The annual U.S. healthcare cost is over 3 trillion dollars. This comprises over 18% of our entire Gross Domestic Product. And is greater than the healthcare cost of all of Europe combined.
Where does this come from?
I see first hand a huge drain on the system when navigating through patient's plans on the Trauma service.
Our reliance on pills is unfortunate. Pills to go to sleep, to wake up, to think more clear, to dull the senses... it goes on and on. I would really dislike it when I'd get paged at night about a patient wanting something to sleep. As a third year intern, I handled that page much better than as a first time intern. I would make myself sound really smart and elaborate the risk of sleep aids. It would put a cabosh on the requests fairly quickly. That's not to say I never gave any, but I'm pretty sure the nurses were smart enough to figure out when I would and wouldn't and respected that. Along with our reliance on pills is the tolerance our body manifests. Chronic abuse lowers a body's threshold to stimuli and in effect by dulling our pain eventually makes us so much more sensitive to the acute pain. Now try to control that pain... it's like trying to dry off your dog while standing out in the rain.
And don't get me started on insurance... My list is filled with names of patient's literally sitting there waiting for insurance authorization to be discharged so they can finally get on getting better. And those 2, 3, 5, and 8 extra hospital days... who's paying for those?
And then you have those patient's who flat out abuse the whole system entirely. We see this quite often in our inmates. You learn quickly that you can never tell your patient when discharge is planned if said patient is an inmate. It's amazing what they will manifest to stay longer in the hospital. I took a patient to the OR today after she had ripped open her own wound and stuck metal buttons (which she had bitten off her hospital gown) and her own feces in it. I cleaned her out and packed it, couldn't close it again due to her own contamination. This isn't the first time, not by a long shot, and it won't be the last. Our New York taxpayer's dollars hard at work.
Really, I just want to do my job. I want to be challenged and learn something everyday. But on trauma... one learns more of the ugly underbelly of the system than is in general desirable.
Much Love.
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