Saturday night my eye swelled up so much I thought it was gonna fall out. It wasn't better in the morning, so we went to the medic. There's a little building next to my polyclinic that's open nights and weekends when the polyclinic is closed. These nurses looked at my eye and recommended something, and laughed at my special lady for not knowing that "it's an antibiotic, it's been around for a while now!" We went to the pharmacy across the street with the prescription and they told us "you're not going to able to find this anywhere, it's been off the market for a while now. You might be able to get it made in the pharmacy lab upstairs." No thanks. So we asked for an alternative, and we got one. Also, the nurses had told me to squirt camomile tea into the eye through a turkey baster. The pharmacist told me not to do that, that would irritate the eye, just use a cold compress. Turns out that's what everybody I talked to afterwards does. The drops the pharmacist gave us worked great, it was almost all better in 12 hours, but I stopped using it anyway after my special lady read me the side effect, including glaucoma and nerve damage.
The moral of the story is, you get what you pay for directly. Does your universal health care suck? Mine does. I supposedly pay for it through my taxes. That is, I pay for it if I need it, and if I don't, I pay for somebody elses. But when you go to doctors who don't have any financial incentive to stay up to date even with what drugs are on the market, don't be disappointed with shitty results, cause that's what you'll get half the time. The other half if good, but is half your medical care being good enough? Every person I've talked to has complained about the system here, and many have had to complain formally.
How about letting me keep my taxes and choose my doctor with money instead of being assigned one by my address? Maybe then the fucking morons would be out of a job soon enough and not writing people expired perscriptions. The one redeeming quality of the system here is that the unemployed aren't eligible for free healthcare; at least I'm not paying for total freeloaders.
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6 comments:
I see we have an emerging libertarian here.
also, did i ever tell you about my eye experience in kretinga? i woke up at 6 in the morning during kongresas and felt like something was wrong with my eye, like it was numb or something. so i stumbled over to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and almost screamed when i saw my own facce. i was a hideous hideous monster with a swolen eye the size of an orange sticking out of my face. i couldn't even open it, at all, my eye was just a big slit of eyelashes that wouldn't move. i put on sunglasses and waited around and then saulius simonavicius took me to the doctor and waited for me to get checked out. the doctor said it was the worst swelling she's ever seen, which is SO not what you say to someone who thinks her eye is going to stay like that or she has an infection (i hadn't taken my contacts out for a week because i slept only 2 hours a night, from like 6-8 am), or going blind... but saulius made me laugh. he even paid for all of it, plus the 3 medications (steroids, antibiotics, and goop to squirt in it) because my debit ccard iddn't work in canada at the time. anyway, the steroids made the swelling go down in 12 hours and i was fine, but i was definitely known by everyone at kongresas after that! also, never go to kretinga. it's full of spiders or something else that causes terrible eye swelling.
taxes are pretty high in sweden for health care, but at least i know that if i need to go to the hospital, i won't have to pay anything except the room fee.
i suspect the idiocy you described has more to do with culture, education, and (comparative) poverty than the weaknesses of universal health care.
as a matter of fact, sarunai, the education of doctors in lithuania is excellent, and top graduates are practically swooped away to work in other countries. if there's a problem with the doctors in lithuania, it's not with the education process, but with the lower quality of the doctors who remain and practice in lithuania. can you guess where all the good doctors have gone, where they agreed to be swooped to? they have gone to the west, usually, but really to any country that doesn't have universal health care, because universal health care barely pays dick. if lithuania didn't have univeral healthcare, we might still have some decent doctors, since then doctors would be paid what they're worth.
this is the same thing that's been happeneing with canadian doctors moving south.
"at least i know that if i need to go to the hospital, i won't have to pay anything except the room fee."
all you need for that, sarunai, is health insurance. the nice thing about health insurance is that you choose it. universal health care is by force. why is that necessary? are people too lazy to get it themselves? the bank calls me every other week to offer it to me, and i've even been in there a couple times. they explain everything, there's certainly no lack of information, nor do i have to put effort into it; i just have to put in money. unfortunately, someone already took my money and put it into a plan not of my choose, a piece of shit plan that some asshole thought would be best for everybody.
rachel, wouldn't you have insured yourself, in that case? if i insured myself at the same rate that the government does with my taxes the payoff for quadrapeligia is seven figures, i believe. more than enough to pay all the bills, and at a hospital and with a doctor of my choice, no less. and (excuse me) maybe those nurses you've complainted about might not be such bitches if you were paying their wages, instead of a faceless government that doesn't take patients complaints as seriously as we'd all like.
rachel, will the australian free health insurance cover procedures out of austalia? cause when i consider your determination to walk again, something not possible yet, i wonder where it will be available.
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