I'm beginning to get a little concerned about it. I remember I read a quote once that seems like it's getting fairly appropriate here. Pardon my language, this is gonna get a little naughty, but it goes like this: "If you think you met an asshole during the day, you probably met an asshole. If you think everyone you met during the day was an asshole, maybe you're the asshole."
So, when we got our first message that said something like "I think you should be shut down" I wrote it off like I'd met a jerk.
About a week later I got something like "what you're doing is destroying the healthcare system. You should be ashamed of yourself".
Hmmm... THEN, someone (in a town where one of our offices is) put up a billboard that took dead aim at us, like we were giving bad care or something.
Pretty soon I started thinking I might be the bad guy.
So what the hell is the deal?
One of those messages came from a doctor's office (which is weird because a LOT of doctors send us patients). One was from a nutjob who works for a hospital. Another was someone from a freestanding ER that's basically walking distance to our office.
Here's what they're all bitching about (and if you agree with them I'm just letting you know I'm sorry you feel this way but we aren't about to change anything):
As you probably know, there is a hell of a shortage of just about everything in the medical field right now. We are scrambling to buy IV tubing, IV caths, needles, syringes, and stuff like that, and buy as much as we can every time it's available. IV fluids are on what's called "allocation". We're allowed a certain number of cases of Ringer's Lactate each month, and we buy every last one we can. We've been in the position where we've had to drive bags from one office to another, and even had to close an office once.
Worse, prices have SKYROCKETED.
Well, all of them are saying some version of "you're taking items out of the healthcare system that should be going to hospitals and ERs, and you're using them for some vanity treatment. It's wrong." Sometimes they accuse us, and places like us, of driving up the price of items.
Honestly, it pisses me off and I don't think they're right. We see people who come in crying from migraines, carry in Walmart bags to puke in because they don't know we have emesis bags, are drained and dehydrated from working their butts off, are wiped out from chemotherapy, and a million other ailments. No, we aren't an urgent care, but we see people who NEED us. We've helped women who are so dehydrated from morning sickness that they were scared. We kept them from ending up in an ER.
Even people who AREN'T sick come to us to boost their immune systems, or because they haven't been eating right, or because they feel like crap and want to feel better. Everybody has the right to feel better.
Not only that, you might not know it, but our $169 Rockstar IV costs more than three grand in the hospital. THREE GRAND. We don't get you in and run a ton of lab tests on you, give you a CT scan, or charge you out the wazoo for Advil. I'm not saying hospitals are screwing you, but they've got to pay an orthopedic surgeon to be on call, they've got to pay a neurologist, a cardiologist, and so on and so on. We don't, so we don't have to charge $3,200 for an IV.
But... we aren't taking things (fluids, multivitamin, catheters) that should be going to ERs or physician offices or hospitals. We're taking things to give to people who will feel better after we do. There's nothing bad about you coming here, and nothing bad about us helping you.
I guess the upshot of this is, don't let anyone make you think you're doing anything wrong by doing something to make yourself feel better. You have just as much right to feel better as anyone else. We don't feel bad that if we never bought another IV bag or a vial of multivitamin some other place that thinks they're more important can have more or pay less. We're here for you, not them.
Anyway, if we're hearing this we figure you are too, so we just want to let you know that we think it's BS and hope you do too... and that's all.
