Friend's Healtcare Nightmare

[cafe]

I have a lifelong friend who is in pretty dire financial straits. Her family was living in Florida, but things were so expensive there that they came back to Indiana. She was pregnant but she had medicaid and thought she would be able to get it here, too. The medicaid office in the city she was in was apparently pretty swamped and she wasn't notified correctly about what documentation they lacked in order to process her application, so she was denied.

Her baby ended up being breech so they did an emergency c-section. She did not have the money to get her prescriptions filled, so she recovered from the surgery with nothing for the pain but Tylenol.

Finally, a few weeks ago, she was informed correctly what documentation she lacked and is now attempting to acquire it. Her baby is five months old and neither of them has had a check-up since they left the hospital. No one would see them.

The only medical care her baby has had has been a trip to the the ER when he was sick. They diagnosed him with RSV. Maybe they are treating RSV differently now than they did when my son got it as a baby, I don't know. My son was given a nebulizer and steroids to help get his lungs cleared up. Her son was given IV fluids and sent home. I'm skeptical that they couldn't do more.

I don't think this kind of thing should ever happen in this country. We can do better.

 

[scantilyclad]

This truly is sad. I was denied Medicaid several times when i was pregnant because they didn't notify me of when stuff needed to be turned in, which frustrated me because i had to sit in the welfare office for 8 hours one day, just to be told that i would have to come back the next day, because i didn't have proper documentation for an interview.

During my first 2 trimesters i had no insurance, and couldn't get any doctors to do anything for me. I went to a midwife to get a few check ups just because they were fairly cheap, and they would take me. I had to pay a lot of money at a place that did 3d ultrasounds, just so i could make sure my baby was okay and to find out what the sex was.

The care i received once i finally got Medicaid wasn't even that great. I didn't even get to see an actual ob/gyn, because NO ONE would even take Medicaid, or they would tell me that i was too far along in my pregnancy for them to take me, or they would tell me that they were booked up for November births. I ended up having to go to a county hospital clinic where they only had nurse practitioners, who really didn't seem like they knew a whole lot.

This really angers me, i feel so sorry for this lady, and even more sad that she has it much worse than i do, it really isn't fair what the uninsured have to deal with. Our country really could do better.

 

[Tallulah]

This is very upsetting...it's sad that everything is so politicized that we can't see common sense anymore. :-( No one should have to suffer, least of all a new mother or a newborn, because of money.

 

[cafe]

It stinks. Some areas seem like they have pretty efficient offices and the medical professionals don't mind accepting medicaid. Other areas it's totally different. When we received it, we had both positive and negative experiences. Since we've gotten good health insurance it's been all positive experiences (other than nobody wants to need medical care).

I don't know what the answer is, but I'm glad there is finally some serious national dialog on the problem.