I really don't understand why you can't just say, "my daughter needs her elbow x-rayed" and just get a damn x-ray. No, we have to sit in the lobby for over an hour, then sit in a tiny examination room for another half-hour. You finally spend 30 seconds with a nurse. Another half-hour later, you spend another 30 seconds with a doctor. Finally, another half-hour later, she gets the X-ray you told them she needed when you walked in the dang door. Couldn't we have saved a lot of time by just skipping the whole waiting on a nurse/doctor thing? Does the doctor really need to see her BEFORE ordering the x-ray? Either it's broken or it's not and he can't do anything before he knows which it is.
It's the same thing when I have a sinus infection. I should be able to just walk up, tell them I have a sinus infection and need a Zpak and let the doctor sign the prescription. Does the doctor actually need to even see me? A quick glance at my medical records would show that I have frequent sinus infections, so I know what they feel like. The Zpak clearly works because I'm not back in their office a week later still sick. Even better, let me go to a pharmacy and get it straight from them after a short consultation.
Sitting in a doctor's office with kids is a miserable experience. Kids have a complete inability to be quiet in a doctor's office, even mine. No kid can sit for three hours straight without getting fidgety. Their phones and tablets are loud, even though I keep telling them to turn them down. Five minutes later, when they think I won't notice, they turn them back up. The toys I brought, thinking they would hold off boredom, are now driving me insane because they are loud. What was I thinking bringing that one? Ebony's ADHD medicine has completely worn off by this time of the evening and she's bouncing off the walls and talking incessantly, even with the hurt elbow.
That's another thing we spend countless hours dealing with - her medicine. We know what works. Why the heck do we have to go to hour and a half appointments every 2-3 months to get access to it? It's ridiculous. And I have to go pick up a paper prescription each and every month because it's a "controlled substance". I do understand that people abuse it. But, why punish every single person because a handful of people abuse it?
Can we not be trusted with our own health care? Can we not make our own decisions? Do we really even need a doctor to know that a kid needs something x-rayed? Why can I not go to Walmart, or at least directly to a pharmacist, and buy an antibiotic?
I know that given that freedom to go around a doctor in making health care decisions would be abused. But, isn't that the abusers problem? Why does that problem trickle down to me?
No wonder health care costs so much when my family is sitting in a clinic for three hours for a total of ten minutes worth of actual health care.
