House does not appear. Patients die.
In Slate: Waiting Doom: How hospitals are killing E.R. patients.
In Manila: A young man on the way home from work is mugged and hit on the head. Passersby take him to the nearest hospital. The admissions staff wants to know if he can afford to pay for treatment. He’s half-conscious by then, he’s got a brain hemorrhage. The hospital takes a long time calling the young man’s employers and getting someone to sign forms and to guarantee that his hospital fees will be paid. By the time they get around to examining the patient, he has fallen into an irreversible coma. Some days later, he dies. The hospital gets paid.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
July 29th, 2008 at 13:27
so where’s this friggin hospital?
July 29th, 2008 at 23:26
wow…is this a true story???
actually,if the health care system of US sucks…then what do you call ours?!
healthcare card holders in the country are SOOO discriminated by doctors. you can hear horror stories from employees all over the metro. i’d like to share my personal experience with those “life savers”:
(on the phone)
Me: Good afternoon. I’d like to inquire regarding Dr. __’s services. How much is the consultation fee?
Secretary: Um..actually hindi si Doc yung tumitingin…sa kanya lang nakapangalan yung clinic.
Me: Ah ok.
Sec: Ano pong health card nyo?
Me: Ah hindi, private ako.
Sec: Ah ok
Me: So you mean hindi nagcliclinic dyan si Dr. __?
Sec: Ay hindi, sya po ung titingin sa inyo. Pang medicard lang po yung kanina. (I assume he means health card)
This is actually a very light example, I’ve heard that some people gets treated like sh*t by some doctors once they find out that they are card holders and not private patients. I mean, why do these doctors bother to register with health card systems/companies if they are so irritated by it? Just asking.
July 30th, 2008 at 01:38
doctors share clinic to minimize cost. some doctors who are lucky to have parents that are doctors to often opt to practice in the same clinic with their mom and/or dad yung iba naman ka-brad or ka-sis.
owning your own clinic, especially those inside tertiary hospitals, can be quite expensive. now imagine, you are just fresh out of residency and still have no connections and suki-patients. doctors that are just starting to move up the medical food chain affiliates with an HMO that would potentially supply them with patients.
don’t be surprised if you get different doctor in the same clinic when you present your healthcard. the seasoned ones – those a few more letters after their MD do not need HMOs anymore.
so to answer your question, they are not irritated by it, they just leave the healthcard patients to their younger colleagues who need the fee more than they do. or maybe they just feel morally obligated not to affiliate with any bloodsucking HMOs.
as for the guy dying in the ER, it’s just too bad that some hospital administrators and owners enact their ‘bayad-muna’ policies like nazis. I personally know a lot of cases though na mga doktor pa ang nagpupumilit na ma-admit ang pasyente, especially when the patient’s case is so bad. the patient stays at the hospital until they can pay the bill through PCSO or the hospital’s charity program.
and please, let’s not be another ‘Korina Sanchez’. We are already losing our precious ‘life savers’ fast. and pakaunti ng pakaunti na ang kumukuha ng medisina. so let’s not discourage them some more.
July 30th, 2008 at 10:18
I can’t help but comment. The story is very similar, if not the same, with an office mate who just died. He was hit on the head, strangers found him, tried to call the employer, hospital did nothing, died days later.
The story here in the office goes that the hospital did nothing because there was no parental consent. One of our bosses guaranteed the bills (even said to double it just to have the operation started). He died days later with nothing done “to save his life.”
July 30th, 2008 at 12:38
i’m not saying ALL of them are like that. i’ll be the first to admit that there’s a lot of good commendable doctors out there. but we also can’t deny the fact that these things do happen. there are SOME doctors who act irritated by the way they treat their patients who are card holders. for example, there was this one person who was complaining that she felt like the doctor was “minamadali” sya, not very friendly (unconcerned), and when she was asking questions re her condition, she was made to feel like she’s wasting the doctor’s time. after some months, when she came back as a private patient (coz she no longer has her card), she immediately noticed the difference in the way she was treated.
if you read some forums, you could see stories from different people who’ve had a bad experience with regards to being medical card holders.
please don’t misconstrue my comment as doctor-bashing. like i said, there are tons of good doctors out there…but at the same time, we shouldn’t be blind to what’s really happening out there or cover it up. first step in solving a problem is RECOGNIZING that there is indeed a problem.
