Free Blood Pressure Screening?

Walking into my doctors office last month I saw an interesting flyer, "Free blood pressure screening in February only!" That made me stop and scratch my brain a minute, does that honestly mean they bill you for a blood pressure check the other 11 months out of the year? Answer, they must if you take that sign literally. Hmm I know this is America and we are the ultimate capitalists, but has it really come down to charging for the simplest medical procedures? I decided to do some research on the cost of a stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, and the cost of a simple home BP machine.

Stethoscope: ranged from 500-20 dollars

BP Cuff: ranged from 200-40 dollars

BP Machine: around 60 dollars

Now when I went in I got my free BP test done with a machine like one you would find in a home, nothing fancy. So that cost my doctor around 60 dollars to buy and put in his office, it requires no special training to use so there is no hidden cost associated with it. The doctor does have the ability to interpret the numbers but then again so does anyone with access to webmd.com. Now for the sake of argument Ill let you know that my doctor has been a doctor a while and is most likely long done with paying for med school. Now for a complex math word problem...

If the doctor charges 20 dollars per screening for 11 months, and he sees around 30 people per day, five days a week, how much does he pocket? According to my math (which trust me could be way wrong) he makes 132,000 dollars a year on BP screenings alone. (yes I know this isn't a perfect science but I'm trying to make a point)

I do not pretend to know very much about the insurance side of my job, I don't deal in it because it isn't in the best interests of my patients. I tell them that their health is coming first right now and money will come second. Knowing full well that that poor old lady in front of me will never get free of the debt this is causing her. Now I know I have a job because we bill for our services, but there has to be a better way. We cant nickel and dime society when it comes to health care, this is America the wealthiest nation on earth, we should also be the healthiest and most educated. Yet we lack in these fields, and I ask myself why is that? Because we are the greediest, my doctor thinks he is being charitable by providing free checks of a vital sign that is the number one indicator of heart attack and strokes. No wonder people avoid doctors and neglect their general health, missing minor things that could be treated or cured, until I have to get involved because the neglect has turned into an emergency. This cycle has got to stop, it is a detriment to our society and is causing a system designed to save lives to be bogged down and it will only get worse as the baby boomers become of age.

I have seen some positive things in communities, such as flyer's advertising "health fairs" where people can go and get a check up for free. These are usually put on by EMS or Fire departments because they recognize the problem for what it is. There are free clinics and pharmacy that charge pennies to the dollar for life saving medication. These are run by people who care more about people then Benjamin Franklin's face on green paper.

Now I don't know if what I'm advocating here is "Socialized Medicine" or not because frankly I don't know what that means. I know that a lot of the people I see have Medicare as their insurance and that's tax payer paid, and I also see a lot of people without insurance who get saddled with the bill to pay out of pocket. Those people without insurance usually don't pay, not because they don't want to but because they cant, especially when we nickel and dime them for every little thing and they come up 10,000 dollars in the hole from one ambulance ride and ER visit. That 10,000 dollars then becomes a deficit causing paying customers to be charged more, its a vicious dang cycle. Maybe we should apply the garage sale principle to health care, "that some money in your pocket is better then no money at all." Maybe after all that is the idea of a government run health care system, you may not be making as much for providing the service but at least your getting something.

What do I know though, I'm a publicly educated EMT but I have seen the future and the future down this path is bleak. It doesn't have to be, all we need is some change, it has worked for countless other countries including the UK and Australia. Our system doesn't have to be the same as theirs but what we have is broke and it needs fixin.

Now if only we as a nation could rally and tell our politicians that we aren't gonna take it anymore, that we will not have a health care system ran by a few businessmen who get their pockets stuffed. While sally office worker has to also be sally waitress and sally hotel clerk, because she doesn't have insurance and her son broke his leg. The health care system needs to get back to just that caring for people.

1mgC