No one studies the effort of managing one's health care

[firecat]

This is yet another thing that people with medical conditions get blamed for—not managing their own care well enough, although according to this article NO ONE studies the efforts required to manage one's own health care.

(Content note: one use of the "O-word")

"But American medicine demands another scarce resource from patients, and that is their time. The time it takes to check in on the status of a prescription, to wait for a doctor, to take time away from work to sit on hold and hope that, at some point, someone will pick up the phone.
...
"There is a risk associated with not measuring patient work: namely, that patients will give up when life gets in the way. This is an especially acute worry for lower-income patients, who often work for hourly wages and have little space to change their schedules."

http://www.vox.com/2016/6/1/11712776/healthcare-footprint

Comments

[lilacsigil]

Yeah, I both do my own healthwork and work in a healthcare job, which means that I do my best to help other people with it as well. I work in a small, rural pharmacy which means that we have a bit more time to talk with customers. Some people from the city get incredibly excited when we actually spend time discussing their medications with them and keep coming back with more questions. (Others are annoyed that we actually want to ask questions like "Do you take [medication with a potentially fatal interaction with what you want to buy]?"

And, being Australian, I get to spend very little time on insurance as the vast majority of my primary care (with the major exception of dentistry) is covered by the government, and whatever I have to pay in addition is fixed, usually at a fairly low price.