July 30th, 2008 at 17:15
i’m not covering them up, just providing plausible answers. in your first example, you did not elaborate what your experience was with the doctor. you just stated your encounter with the doctor’s obnoxious secretary. as for your friend, what led you to believe that it was the card and not something else? was s/he able to make a third visit with the same doctor on a healthcard? i know many doctors that are notoriously neurotic at one time and euphoric a minute later. it’s a well known occupational hazard :)
one plausible answer as to why doctors may not warm up to health card patients is that MANY HMOs will take 3 to 6 months to release their professional fees. and some HMOs only pay 150 as consultation fee. mababa na nga, late pa. a regular consultation would cost around 1,500. if this is the case, just think of the doctor in front of you as some disgruntled underpaid government employee.
also, try reading your doctors’ forum at http://pinoy.md/ipb.
July 31st, 2008 at 01:09
exactly…they shouldn’t pass on their grudge against the HMO companies to their patients…coz that’s not an excuse and that’s not very professional. nobody is forcing them to join these HMOs. patients deserve to be treated well regardless of external situations.
anyway, i don’t want to use this comment box as a forum. we have differing opinions (probably coz we have different experiences, or if i’m guessing correctly, i take it that you’re a doctor or related to one?) and it’s obvious we won’t be seeing eye to eye on this one. let’s just leave it at that…but thanks for the info re the HMOs.
July 31st, 2008 at 22:39
I am both a doctor and a health card user. (We have to be wa-is during these times.) You start at the bottom of the pile (where I am) and you work your way up. The whole situation is a little too complicated for my super-fried brain and negative balance emotional account but I suggest reading How Doctors Think by Dr. Jerome Groopman. Yeah, he’s a doctor but he was also a patient. And the book is primarily made for patients. It makes the patient more aware of what goes on in the doctors mind and how the patient can avoid it. Then maybe focus on the main topic of this article, ie hospitals? Not doctors? It wasn’t a doctor per se who did not attend to the patient right away. In some hospitals even in the good ol’ PI, there’s a triage system who sees the patient right away. They’re not necessarily doctors. So it’s a team effort. Also sometimes maawa naman po kayo sa amin. Mag-isa lang po kami and sometimes there are some patients who are in more dire straits than another. (If you think, nothing could get worse, think again) We work >/= 36 hour days. (Yes, 1 day is 24 H but who’s counting.) So imagine the odds stacked against us. I don’t think I’m lopsided ’cause I only put the Dr in front of my name to pull rank which one just has to do in some cases especially in dealing with HMO’s but imagine one HMO officer had the gall to attempt to deny my claim based on a pocket-book-size medical dictionary? And she wasn’t a doctor. So let’s spread the blame around. Plus, there really are some card holders who visit the doctor and especially the ER for nonsensical reasons. Punta ng ER para magpa-check up. Seriously. In their own words. Which they would not do as private patients. So that’s another congestion factor there. If they could just avoid that, that’s one less patient to deal with and the quicker the response time, right? Coz by some twist of fate they arrived before the more serious case they were attended to first. Professionalism, twisted but I think so. And we are underpaid. Actually unpaid and even some have to pay for the training. Question, how come it’s ok for government employees to be unprofessional and doctors have to be?
July 31st, 2008 at 23:38
“The hospital takes a long time calling the young man’s employers…. By the time they get around to examining the patient, he has fallen into an irreversible coma.”
Any patient that comes into any Emergency Room — especially someone with such injuries as described — is examined and given life-saving measures as necessary. In a case like this, depending on the patient’s signs and symptoms, he will probably be intubated, an IV line will be started, and emergency medications will be given, all BEFORE the hospital’s Business Office comes into the picture. Decisions that require the Business Office’s approval are such things as whether a patient is admitted into the ICU and whether he will undergo surgery IN THAT HOSPITAL. If they can’t afford it, they are advised to transfer to another hospital ASAP, so further treatment won’t be delayed.
Doctors take oaths; businessmen don’t. Guess which group runs hospitals. Guess who makes decisions about admissions policy. The truth is, if hospitals give all the best treatment to all & sundry, without regard for compensation, it’ll go bust sooner or later, usually sooner. If that’s the case, no businessman in his right mind will enter the hospital business.
The realities of life are harsh enough without resorting to exaggeration.
And I don’t want to fan the flames of the heated discussion above. I’m directing this last comment to all, including myself. Let’s not talk about things we know nothing of, because there are others just as ignorant who might believe us.
August 1st, 2008 at 09:50
I always feel like we’re living in a society that slowly rejects hospitals… culling people until all’s left are folks too tough to get hospitalized and hospitals have to do everything-must-go sales just to make ends meet. Everything medical’s too expensive these days and sometimes it seems like we’re better off chewing grass like carnivorous mammals.