What health care crisis?

My wife became disabled at age 46, judged so by the Social Security administration. She sees lots of doctors. Because I still work, my health insurance is considered primary by Medicare. So I know a little about the ballyhooed "health care crisis" and the strain that funding health care, dealing with insurance companies, and Medicare puts on any family.

It is not easy to be sure.

A doctor needs to know what he or she is doing, listen to the patient, be available, be patient with the patient, and do all the things that are right and good about the health care field. Finding a doctor like that is not always easy. Finding clinics like that is not always easy. My wife has been lucky. She called one of her doctors who was out of town on vacation. His staff gave us his cell phone number. And he called us back that day. Not many docs or staff are that understanding, unfortunately.

If I had any recommendation for dealing with the health care nightmare that some people have, it would be to find a doctor whose first name isn't "doctor."

I'm not going to go into a long laundry list of the problems my wife deals with. But here's a story, true.

She is seeing a new doctor in a few weeks. A new round of some tests and maybe treatment plan. That's nothing new for the past ten years. It's old hat to us now. So this new doctor, in order to save us some office time, sent us a bunch of forms to fill out. Again, that's not unusual and we have the filling out job down to computer printouts and we simply write down "see attached." (That's another tip I would give to those entering the morass of paper work of health providers. Taking some medication? Make a list and save it. Give it to the doc every time you go, update as needed. Medical history, list of surgeries, other routine questions that every doc asks every time? Print out your list and say, "see attached.")

This time, however, the new doctor threw us for a loop with a form. We've seen "Family Medical History" forms before, but not like this one:



Look at it closely. See the sections for brother and sisters, sons and daughters. Last time we checked, there were no gender identity problems on either side of our families. Are we really supposed to determine if her brothers and our son are male? Or her sisters and our daughter are female? Uh, aren't those family members a particular gender by definition?

At least they figured out that a father is male and a mother is female, but maybe with same sex marriages they should try to differentiate between the sex of the parents and who is the wife or husband in that type of relationship.

Seems stupid to me and got me wondering.

There are big problems in our nation's health care system. Maybe, though, we have bigger things to worry about.

***

This and other pieces also appear at the blog site of the Democratic Party. To read any comments that people have made about this brief essay, or to read other pieces please visit there.