Your Healthcare: Annoying & Grateful

When you have a health issue and you’re fortunate to have physicians and healthcare professionals find the appropriate solution to your problem — you’re very grateful.
However, on another day, you may find the healthcare arena frustrating and brutal. It can range from rude front receptionists, clinics refusing to take your medical insurance, delays in treatment because you have to get a referral from your primary care physician and people who don’t listen to your concerns and under or misdiagnose your problem.
If you find the prescription drug that saves your life, eliminates symptoms or eases your pain you feel like you live in the greatest country on earth. But then aggravating, greedy pharmaceutical company decides to increase the price of the drug by 300 percent and your insurance refuses to pay for it.
On top of that your health insurance, that’s likely to be very expensive, may deny, delay or avoid payment for treatment. For others who may not even have health insurance, your problems multiply.
There are so many complications, outwardly expensive treatments and infuriating processes that the average person in this country has to go through to get healthcare, it’s a wonder we don’t all need treatment just for our healthcare stress. Many people decide to wait far too long to receive treatment for a medical condition they could have treated earlier, at a lesser cost, both financially and emotionally.
After all this venting, I am happy to point out an article in this issue on changing this mindset and combating this issue through preventative medicine and a new progressive model beginning with students at Oregon State University-Cascades (OSU-Cascades).
Donna Mills (executive director of the Central Oregon Health Council) is on the right tracts when she says, “Prevention here is the key to great overall health in the future. If you rectify a health issue early on, you can prevent it from snowballing into a major, more expensive issue in the future. Having an annual physical, a yearly oral health exam, a behavioral health assessment are all really key things that can promote a healthy lifestyle and be ultimately very cost effective.”