UNHEALTH UNCARE

A major pharmacy, Riteaid, went bankrupt and shut down it’s stores, including the one in my small town. Since I can no longer get drug prescriptions filled there, I called the clinic that issued my prescriptions to have them switch to Amazon, to fill them. It was a real hassle doing this as it was only after nearly an hour on the phone, first being answered by an idiot who didn’t even know what Amazon is, finally getting a call back from a person who knew what she was doing and getting it done.

I thought that was the end of it but no, an hour later another call comes from the clinic, and she says I have to have an appointment to get this done. I won’t go into detail about the conversation but finally she agreed to make it a phone appointment instead of me having to drive twenty miles of mountain road to the clinic.

The thing about this appointment instead of just DOING IT after I answered all the verification questions to prove it’s really me, is that when they call it a Doctor’s Appointment they get to charge my insurance as if I’d actually gone in and seen a doctor. For an unnecessary phone “appointment”.

Growing up, if someone in the family was sick, a doctor would be called who would come to the house and treat you. If you were too sick and needed further help, you’d be taken to a hospital. Now, we don’t have private practitioners anymore, we have Health Clinics and they will call you at regular intervals and tell you that they NEED you to come in for a checkup or blood tests or the latest vaccination. So they can make more money by charging your insurance company for exposing you to The House of Germs, which is what all these clinics are, so that if you weren’t sick before, you may be soon after.

They used to do this to me constantly. Every few months they wanted me to get some test or come in for something until I finally told them No, I will come in when I need to come in, not because they want me to but because I want to, for some medical problem that might arise. They tried hard to get me to agree to once every 3 months, but I refused, then tried for every 6 months, I told them No, finally they said that I at least had to get a blood test once a year or they’d drop me as a patient.

They just HAD to make money off me every year if I wanted to ever see a doctor there again or get my statin prescription renewed. No blood test, no statins and I need the statins. It’s plain Medical Blackmail. This is what medicine has come to in America. The hospitals are performing horribly dangerous and expensive procedures on people as if it was an aspirin they were giving you, and making massive profits doing so, and putting corporate profit ahead of patient welfare, and the clinics have ballooned into big corporations with many clinics as if they were MacDonald’s franchises, and the same corporate greed.

American doctors have lost our trust. They did it for money. And it’s really too bad.