medgremlin

Unfortunately, most health insurance plans have a separate sub-company manage the pharmacy benefits and we have absolutely zero way of accessing their systems. It would be lovely if we could see what your insurance would cover immediately as we prescribe it, but that also runs into the problem of us not having any control over the actual pharmacy and their billing and pricing.

And as long as CPR machines are obscenely expensive and difficult to obtain and maintain for a lot of smaller hospitals and EMS systems.

Here's the problem with that: it relies on things like the LUCAS CPR assist machine which doesn't fit on a lot of people. I've done CPR on a lot of people, and only a handful of them would have even fit in a LUCAS in the first place.

Yes. This exactly.

I'm in my third year of medical school, so I've just started my clinical rotations, but one of the things that shows up on almost every reference table for physicians regarding treatment options is information on the price for the patient. I'm rotating in a family medicine clinic right now, and we pretty frequently prescribe the best possible treatment, and then when the pharmacy runs it through the patient's insurance and finds out how much it's going to cost, we then start working down the list of next-best alternatives until we can find something the patient can afford. Because there are so many different insurance plans out there, we have no idea how much something is going to cost until the insurance tells us.

Medical field here: The vast majority of us are not in it for the money. Physicians have to spend 3 to 9 years after medical school working for a wage that works out to about $5/hour to gain certification and a medical license in their specialty. And that's after 8 to 12 years of undergraduate/graduate/doctorate education that basically has to be paid for with loans unless they're in the military or come from a rich family. So, yes, physicians do make high salaries once they're established, but there was a lot of work and sacrifice to get to that point, and very few people are masochistic enough to put themselves through that just for the money.

Also, the most expensive parts of a medical appointment/surgery/ER visit etc is the administrative overhead, inflated prices of drugs and supplies, and insurance company bullshit. Very little money from that price tag actually makes it to the healthcare workers. Your average EMT on an ambulance makes between $13-20/hour depending on the state minimum wage.

If you have a problem with your healthcare costs, that's something to take up with your representatives in government, not the EMTs, CNAs, nurses, and physicians providing your care.

That's the idea.

The PE bullshit is why I want to be a physician in the public, county ER that actually employs its physicians directly. Also, the PE companies don't qualify for PSLF, and they don't pay enough to make up that difference against non-profit hospitals.

What I mean by that is there is a lot of training for heart attacks/cardiac arrest and significant trauma, but not a whole lot for general illnesses or more minor health problems.

What I mean by that is there is a lot of training for heart attacks/cardiac arrest and significant trauma, but not a whole lot for general illnesses or more minor health problems.

I have an EMT license in America and am currently in medical school. EMT training is entirely centered around "stabilize the patient and get them in front of a physician". They have a limited range of capabilities, but the training they do have is focused on the things that will kill you quickly, and a brief overview of other things.

See, I'm planning on trying to steal your business by going into emergency medicine to be a necromancer. (I have done CPR on people that have actually woken up to complain about it....you cannot convince me that CPR/resuscitation is not necromancy.)