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- Ways to Live On Almost Nothing - 2
- Ways to Live On Almost Nothing - 3
- It's Better Than Cheap... It's Free!
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- Vacationing on a Shoestring Budget
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – Intro
April 8th, 2008
A few months after moving to our mountain retreat I got bit by a tiny deer tick while working to clear the neglected garden for planting. Soon I had fever and swollen glands, seriously painful joints and a nasty rash surrounding the bite site. After a few weeks of this we finally got a little ahead on basics, so I went to the local doctor. He has a little clinic next to the grocery store, comes to town twice a week.
First thing was to check in and lay $60 on the counter up front before the doctor would see me, given that I had no insurance. If I’d had insurance, it would have been $10. Then the assistant took my vitals and I was asked to wait in an overcrowded room with a lot of obese locals and their obese children. I guessed immediately that the primary cause of illness in this rural area had to do with America’s basic poor-person bad diet. But that wasn’t my problem…
$150 worth of in-office blood tests and a ‘scrip for a week’s worth of antibiotic later (plus the original $60 just to see him), I found out I’d contracted Lyme disease. He made another appointment for his next in-town day, said he’d give me another week’s worth of antibiotics every week until I was cured. Ha!
So I went home, opened up my handy-dandy Merck Manual, and looked up Lyme. Treatment was 3-6 months’ worth of constant antibiotics. Quickly adding up the doctor’s plan for $60 a week just to get the prescription for antibiotics I could barely afford told me I was much better off just getting the antibiotics and skipping Doctor McGreedy. Because we had quite a bit of experience dealing with our pets’ health issues, I knew I could purchase a full three-month’s supply of the very same antibiotic he prescribed from a veterinary supply firm, for less than the cost of just one more unnecessary visit to his sometime clinic. So I did.
Merck gave the dose too, and luckily the vet tablets were at the right dosage. I found that they dissolved too quickly and upset my stomach, so purchased some gelatin capsules to encase them. Sure, the medicine is generic, but it’s the very same antibiotic that humans use, in just the right dose, for not very much and without having to go to the doctor once a week to get the prescription. It worked just fine, so I’ll thank that doctor for the diagnosis and not for his greedy abuse of uninsured patients.
CNN has some good generic advice for people with high blood pressure who can’t afford the high costs of “New and Improved!” brand-name drugs. I predict we’ll see a lot more of this sort of advice as the recession deepens, so I’ll collect some of it here on this blog.
Stay tuned for further posts to the subject!
Useful Links:
HHS: Free and Low Cost Health Care Referrals
The Merck Manuals
Physicians’ Desk Reference: Prescription Drug Information
Ask The Nurse: Health & Medical Resources
MedHelp: All Ask Doctor Forums & Support Communities
Previous Posts About Health and Health Care
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – Intro
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 2
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 3
Medical Rationing and Medical Tourism
Basic Health Maintenance: Part I
Basic Health Care Maintenance: Part II
Shoestring Budget: Nutrition Posts
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9 Responses to “Inexpensive Health Care Tips – Intro”
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HEY! Mr. Cheap guy! Both my husband and daughter suffered from lyme disease and if you don’t follow up with your doctor and make sure you get retested, you may find yourself in a whole lot of medical trouble. I live in the mountains also. I know some of my neighbors have died from the disease. It can affect your heart and vital organs.
You obviously have a computer. Look it up at http://www.webmd.com and cut the crap. Make sure you take care of yourself properly and don’t think you are smarter than the doctor and stop looking for ways to save a buck. MAKE SURE YOU GET ADEQUATE AND PROPER MEDICAL CARE. My husband and daughter were f***ed up for months because of this disease. It should be taken seriously.
AND it can come back if you get bit again. My dog was crippled from this disease.
Hi, boomie. Struck a nerve, did I? My experience occurred 15 years ago. I am fine, thanks. Yes, there are traveling clinics, the Health Department, appeal for Medicaid, and drug company “freebie” plans to get expensive meds if you can’t afford them. All parts of this series we haven’t gotten to yet.
