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Flu Shot

Got my first-ever flu shot yesterday. At least I think it was my first ever. I don’t remember getting them as a kid.

When I was at the doctor’s office, I noticed he’s dropping my insurer. If I want to stay with him, I need to get health insurance through another provider. Of course, I don’t have much choice in the matter. My insurance is dictated by my employer. There’s no way I could afford to drop our group plan and buy my own insurance. Therefore I need to find a new doctor. So sayeth the Corpocracy.

What a system.

Update: Adding insult to injury, my insurer’s online directory of physicians in my neighborhood includes numerous listings for doctors at 3535 Bienville Street. That’s a building attached to the Lindy Boggs Medical Center, which of course has not re-opened since Katrina. So that information is obviously over three years old and no longer valid. Thanks, Humana!

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6 Comments

  1. Sean Sean

    They really have you over a barrel no matter what situation you think you’re in. Some people will say, well, at least you’re covered… Did you ask why he was dropping them? I went to a specialist who said he wasn’t paid for over 6 months by the insurer. Hell, that’d be reason enough if he wasn’t hurting for patients.

    I have a number of misgivings with Obama’s healthcare plan, so I’m still waiting to see if they will adopt the Insurance Exchange. Of course it hinges on the cooperation of private insurers… If they do this however, I doesn’t seem like it would effect your situation, but how it is formed in reality vs. campaign promises will really need to be watched carefully.

  2. Yes, at least I’m covered. Back in the 90s I had to live for quite some time without any health insurance. Something about my epilepsy as a “pre-existing condition” meant that insurance was quite literally unaffordable.

    I was told the doctor’s dropping Humana because they simply don’t pay enough… which raises some other questions, the most pertinent to me being what kind of quality care am I going to get with a plan that pays so little to the provider?

  3. I’d see if I can get some more details on it. Do they not pay enough for office visits? Complicated procedures? Depending on the difference between what your Dr. wants and what the insurance will pay, you could still file your own claims. Yeah, it’s “out of network” and has higher copays or deductibles, not to mention being a big pain in the ass, but I’d rather keep a doctor who knows me unless it’s simply not financially possible.

  4. elizalou elizalou

    UGH!
    this hits a nerve in our household…..we had health insurance for almost a year before we were able to find a doctor that was accepting new patients in our area……the most frustrating part of it all was that we used their ONLINE directory (in my mind it would be dangerously easy to update this version…….right?), and out of the 63 doctors that we called *35 of them were no longer at the phone number listed for them in the directory and often the number had been reassigned already (and when i called the insurance company member help line, they faxed me the SAME pages with the SAME numbers) *22 of them were no longer accepting new patients, *3 of them had answering services that we left messages with and we never heard back from them despite repeated calls, *3 of them were not GP’s but specialists like OB/GYN and PEDS (though they were listed as GP’s in the directory) and therefore were not eligible to be primary care physicians……we finally found a dr this fall when a client of mine gave me a referral to their dr, and we discovered that though he was not listed in our directory he did accept our insurance!
    i feel your frustration……good luck! /rant

  5. […] with a little fever. I discovered my old doctor was taking my insurance again after dropping it back in 2008. So I made an appointment and now I’m taking a course of antibiotics and also some sort of […]

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