I was a sickly boy as a child, but I realized how far I had come when I had to rush to the hospital on Sunday. All because of medical insurance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It wasn’t for me, but for my wife. She\u00a0caught a fever on Saturday and it wouldn’t subside by Sunday. I realized that we’d need to see a doctor, and I also realized that I did not know any doctor in Hyderabad.\u00a0 So we took her to one of the hospitals that were on the approved list provided by the insurer.<\/p>\n
My belief is that if you are a generally healthy person, your medical needs are best served by finding a\u00a0decent doctor who makes his living by treating lower middle-class people and sticking to him. This is from my personal experience, having been a lower middle-class person myself in my childhood.\u00a0 You are better off with this guy than with\u00a0an excellent\u00a0doctor who treats the rich.\u00a0 The first reason is that he will have more experience. The second, more important reason is that his incentives will be aligned to yours. He will be used to treating people who cannot afford too much money for useless tests. He will be focused on volume rather than on trying to extract as much value from you as possible. So you will get treated for your disease in\u00a0 a no nonsense way.<\/p>\n
Opting for insured treatment for minor illnesses is usually a bad idea, because the hospital will find multiple ways to treat you and charge the money to the insurance company.\u00a0 First, they insisted on hospitalizing\u00a0my wife\u00a0rather than gave\u00a0her outpatient treatment, because the latter is not covered by insurance. Then they tested her for every\u00a0illness imaginable. Then they put her on the drip and injected her with such a large diet of antibiotics that by the end of Monday, she was in tears from the pain and was begging me to take her home. Today morning I insisted on a discharge and got it.<\/p>\n
I could turn this into a discussion on the various interesting ways in which the market fails when it comes to medical treatment – and how the attempts to fix it breaks it in various interesting ways – but I am too drowsy from having spent two nights in a hospital bunk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was a sickly boy as a child, but I realized how far I had come when I had to rush to the hospital on Sunday. All because of medical insurance.\u00a0 It wasn’t for me, but for my wife. She\u00a0caught a fever on Saturday and it wouldn’t subside by Sunday. I realized that we’d need […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2859"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2859\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}