I’m sorry to hear about your family and dog. Lyme can definitely be a serious health issue if not attended to. What I posted is that it was attended to. Once I knew what it was, I could find out what to do about it. That’s the same info the doctor had, I just didn’t charge myself ~$1500 I didn’t have to take care of it.
Had there been any recurrances – given that I knew what those would look like – an entirely different course of action would have been called for. That is not how things went down.
Living on a shoestring budget isn’t a matter of simply not spending what you’ve got to spend. It’s living on less than most people have to live on. There are issues related to this, health care being among the most prominent. With a full 50% of bankruptcies in this country directly related to medical expenses – 70% of those among the insured – this is an issue that deserves some attention. Simply berating people who must make do with what they can get doesn’t address anything but how dire the situation really is.
Aileen, please just get a follow up exam after you finish your antibiotics. DH and daughter had to go through 3 different types before they were cured. It isn’t as easy as you think. The disease lasted for months and months.
Dog got cured BUT we have to watch her all the time for symptoms and despite using flea & tick collars we still find blown up ticks on her (which means ticks had been feeding for a while.) Not a good thing.
I hope I didn’t sound like I was berating anyone. I just feel emphatic about this disease. People think they have arthritis or heart disease first before they even realize it’s actually lyme disease. My daughter’s original dr, who was treating her in the city, thought she had arthritis. Once she got back home here in the mts, she went to our family doctor who knew differently and treated her correctly.
Live and learn.
As I said, this situation occurred 15 years ago. Shortly after our son died of gross medical malpractice in Florida (for which we spent 7 years in court). We bought the Merck while trying to figure out what the doctors were telling us. My sister the RN helped to translate, we still ended up getting it wrong (or they couldn’t have killed him). My father-in-law suffered a heart attack at the funeral. So we got to transfer our caregiving focus immediately to him. Had we not had the Merck and been paying attention when they released him, he’d have died from getting only half the requisite beta/calcium channel blockers he needed. Had to insist (and be surrounded by security) before the head nurse would even call the doctor, who did in fact screw up the ‘scrip.
Have RNs in my family, they get more actual non-specialist general care training than doctors. I’m fully certified in CPR and first aid, worked many years in first responder status for industry. Sometimes you’ve gotta have a doctor, sometimes you don’t. I needed that doctor to diagnose what ailed me. Taking care of what ailed me wasn’t that hard – he prescribed penicillin originally, what I actually needed was Erythromycin. I knew that and so did he, but he was willing to stretch it out over a year or more – at my expense – to get his cut. I skipped the horsehockey and went straight for the broad spectrum. It worked.
As things get tougher in this economy, health care is slated to be one of the first things people lose access to. The only way to beat that (when we can) is to realize that doctors aren’t gods, and we aren’t idiots.
Again, I’m glad your family and your dog are okay. We’re going through trauma with our cat Larry. He ate some rat poison, nearly died. So far so good, and we still owe $200 to the vet!
My MIL & SIL are both nurses. I speak with them first before anything. My brother and his wife were both doctors but gave up their practice while they were still in their late 50′s. They couldn’t afford the malpractice insurance.
There is no doubt that the medical profession is a mess. Every month I struggle to pay my health insurance BUT I have to stretch out the visits to the doctors because I can’t afford the co-pays! Ugh!
Hope you cat is fine.
Best regards.
Wow, boomie. I’m sorry for your brother and his wife. Our issue was with ‘bad’ doctors, always a relative judgment, but in this case blatant (refused admittance for compllications of an injury they’d diagnosed, then refused permission for a LifeFlight helicopter to land after pre-approval the night he died of complication of that same injury). Makes it hard on everyone, yet it’s no worse than it’s ever been. Mere greed at the root of it all.
Cat’s… a cat. We love him, but he’s headstrong and either ate a mouse of a neighbors’ who was poisoned, or a neighbor put out food that was poisoned (don’t like to think about that). But what could we do? I suppose most would have just let him die. We aren’t them.
Please stay tuned, will have posts early next week on more resources, hints and alternatives. Thanks for your input.
P.S. Nurses Rock!!!
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