Leaches & Medical Inflation

Yesterday a nurse practitioner took 700 CCs of blood from my right arm.

She’s going to do it again next Thursday morning.

And the next and the next. I wish it were in the afternoon so I could work more on Thursdays, I don’t feel so wonderful afterwards.

I have a rare condition called Hemochromatosis.

My body doesn’t get rid of iron properly, so it sits in my liver poisoning me. Very heavily iron-saturated blood can damage the liver, heart and other vital organs like the pancreas.

What did I do to get it?

I was born.

What could I have done to prevent it?

Nothing. Hemochromatosis a chromosomal mishap of the HFE chromosome. It’s genetic.

What’s the only thing you can do to treat it?

Bleed me periodically for the rest of my life.

Thank the good Lord they no longer use leaches.

I got the diagnosis in my 20s, which quite literally saved me from a liver or heart transplant, diabetes, etc. With hemochromatosis early treatment is everything.

When I was first diagnosed they took a pint of blood from me every week for around a year.

It cost me $10 a week in copays. My oncologist/hemotologist did it in his office.

I thought insurance was a pretty dang good bargain.

I was without insurance for around 6 months after I left that job and then ended up in NYC getting phlebotomies (that’s the medical term for being bled) for another 6 months and my copays were again, $10.

I went 3 years without having to get phlebotomies due to natural iron depletion from pregnancy, childbirth and lactation.

The next time I needed to be bled, I was on my husband’s health insurance. He still worked for a Fortune 500 company with pretty good insurance. Our copays went up $5 so we were paying $15.

But, here’s where it was dramatically different. I started getting bills for extra stuff. Services that used to be included with the original copay.

They now wanted $15 to test my blood levels to be sure it was safe to bleed me.

Then another $15 for the nurse practitioner to read my labs.

And still another $15 for the phlebotomy itself.

And still another $15 for the doctor to track my condition periodically.

Mind you I have to pay 3 of these bills 4 times a month. So it’s not a $5 increase in copays – as it first appeared.

It was $195 a month for the same exact treatment I was paying $40 a month for.

It became a real financial hardship disguised as a $5 increase in our copay.

Another baby caused another 2.5 year time lapse. In the meantime, my husband got a better job, with another Fortune 500 company.

This time our copays increased from $15 to $25.

Which, doesn’t seem like much when you’re considering everything and you’re basically healthy – “it’s only $10″ you tell yourself.

My iron levels are high again. I must be bled weekly. Emotionally, this is no biggy. It sucks, but I make light of it. I have to do it. So I do it with a good attitude like my mother taught me.

Until I call the blood bank where I want to give my iron rich blood to save lives and they tell me they will charge me $75 a week. “It’s a new rule since we were bought by another company,” the woman on the phone tells me.

Blood they will turn around and sell to a hospital, though they qualify for nonprofit status. Blood they claim to need due to a blood shortage.

Blood the hospital will turn around and bill to the patient.

Everybody taking their cut.

My blood and everyone profits but me.

So 2,100 CCs a month of valuable lifesaving blood will go into the trash.

I can’t afford to “donate” it.

My new doctor wants to order tests – “a liver cat scan to look for cancer, a heart test to look for heart conditions, a diabetes test, and maybe a few others just to be sure.”

All words used to frighten me about the potential seriousness of my condition.

“Is there anything in my lab results to suggest there is any reason to suspect my liver or heart or pancreas is malfunctioning?” I ask him.

“No, everything looks normal.”

“Then I’m not doing optional tests.”

“Don’t you have insurance?”

Every doctor I’ve ever been to asks this question as if insurance fixes the health care inflation problem American’s face. It doesn’t.
“I have insurance, but that doesn’t make it free. I could go bankrupt just paying copays for all these tests. I’ll do tests if there is indication of a problem. Until then I’ll only do the weekly phlebotomies.”

“I want you to get labwork every week two days before to monitor your iron levels.”

Doing the math in my head that’s $25 for labwork, $25 for him to analyze the labwork, $25 for the phlebotomy. That’s $300 a month in copays.

