Adventures in Health Care

A year ago, I went on an adventure through the Texas public health care system. I had an abscess develop on my leg and I had a case of the flu turn into pneumonia. Thankfully, with the most basic of care, these things are rarely fatal. I went to the emergency room and was given IV antibiotics overnight and a prescription for powerful antibiotics to take over the next 10 days. The abscess cleared up, the cough eventually subsided and I returned to work and classes. My illness was treated.

The health care system failed almost entirely.

I am a type II diabetic. I made good progress controlling it with diet and oral medication, but I could never get my blood sugar down to normal levels. Every doctor and nurse that saw me during my overnight stay in a local hospital assured me that my out of control diabetes was the primary factor in the abscess and contributed to the severity of the pneumonia. I had to get my sugar under control, and I would need a doctor's care and insulin to do it.

The problem was that I didn't have health insurance.

I could not afford to see a private physician to run necessary tests to start taking insulin, nor could I afford the expensive supplies needed to test my blood sugar regularly as is necessary when taking insulin.

Well, they all said, you need to get it taken care of. The diabetes is what put you in the hospital, and we can't help you.

Therein lies a critical problem with the United States health care system. I have to use county facilities to treat serious illness and will be a long time paying off the medical bills. For the time being, my rather expensive care was paid for by Denton County. The hospital had no choice but to put an out of control diabetic back into his daily life knowing that there was a good possibility he would be back with another urgent complication resultant from the untreated diabetes. In short, they treated the symptoms of the disease, rather than the disease itself. They had no facilities to treat a diabetic, test insulin resistance, and prevent many further complications.

For less than one tenth the price of my hospital stay, which the county has to deal with until I can pay them off, I could have likely prevented the illnesses that put me in an expensive hospital bed overnight so I could be cared for by very good, very expensive doctors and nurses. One tenth of the money, around $500, could have saved $5,000 in hospital fees.

Denton has a few low cost clinics, but they're private and they really aren't designed for long term care. What Denton, and Texas, and the nation need is a real solution to the tremendous cost of health care. The poor need access to doctors when they're a little sick so they can affordably prevent getting very sick. It costs money in time off work, and it costs far more for the county to treat an illness in a hospital than it does in a doctor's office.