Raymond Ponzini

We have an absolute sham scam of a medical system in the United States. I am presently being hunted by a collection agent for a three-year-old medical bill for $290. Three years ago I took my wife to an emergency room after listening to days of howling about a small but painful rash she had developed at the base of the back of her neck. The fact that I even waited at all is outrageous, but we are too poor to afford a thousand a month for medical insurance, and we are at the mercy of an exploitive American system, which I and many other Americans dread dealing with.

We spent all of two hours at the hospital, ninety eight percent of it waiting to see a doctor. When they finally did see my wife the diagnosis was short and simple. “It’ s shingles. We can’t do anything go home and let it run it’s course.” After that we were directed to a row of desks where clerks working for the hospital made a pitch to us that if we paid our bill immediately it would only be $185 rather than $290. I wanted to do the right thing and the most economical thing so I paid the $185 for the five-minute consultation and went home with a clean conscience thinking I had paid the bill.

In about six weeks a bill came in the mail for $290. from the doctor who had seen my wife. The other bill we had paid was just the rent for the doctor’s office and had nothing to do with the doctor’s bill. We had been scammed! The total bill would be nearly $500. for what should have been a simple $20. visit to a doctor, and which in other countries would have been completely free.

Now we receive calls from collection agents in the morning in the evening at dinnertime, telling us that we must pay. They want to put us on a payment plan stretching out over a span of years, turn us into debtor slaves, because one time my wife saw a doctor for five minutes.

Then there was the time about five years ago when my wife was convinced that she had some kind of flu. She insisted on going to the doctor to get antibiotics. Her antibiotic of choice was erythromycin. She actually believed that she could simply go to a doctor, like in the country she is from, be seen, diagnosed, and get prescribed a weeks worth of antibiotics to knock out the bug.

The visit took six hours, five hours of it spent in various waiting rooms. She was subjected to unnecessary x-rays and blood tests and yes, it was eventually determined that she was sick with a bad cold or possibly a flu. A meager two-day supply of erythromycin was prescribed, which turned out to be quite expensive even for the generic. I can remember getting a two-week supply of erythromycin for five dollars twenty five years ago, now it costs almost that much for each pill.

A few days later we got a bill for $2500. I told the hospital that I couldn’t pay it, so they wrote it off on their taxes, shifting the ridicules bill off on to the taxpayers. The American medical system is a corporate government HMO rip-off system that feeds on the people. The medical insurance companies, HMO’s profit more by denying people medical care then by providing it. In highly industrialized America, richest country on earth, some fifty thousand people die each year from treatable illnesses simply because they cannot afford to see a doctor. More than forty six million Americans have no medical insurance, many of them working. America is rich enough to wage a ten trillion dollar war against a concept – terror, rich enough to hand the banks ten trillion dollars even though they can’t account for nine trillion, but this government, which is not a government of the people at all, can’t or wont provide the American people with medical care.

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By Raymond Ponzini