#075 Doctor Appointments

No matter what they tell you, doctors are in the business of making money. Yes, their job is to help rid you of pain, illness and the like, but the more patients they see the more money they make... whether it be from the insurance companies or people paying out-of-pocket (I won't even go into the kickbacks doctors get from drug companies, etc.), they will get their money somehow.

For me, visiting my physician is always a (figurative) pain in the ass. I usually get there a few minutes ahead of time because I typically have to drive a long distance to get there and I don't want to be late, so I give myself some extra time in case I hit traffic or whatever. I don't ever actually get placed into an exam room until about 15-20 minutes after my appointment was supposed to begin, and then I wait another 40 or 50 minutes until the doctor arrives. Then, it's a 7 minute assesment of what's going on and suddenly I find myself walking up to the counter to settle the bill.

Now, my dentist, dermatologist and other specialists really don't seem to follow this trend (generally - there are few instances where they have fallen significantly behind schedule). Is it that these doctors are a better judge of the actual time it will take to perform the appointment? Have they included a "buffer" amount of time to compensate for the unexpected? I think my doctor just tries to cram in as many appointments as possible because hey, you have to see the doctor, right? You wouldn't be there if you didn't have to see the doctor, so basically they (figuratively) have you by the balls.

In a lot of cases, if a patient misses an appointment or doesn't call to cancel within 24 hours, the patient either gets charged a fee or has to reschedule for a much later (and much less desirable) appointment (or both). And if I'm going to be late for an appointment, I have to call and let them know. So why can't they call ME and let me know that they're running behind, or even tell me when I sign in? In most cases I will have to leave work to go to my appointment anyways, so I would prefer to minimize the amount of time I need to be away from work so I don't have too much more to make up at a later time.

I have even taken it into consideration that as the day goes on, the doctor will be running later and later due to compounding delays of patient upon patient. Therefore, I try to schedule my appointments for being the first or within the first few of the day. However, I start work much earlier than most doctor's offices, so even their first appointment of the day is practically in the middle of the first half of my day. Also, I can't go see them on my lunch hour because they, too, have a lunch hour... most of which is taken up by trying to get caught up on morning patients before starting afternoon patients.

I don't have a very complicated medical history, so it should be easy to just switch doctors, right? Well I have tried to do this on a few different occasions but I seem to run into the same problem, or I just don't seem to like the doctor. I also feel like I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO deal with this crap.

So basically it's like I can't win.