Reality of universal health care

[Triangulation]

I'm hesitant to post this bc it runs counter to a lot i always ardently champion, but working in retail in a underserved area has made me question the idea of universal heath care, in terms of rx coverage a lot more. It could be attributable with frustration with ungrateful Medi-Cal patients, but it just seems like so many abuse their coverage. It's not that they are doing anything illegal it's more that they are completely uninformed about how their coverage works. Medi-cal covers a max of 6 scripts per month unless they receive an authoirzation from medi-cal , but patients are always completely oblivious to this fact and land up tying up the system because we are submitting third-party authorizations all day while they yell at us about how their scripts aren't being filled.

I'm still a proponent of universal coverage, but it needs to be improved as far as communication. Once again, it's difficult to set up a penalization system for people that abuse their coverage bc they often legitimately need their drugs to live (at least they get their docs to think so)

What are people's thoughts on this? I know that the pharmacists from other states who are working in my pharmacy are just amazed about the coverage that californians get.

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[jdpharmd?]

I'm not exactly sure how Medi-Cal works, but here in Michigan Medicaid patients are definately the most difficult to deal with. Not only is the formulary very small and very specific, but they require prior-auth on several common drugs. Medicaid patients usually come in and look at us like we owe them something beyond what we're giving them. We already personally pay for their health and prescription insurance with our taxes, what more do they want? Medicaid patients usually have $0 or $1 co-pays for prescriptions here. They get it in their heads that we (or society) owes them something and they come in with a chip on their shoulder 75% of the time, or develop one soon after hearing that their doctor's rx for Vicodin has expired after 'only' 5 refills. I would love to see some type of standardized healthcare because I think that anything is better than our current system. I just finished a class that explored science in America and the aspects that make "American Science" different from any other nation. One of those aspects was that we're one of the only developed countries without a standardized healthcare system. When discussions came up, the thing that was pointed out to the class was that the capitalistic and democratic nature of our country gave the best healthcare in the world to those who could afford it and virtually none to those who could not. In most of Europe, you can just walk into a dr's office and be treated for a URI, but try to get an MRI or CT scan done and you could be waiting months, literally. Here, if you've got the cash (or BSBC Mesa) they've got the care. The point was that although they do have standardized health care in many countries, it does not mean that it's a healthcare utopia. It also raised the question: Would you rather have uniform, standarized healthcare that provided a mediocre level of care and ensured that everyone was covered, or keep it like it is and let the rich get the best healthcare and have up to 30% of the population go completely without any type of insurance? There seems to be a hard time finding a middle-ground that everyone can accept. I'm in the unlucky position of losing my healthcare for a couple months while my parents change jobs, and then I'm in the same situation again when I turn 25 and have to pay out-of-pocket for insurance while at pharmacy school. (or should I say "out of loan"?) If anyone has an idea for a cheap, effective and easy way to impliment a system for standardizing healthcare, I think that Mr. Bush would love to hear it.

Jd

 

[Triangulation]

You seem to echo both my sentiments and my conflict: what has to give for universal coverage? Dunno. It needs to be re-vamped, but that will take a lot of money and the budget sitch isn't gonna get straightened out for a long time now.

At this rate, even if they could get universal health care set-up it'd be DOA bc it'd be banrupt to start. Medi-Cal has to be in the same sitch as soc sec, in that it's gonna run out of money. zero co-pay for $300/bottle? nuh uh.