MAROONED IN COSTLY LIMBO
It's been more than 40 years since Canadians faced ruin because of medical bills. It used to be a spectre over every family. But ever since medicare began in 1966, we no longer have to worry.
Or do we?
What about parents whose kids ignore the health ministry's reminder about travel insurance and head for Florida beaches for spring break? What about Snowbirds who skip insurance because of the hefty premiums when they flee winter?
If you're lucky, the hospital bill will be only $70,000! I know, because that's what a mere nine days in West Virginia hospitals cost before the $12,000 air ambulance trip to the hostile reception at St. Joseph's Health Care Centre.
Fortunately Mary and I were insured. Green Shield covers me for a month out of the country. We were covered for a second month by travel insurance costing $626.
Yet I have friends who gamble and go naked of protection. As I write, one is on a quick trip south and couldn't get insurance because of a problem after a recent cruise. There are cases where insurance bureaucrats refuse to pay because they claim questions about "pre-existing questions" were fibbed.
One point of my Sun "hospital hell" series was that we are being robbed of proper care by inadequate staffing and "restraints" even though OHIP takes 43% of the provincial budget.
E-mails from readers support that, as did the recent Canadian Medical Association study saying "the once proud system is in distress." Sounds like a broken record! How many studies do we need into the frustrating, miserable, even dangerous, condition of medicare? (For dismal reading, look at the report on CMA.ca.)
I got a response from Health Minister Deb Matthews about my costly delay in getting home. Matthews conceded to me that "there is a gap and we are working to address it. "
She argues the "vast majority" get back without much difficulty "but partly in response to your stories and some others," she has asked the Ontario Medical Association to work with reps from the hospital association, travel industry and her critical care secretariat to develop a new protocol. "We can do better," she says, if patients anxious to get home are not dealt with on an individual basis.
Of course the insurance industry has a huge stake in speeding our returns. But so have Canadians. Readers have told me they only got a relative home because a relative working in the Ontario hospital fought from the inside. They've said Canadians in the U.S. are at the bottom of wait list because they're already being treated.
Liz Potash wrote me that Matthews was only one of the leaders she contacted in the two-month fight to get her husband back from Florida last year. The ordeal stunned them. "What is happening to our system when a citizen is gravely ill and not one single bed in any hospital in Ontario can be found," she wrote.
Exactly the same was written to me by Laurie Leveille who says the average Canadian doesn't recognize the "insanity" in medicare unless they have to endure it "kicking and screaming." Her late son spent terrible months in Mexico before, in awful irony, a Florida hospital agreed to take him. The struggle to get him into the Niagara Health System took seven months. (The system has just been placed under a provincial supervisor because of merger problems and a deadly outbreak.)
Several readers wondered why I wrote about costs because they said their private insurance paid almost everything that OHIP didn't. As if we don't pay for OHIP through our taxes. As if we don't pay directly or indirectly for private insurance. My premiums for the Sun plan for retirees is $390 monthly, rising from the $266 I paid in 2008 because of what administrators said were high health costs.
Green Shield may have paid $4,660 of the $6,450 bill that St. Joe's charged me, but bills like that are the reason my premiums jump.
You may ask for a semi-private room but you will be charged the higher fee for private if you are in intensive care or the hospital claims semi-private wasn't available. Yet the main bill isn't the end of it. I paid another $658 at St. Joe's. Hospitals today are more efficient at picking your pocket on incidentals than in answering your call button at 3 a.m. So you pay $75 a month for phone service, and have to provide the phone. You pay for TV even when it doesn't work. Runnymede charges $60 monthly for laundry, even if you don't use it. And it billed me $3,333 in advance. Unfortunately, it still hasn't given me a full accounting.
It hasn't been an easy return to health from my admission to the first of four hospitals on, appropriately, April Fool's Day.
I have had plenty of down time to reflect on the costs and tribulations since I have daily visits from a community nurse for the bed sore wounds. They may continue for months and certainly cripple my movements and summer. But I thank heaven, and you should too, because the Community Care Access Centre means I can be at home and not in hospital with its costs. You and I as taxpayers would have saved a lot if only those deep ulcers hadn't been allowed to dig in so evilly.
There is a humorous side, but then I have to search hard to find it. I have had months of daily inspection of my bottom by nurses. I laughed when Dr. Franklynne Vincent, the friendly dermatologist who is the wonderful weapon against wounds at St. Joe's, admired how the wounds were healing. I said I had waited 60 years for a woman to admire my bum but the eroticism was ruined by the setting.
It's an interesting start to my daily routine to have a woman come to my bedroom and start tweaking and patting my bottom. It almost makes up for Vincent and a plastic surgeon who twice have cut flesh away so a "vac" can be inserted to drain the wounds.
