My "entities" list for the birth center has 37 entries on it - these are things that need some sort of trigger in the phone system, the server or the email plant (or all three). All but two of them are working, and that's because two people haven't made an office call from their cell phones in a week. Our naturopathic doctor has been averaging 50 new patients per month. I have managed to figure out a way to put up pictures of families and babies such that we cannot be accused of either cultural appropriation or prejudice, which is quite an accomplishment in an industry where wokeness points are scored by accusing someone else of not being woke enough. Our problem student, who we had to let go because she was too racist to work with our South American midwife, is facing disciplinary action from the VP of her school. It took three weeks and dozens of hours of wargaming but we have successfully terminated a person of color while being white AF. Which is not to say there isn't a massive whisper campaign about how we're incompetent hood-wearing butchers. But our credibility is intact. But what about YOUR shit, KB? Surely you haven't been dealing with your wife's bullshit for a month straight? I'm trying to extricate one of our employees from the school. She's been forced to restart her thesis three times and they keep changing it on her. I'm probably a dozen hours into that as well. My wife has pointed out "hey, at least you're getting to help someone in real life instead of on the Internet for once." My daughter wants to take "beginning strings." This led to a two hour discussion with my wife last night where I realized that my pursuit of mixing and my college career in clubs was a reaction to the abuse and discouragement I experienced in the school music program as amplified and expanded by my parents. I guess that's what a high ACE score is about - the likelihood of being reduced to inchoate rage over a quarter-sized violin without even seeing it coming. I kept it together but just. The shitty thing is that the reasonable, responsible adult thing is to rent the fucking violin, put on a happy face and plaster over the gaping wound so that my kid doesn't have to grow up dealing with my bullshit. I've probably been 50 hours a week into the birth center for the past month. My wife would like to pay me so that it doesn't suck so hard. This would of course nullify my unemployment, which has been under review and hearing for the past month because I omitted my middle initial when I refiled in September. Tomorrow we're meeting with an accountant to talk about upping our corporate status and to figure out how to provide health insurance and retirement for our employees without allowing my wife to be eligible because, you see, as soon as my wife even has access to ANY KIND of health insurance my super-great health insurance that I spend 5 months in LA earning is no longer available to her. Or my kid. My wife was late coming home from the outlet mall. I immediately went to her dying in a car crash and immediately went to how I would handle the books and scheduling because if that business goes under two people lose their houses. It sucks being an employee in the United States. It sucks being an employer, too. I get to spend the next week configuring $2500 worth of IT bullshit so that our two receptionists will be less mad at one of our doctors because a technological solution is one that nobody needs to get their feelings hurt over and because fuckin' hell, nobody's paying me any extra but if I don't figure out a way to get you more money you'll never be able to get health insurance and how fucking shitty is that.
Stephen Colbert just did a week long series on his trip to New Zealand. He's sitting chatting with one of the guys from Flight of the Conchords and Lucy Lawless (notice whose name I remembered easily, and whose I didn't...), and he asks them about how health insurance is in New Zealand. Dude says, "It doesn't exist." Stephen is kinda caught off guard for a moment. That wasn't in the script. Dude continues, "If I get sick, I just go to the doctor and it's taken care of." Stephen gets it - his entire framework for discussing health care is fucked - and smiles. Dude continues, "Even you. If you get sick, you go in, they fix you up, and you leave. For free." They then go on talking about the canned spaghetti sandwich they are eating, and what a delicacy it is. Fuck, man. What would it be like to live in a civilized country... ?
There is a 42% chance that a cancer diagnosis will cost your entire life savings. This is partially by design. My wife has a friend whose husband got a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. The social workers at the hospital said "look - how fast can you get below the poverty line?" They couldn't do shit for 'em until they could get 'em on welfare, at which point they could tap a different set of funds. So she had to tell all her patients she was no longer practicing medicine and they had to move in with her parents. Two years later and he's beat it and she's back in practice... but literally. "oh, you can pay something? well, that's not good enough. You have to pay EVERYTHING." It's fucked up from the provider standpoint too. We've had this doctor working for us for four months now. And we had to run every ICD10 code we thought she could possibly bill against our reimbursement rates for every insurance we take with a weighted average for our projected patient makeup. Then we had to subtract our overhead and et voila that's how much we can afford to pay her. That's her max. That's all she'll ever make from us until it's time to renegotiate insurance rates at which point they're as likely to go down as up because dealing with insurance companies is like dealing with Walmart. It's been four months and we won't even have a decent amount of bills to check to see how close we were guessing because most of the insurance companies? They don't even attempt to pay you for six months. We've got bills outstanding from 18 months ago. So we're hoping? We'll know whether we can pay her more? Or whether we'll have to reexamine our relationship? some time next month. Maybe. But on no planet. Under no conditions. As chosen by anyone. Does our current system make a lick of sense. Unless you're in the insurance business.
Two things - my cousin is in one of those videos, where Colbert trains with Piri Weepu and DJ Forbes. Bloody hilarious how small NZ is that my family member can just rock up to a field for practice and get asked to be on camera with Colbert. Secondly - yeah our healthcare system sometimes has it's faults but holy shit, we get well taken care of a majority of the time. My sister having her son? Spent a week in hospital and had no bills, just some baby stuff to take home to make things easier. I've had specialist appointments after a inner ear issue, all paid for. My prescriptions never cost more than $5 a pop, and they may last me for 6 months - so $10 for a year of medication if needed. My mum had a stroke in 2013 and is on a variety of meds since then, $20 a year for the lot of them. My brother is a severe hemophiliac, entirety of his treatment was government funded - I estimate in the early years before treatment really got good, we cost the NZ government millions with hospital visits, surgery, and Factor 8 treatment.
As you'd expect, we have our fair share of asses but they often isolate themselves so the ones you meet traveling are usually like-minded and open to everyone! So the medication, the $5 is just the co-payment. Most common medicines are subsidised to the point that you just pay $5 each time you get it renewed, then after a while of using it you can apply for high-usage charges and get the whole thing covered. I did that for my anti-depressants when I was on them, $5 every few months wasn't bothering me at all but my Dr insisted we could remove the charges entirely as I would be on them for at least a year, and they did! Last 6 months on them, I didn't have to pay for them at all. If you're a child under 13 your medication will pretty much always be free - like in the case with my brother. He was funded regardless of how much it cost, then once he moved past 13 the treatment had improved vastly so even if it wasn't funded, it wouldn't have been so bad. Thankfully it was and still is to this day! Certain medication won't be subsidised - but I don't have much of a list handy for you, I know some unique meds for epilepsy aren't covered as much so the person pays $20 or so each time - I would like to think after a while they can get high-usage cover as that's likely saving/improving their quality of life. But don't know enough to be sure!