Today, the LA Times reports…

Most major health insurers in California do a poor job of paying claims and providing customer service for members in preferred provider organization plans, according to a state survey released Thursday.
…
In the quality report card, Anthem Blue Cross, Blue Shield of California, Health Net Inc., UnitedHealthcare and Cigna Corp. received the lowest possible ratings — poor — for customer service. Aetna Inc. earned a slightly better rating of fair.

I have to say, I’ve had remarkably good results from my insurer, especially over the past two years or so that I’ve been dealing with both repetitive strain and the vestibular disease that screwed up my balance. They never balked at paying for ongoing physical therapy or several pricey brain MRIs.

My problem wasn’t the insurance, but the utter incompetence of the doctors themselves. In regards to repetitive strain, most of the doctors I talked to offered blank stares and meaningless advice about wearing a wrist brace (which I already was doing) and physical therapy (which turned out to be 100% worthless.) They were entirely unaware of the various remedies which did ultimately prove helpful: trigger point therapy, hot/cold baths and a few other things I picked up off the web or by talking to people.

And in regards to my vestibular malfunction they were even worse. They gladly ran expensive tests which returned ambiguous results, and then gave me meaningless advice about how to handle stress. I can fairly say that all of the detective work that finally led to the correct diagnosis was done by me, on the Internet.

This highlights what I think is an often ignored topic related to the health care debate. If we guarantee all American citizens the right to have access to health care that is fundamentally garbage, we really haven’t achieved much.

I don’t want to slam on doctors. I think with things like cancer, heart disease and car accidents they know what they’re doing. But when it comes to maladies they are less knowledgeable about, they basically stand around with their thumb up their ass.

I actually just took my dad in for a doctor visit. I like his doctor, and he’s a well-meaning guy, but in the course of a 20 minute visit he made at least four mistakes. (For example, sending us to the lab for some blood tests, without putting the request for these tests into the computer system.)

I think it’s reasonable to say that we will only have competent health care in this country when any doctor who screws up anything is rewarded with death! Just like they do in France.