Now I have to carry an awkward three-pound vacuum box around my neck and lots of tubing every bloody second of the day and night. If only it was filled with rum. That might ease my gloom over the last months and my fear that despite all the political rhetoric and CMA studies, the only thing that will change will be ever higher costs.
It's been more than 40 years since Canadians faced ruin because of medical bills. It used to be a spectre over every family. But ever since medicare began in 1966, we no longer have to worry.
Or do we?
What about parents whose kids ignore the health ministry's reminder about travel insurance and head for Florida beaches for spring break? What about Snowbirds who skip insurance because of the hefty premiums when they flee winter?
If you're lucky, the hospital bill will be only $70,000! I know, because that's what a mere nine days in West Virginia hospitals cost before the $12,000 air ambulance trip to the hostile reception at St. Joseph's Health Care Centre.
Fortunately Mary and I were insured. Green Shield covers me for a month out of the country. We were covered for a second month by travel insurance costing $626.
Yet I have friends who gamble and go naked of protection. As I write, one is on a quick trip south and couldn't get insurance because of a problem after a recent cruise. There are cases where insurance bureaucrats refuse to pay because they claim questions about "pre-existing questions" were fibbed.
One point of my Sun "hospital hell" series was that we are being robbed of proper care by inadequate staffing and "restraints" even though OHIP takes 43% of the provincial budget.
E-mails from readers support that, as did the recent Canadian Medical Association study saying "the once proud system is in distress." Sounds like a broken record! How many studies do we need into the frustrating, miserable, even dangerous, condition of medicare? (For dismal reading, look at the report on CMA.ca.)
She argues the "vast majority" get back without much difficulty "but partly in response to your stories and some others," she has asked the Ontario Medical Association to work with reps from the hospital association, travel industry and her critical care secretariat to develop a new protocol. "We can do better," she says, if patients anxious to get home are not dealt with on an individual basis.
Of course the insurance industry has a huge stake in speeding our returns. But so have Canadians. Readers have told me they only got a relative home because a relative working in the Ontario hospital fought from the inside. They've said Canadians in the U.S. are at the bottom of wait list because they're already being treated.
Liz Potash wrote me that Matthews was only one of the leaders she contacted in the two-month fight to get her husband back from Florida last year. The ordeal stunned them. "What is happening to our system when a citizen is gravely ill and not one single bed in any hospital in Ontario can be found," she wrote.
Exactly the same was written to me by Laurie Leveille who says the average Canadian doesn't recognize the "insanity" in medicare unless they have to endure it "kicking and screaming." Her late son spent terrible months in Mexico before, in awful irony, a Florida hospital agreed to take him. The struggle to get him into the Niagara Health System took seven months. (The system has just been placed under a provincial supervisor because of merger problems and a deadly outbreak.)
Several readers wondered why I wrote about costs because they said their private insurance paid almost everything that OHIP didn't. As if we don't pay for OHIP through our taxes. As if we don't pay directly or indirectly for private insurance. My premiums for the Sun plan for retirees is $390 monthly, rising from the $266 I paid in 2008 because of what administrators said were high health costs.
Green Shield may have paid $4,660 of the $6,450 bill that St. Joe's charged me, but bills like that are the reason my premiums jump.
You may ask for a semi-private room but you will be charged the higher fee for private if you are in intensive care or the hospital claims semi-private wasn't available. Yet the main bill isn't the end of it. I paid another $658 at St. Joe's. Hospitals today are more efficient at picking your pocket on incidentals than in answering your call button at 3 a.m. So you pay $75 a month for phone service, and have to provide the phone. You pay for TV even when it doesn't work. Runnymede charges $60 monthly for laundry, even if you don't use it. And it billed me $3,333 in advance. Unfortunately, it still hasn't given me a full accounting.
It hasn't been an easy return to health from my admission to the first of four hospitals on, appropriately, April Fool's Day.
There is a humorous side, but then I have to search hard to find it. I have had months of daily inspection of my bottom by nurses. I laughed when Dr. Franklynne Vincent, the friendly dermatologist who is the wonderful weapon against wounds at St. Joe's, admired how the wounds were healing. I said I had waited 60 years for a woman to admire my bum but the eroticism was ruined by the setting.
It's an interesting start to my daily routine to have a woman come to my bedroom and start tweaking and patting my bottom. It almost makes up for Vincent and a plastic surgeon who twice have cut flesh away so a "vac" can be inserted to drain the wounds.
Now I have to carry an awkward three-pound vacuum box around my neck and lots of tubing every bloody second of the day and night. If only it was filled with rum. That might ease my gloom over the last months and my fear that despite all the political rhetoric and CMA studies, the only thing that will change will be ever higher costs.
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