It has been a year and a half since my first post to this blog. In that time I have spent $25,000 on fixin’ my heart, had a lot of drama including an exotic Asian adventure, and written over 11,000 words in nine posts :) only to be right back pretty much where I started, in the situation I described in the first few paragraphs of that first post.\u00a0 I have more or less returned to being a dropout from the American health business.\u00a0 I am again making the gamble that I am not seriously f—ed up, that I will make it to Medicare rather than handing over my retirement savings to the bottomless greed of the shareholders.<\/p>\n
When I returned to Reno from gettin’ fixed in Istanbul<\/strong> I did re-establish my relationship with Dr Kedia and Reno Heart Physicians.\u00a0 I wanted to and also I pretty much had to.\u00a0 Job One in the post-op follow-up to heart surgery is getting frequent blood tests to calibrate the dosage of a powerful blood thinner one needs to take for a time after the operation.\u00a0 You cannot get blood work in America without a note from your doctor, and an Istanbul doctor doesn’t count.<\/p>\n The first check-in back with Dr K almost qualified as fun, although I do also recall being quite anxious, as in full of anxiety, when I entered the waiting room for the first time, since my only other experience after entering that room had been very, very unpleasant.\u00a0 Anyway, Dr K was nice, I was nice, the tech who administered my $97 EKG was nice … Dr K checked out Dr C’s handiwork … from the outside, that is she looked at how my scar was healing, thumped me, stethoscoped me and took my blood pressure, prescribed me a statin<\/em> (cholesterol drug, the $4 Walmart version of Lipitor) and a blood pressure medicine, and $200 later I was outta there.<\/p>\n Second follow-up she bumped the b.p. med because my blood pressure was a little high, and said she wanted me to get\u00a0 a follow-up echo-cardiogram next time.\u00a0 So while paying my $136 I drop in on Billing and ask them how much an echo costs — and the answer is $900 – yikes!<\/p>\n To review numbers from previous posts, that happens to be exactly 1\/20th (5%) of the cost of the operation and three weeks in the hospital in Turkey, including two echo tests, one before and one after the operation.<\/p>\n I have not been back for that third checkup.\u00a0 I am taking my meds pretty regularly, and sort of behaving myself – I could do better on the lifestyle front:\u00a0 eat better, exercise more, party less, but unless I invest in the test, I am failing to see the point in going back to the doctor. She will take my blood pressure, asked me about my lifestyle and how I’m feeling, guilt-trip me about the expensive test, and that will be that.\u00a0\u00a0 And I can do all of those things to myself for free … if you count using the blood pressure machine at the supermarket.<\/p>\n I managed to figure out I had a problem the first time without the help of modern medical science (although I sure was glad it was there when I did), so i guess I can do it again if it comes to that.<\/p>\n I am not particularly proud of this, I am ready to fully concede that I am being a contrary, stubborn, cheap, all-around dumbass<\/strong>, and if I was advising myself, I’d say get over it and pay for the test and go back to the doctor.\u00a0 But there you have it – I think I have a good chance of making it for another 3.5 years to Medicare, or who knows, it’s just possible that our Congress will do something useful.<\/p>\n UPDATE:\u00a0 To my mild surprise, our Congress did do something!\u00a0 It’s not at all clear to me that what they did materially changes my situation.\u00a0 I think the requirement to buy insurance doesn’t kick in until 2014, and I will be under Medicare by then.\u00a0 I guess I will look into those insurance exchanges whenever they get set up.\u00a0 We certainly are a really backwards, stupid, spoiled country sometimes, with a really dysfunctional government all the time.\u00a0 In my rare gloomy moments, I am glad I won’t be around to see what a f—ed up mess the world will be, and more particularly what a loser country we will be in fifty years if we don’t get our act together in a number of ways that I think are sadly, really unlikely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It has been a year and a half since my first post to this blog. In that time I have spent $25,000 on fixin’ my heart, had a lot of drama including an exotic Asian adventure, and written over 11,000 … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kt_blocks_editor_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[69],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/whufu.com\/wptest\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/whufu.com\/wptest\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/whufu.com\/wptest\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whufu.com\/wptest\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whufu.com\/wptest\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/whufu.com\/wptest\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/whufu.com\/wptest\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whufu.com\/wptest\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whufu.com\/wptest\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}