“No. I’ll do lab work once a month and a weekly phlebotomy and no extra tests. We’ll see how these offices and my insurance bills all of these procedures this month and we’ll re-evaluate when I start getting bills.”

A few years ago I consented to a number of “just in case” tests when I was suffering from terrible allergies. “We need to make sure you don’t have a brain tumor, we need to be sure you aren’t having serious inner ear problems.”they scare-sold me. The results? I was suffering from terrible allergies – my self-diagnosis turned out to be accurate about $1,000 in copays later. Fool me once . . .

My brother suggested I take courses to become my own phlebotomist and learn to bleed myself.

It’s shocking to think that our healthcare system has come to the point where I’m actually considering draining a bag of my own blood at home to avoid healthcare inflation. Does that strike you as a reasonable option? Does it strike you as the kind of place you want to live?

Our healthcare industry has become a place where I must be a savvy consumer before I’m a patient. Where I must guard myself against medical up-selling the way I guard against being up-sold the super-sized meal at McDonald’s. The difference being if I falter and order the super-size Big & Tasty I’m out $7 and I’ve got slightly bigger thighs. If I misjudge the necessity of scanning for liver cancer I could die, but if I pay for the unnecessary tests it will have disastrous consequences on our family’s economics.

I question my own medical providers motives and realize the distrust has grown to a point that I think my health and well-being ranks below the medical providers’ profit, the insurance companies’ profit and the doctor’s fear of getting sued.

My health and well-being ranks 4th. My economic well-being doesn’t factor in.

The shift in priorities and the massive inflation took a mere 10 years. The same exact treatments went from $40 a month to $300 a month in COPAYS alone. That’s a 750% increase. I can’t afford the same increase over the next 10 years.

If you’re thinking this problem is specific to me, my specific insurance companies or our specific employers – you are mistaken. Studies show the inflation is across the board over the entire health care industry.

I got a mutation of the HFE chromosome, at birth, that will require affordable access to healthcare for the rest of my life. You might get the heart attack, or a premature baby, or leukemia, or diabetes, high cholesterol, thyroid problem, high blood pressure, or a special needs kid.

Universal Health Care will slow healthcare inflation dramatically.

It will insure more people. Uninsured people are a massive cause of both higher taxes and healthcare inflation.

* When you’re uninsured you drive the costs up for me.

* When you can’t pay you drive the costs up for me.

Universal Health Care will increase competition of health insurance companies to offer more services rather than less for the same dollar by opening up the market to the self-employed or the “already diagnosed” by creating larger insurance pools.

Universal Health Care will untie our insurance benefits to our employers so we don’t lose our insurance if we become unemployed, divorced, widowed or decide to be self-employed or work on contract. I’m self-employed and I want to keep working this way so I can spend more time with my kids.

Health care accounts for 16% of our entire national spending. It’s expected to account for 20% of our Gross National Product by the time our next President leaves office.

John McCain says we should let The Market, which he implies is as holy and sacrosanct as God, take care of it. The trouble is that The Market has never once decided it’s got enough money. Every single quarter it shoots higher.

Do not confuse The Market with people. It is not people. It is corporations. The Market is Insurance Corporations. The Market is Medical Conglomerations. The Market is a-moral and single-minded.

The Market’s only motive is its own short-term profit.

If you truly, in your heart, believe that The Market is going to decide, as all the millions of baby boomers become simultaneously in need of more medical care and unemployed and more likely to be uninsured, that there is so much business they will lower their prices of their own free will – then I pray you, your kids, or your parents never get sick enough to find out how disastrously wrong you are.

If, like me, you know in your heart John McCain’s theory about The Market fixing healthcare inflation is a big freaking ball of lies and marketing and that the leaches will suck patients dry until we have nothing left – then VOTE FOR BARACK OBAMA and Democrat Senators and Representatives who will implement Universal Health Care.

I want a healthcare system motivated by the patient’s health not a system motivated by profit.