It is a fact that people today are going to great lengths to pay their prepaid medical bills, without it resulting in a better quality of care.
As a physician, with 39 years of profession, my 86-year-old mother was admitted to a sanatorium near Arenales Street.
Her name is María Rosa V and not the old woman from Room 420, as Doctor Without Humanity called her.
It happened over the weekend, and he was in a serious condition, but the infamous thing is that as soon as the situation was discussed with the doctors involved, they disappeared, with no one to personally report on the decisions made.
The decisions depended on the guard who today is constantly saturated with a large number of inquiries.
In other words, 7 floors of an organization, run randomly, interactively depending on what happened, possibly subject to some kind of artificial intelligence that would make decisions.
Calling the doctor assumed my mother was there for a topic, not as a patient with multiple illnesses, all intertwined.
However, we do not realize the dangers of a fragmented and inhumane medicine, with doctors who do not have Argentine specificity, who are exposed to long hours of work, and many of them without the necessary qualifications.
Excel spreadsheet, tick, half the people, double pay, triple the work, I’m translating; The economy has reached the foundations of medicine, and has caused a great earthquake, the final consequences of which we do not know.
I know health is not a commodity.
I return to the case, after 7 days of treatment in the hospital, a doctor appeared, from the eighth episode of Dante’s Divine Comedy, who said with amazing certainty that my mother was discharged that day.
My sister called me with great skill, because this doctor did not take into account my mother’s needs, such as treatment, follow-up, and body hygiene (of course, it was not her mother); Thanks to this explanation given to the professional, my mother remained in the hospital until there were, at home, the things necessary to maintain her precarious health.
But another reality, lurking in wait for him, another doctor showed up on a Friday, saying that from that moment on, they were all isolated, because of a terrible fecal abnormality, called Clostridium difficile.
Panic, horror, no one explained anything, the message was isolation!
Another urgent call, from a diabetic caregiver, and just mentioning isolation, I thought she was going to jail with my mother, for the rest of her life, as has covid.
I called her to contain her, and to give her directions for her care; The next day, the error disappeared, as well as the isolation, a false alarm.
But the last day was the icing on the cake, the ambulance got him home, a real epic, an epic like few others, ordered at 3:00pm, and hard, or really, arrived 4 hours later.
That virtue on the part of the person who suffers from it is called Stoicism.
It is clear that health is not and will not be an item on the agenda of our politicians.
What I do know is that through 2022, the backlog of annual increase closed at about 100%, with share increases of 9% in January; 6% in March; 6% in April; 8% in May; 10% in June; 4% in July; 11.34% in August; 11.53% in October and finally 6.9% in December. So far, in 2023, there was a 6.9% rise last January and there are other plans.
As a physician, I understand the conditions the sector is facing and its efforts to generate benefits in the face of accelerating inflation. What remains clear is that the benefits must be of quality, providing humane treatment, not system aggregation, with qualified professionals, because good medicine is the cheapest.
Only this.
Thanks.
