I intend to make this a brief summary of a very long nightmare.
After years of the St. Louis Veterans Administration ignoring my health concerns and connfidential information breaches I began to have chest pains emanating down both arms. They simply ignored my concerns and sent me to their mind police: psychology department.
After a year of this I finally contacted Representative Jo Ann Emerson, my representative. She has a record of defending veterans rights. At her urging, the Poplar Bluff, MO VA decided to submit me to a stress test in which they discovered that I was in imminent danger of cardiac arrest. I was not just real excited about the prospect of letting the same people who let me get to this condition cut me open. So, I requested and got a transfer to the Memphis VA.
They bypassed all protocols of admitting new patients and rushed me straight to their cardiac department and scheduled me for triple bypass surgery. This occurred in five days and I was operated on and discharged within three days. A hospital record for both.
When they called me back to see a primary care physician, as we were going over my out of control cholesterol and triglycerides, my sky high blood sugar levels, and the plethora of other ailments with which I was suffering, without adjusting a single med she looked at me and said, "You are too young to have all of this wrong with you. I want you to see a psychiatrist." I nearly fell out of my chair.
Lab reports do not lie. I know that medical professionals are trained to believe that the patient ALWAYS lies. But blood work doesn't lie.
After a couple of psych visits in which I was not granted an audience with a psych, therapist, nor any other professional and in which all I was exposed to was classes on Buddhist practice and thought which was disguised in Christian trappings, I decided that these classes were only to have seats filled for funding purposes. I was there for help. Not to help them earn funding.
So, I quit them. I decided that I might have just as much luck with Medicaid (the bottom of the line medical insurance offered by the government). I set out to find a Medicaid doctor. That turned out to be a search that would best be served by a posting of its very own.
The primary message in this post is that the Veterans Administration could care less about any of its patients. It is touted as the closest thing to socialized medicine that we have here in the United States. I would put good money on THAT being the reason that so many people are deathly afraid of socialized medicine here. But the VA is anything BUT socialized medicine. It is institutionalized medicine whose only concern is the bottom dollar that it can spend to treat the most patients.
Stay tuned for part 2- Medicaid-almost medicine for almost people
