this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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Cost money/time to cure people. Cheaper to just manage conditions.
Tell that to the doctor that said I had a blocked salivary gland and to "just suck on some sour candy". I had a tooth abscess (I even told the doctor that) and ended up in the ER for nearly a week. Costed insurance 28 thousand dollars for a procedure that normally costs a couple hundred at most (tooth pull).
Would a doctor do a tooth pull, or a dentist? I don't think it's a reasonable expectation to expect a doctor to pull a tooth, but instead a dentist would do so.
Also, one thing you have to realize is that they don't look at the cost just at the atomic per incident level, but they look at it through the whole life of the customer/patient.
They play the odds, and they do literal risk management, when deciding how to spend money and when to spend money, specially for big money spending like operations.
So in your case it might have been a matter of a risk management decision, of the odds of you getting better without having to have the tooth pulled and spending the money to do so would be good, but you just got unlucky.
I was even thinking of deleting my previous comment because I figured someone would try to explain how my awful experience was normal and justified from the perspective of doctors/insurance, but I left it, and here we are. Go figure. I gave you the summary. There's some important context left out, but I didn't wanna write a book, so maybe just understand that people aren't putting their whole life story into each and every comment.
There was no risk management involved, just shitty doctors, and shitty insurance companies. I went to urgent care, then a dentist, then urgent care again. Every time explaining that I had a bad tooth, was eating, cracked it, and was in immense pain since that point, with swelling to follow. None of them gave a shit, no referrals, no antibiotics, nothing. I got in with an oral surgeon without a referral, only because my mom knows that guy, and he told me to immediately go to the ER where he personally would come pull my tooth.
Is that enough context for you? Or do I need to continue justifying my experience like I had to with my doctors in this exact story?
I'm aware, but you can only have a conversation based on what's actually said, or in this case, written.
The shitty insurance company does risk management.
I'm truly glad to hear that you got treated.
My point was never to excuse bad doctoring, or to challenge your story, but just to say that medical insurance companies don't just look holistically at the patients well being, when deciding what to spend on. There's factors, including business factors, that they look as well. Their top priority is not to heal, but to manage. Healing is a bonus for them.
And yes, there's idiot doctors out there. Trust me, I know. I have one of them in my network.