State:: Texas

Occupation:: Pre-Medical Student

I’ve been very interested to read all the comments on this website, and I can see where doctors are coming from, and where unsatisfied patients are coming from. I think it’s silly and unrealistic to expect everyone to have health insurance – for many of us, it’s unaffordable or not worth the cost. To insure my family of 6, it was $1000 a month! At a rate like that, it’s better to save the money and just pay any medical bills out of pocket – which we did, when my dad had a bicycle accident at 40 mph and ended up with a $10,000 ER bill (notice: still cheaper than a year of medical insurance for the family). I don’t think that patients should be required to carry medical insurance. However, you should expect to pay your medical bills. I realize that sometimes they seem unreasonable, and you should hold your physician accountable – check what they’re charging you for and why they are charging that. However, as a future doctor, I think I can say that while there are some people in the field for the money, most of us want to practice because we feel the work is important, that the people are important. However, it’s also very high-stress, and involves long hours and years of debt accumulation. To you, it may seem like they charge a lot of money, but your bill isn’t just paying the fifteen minutes you spent with the doctor – it’s paying the cost of the facilities you saw them in, the cost of their liability insurance, the cost of their secretary’s salary, and then after that, the cost of the 11+ years they spent in school and training, incurring debts, and the high demands of the workload they now shoulder, which includes constant worry over paperwork and covering themselves in case you get angry and decide to sue them.

It’s sad but unsurprising that the doctor-patient misunderstandings basically come down to money issues. If there were a less expensive way for doctors to practice, maybe the exchange could be less stressful for everyone.