Emergency Rooms

So I'm into the thick of things trying to finish my online course. My forte is accounting so it's exciting and also overwhelming to learn new things like medical terms and anatomy and also about insurance terminologies and codes. I love learning things about insurance most of all. From where I came from it's not very customary to have a health insurance coverage, we normally do pay-as-you-go kind of thing. But the upside of it is unlike here in US where you have to go through your primary care provider to get a referral for whatever medical concerns you have, in the Philippines you can just go to any doctor that you need on a first-come-first-serve basis. So basically you can get help sooner and faster. No need for your doctor to check with insurance companies whether the medical procedure you need is covered or not to ensure their payment for the service.

Once I had a medical emergency due to profuse bleeding. My neighbor rushed me to an ER only to wait there for over 5 hours to get help. The first thing they were eager to get was the information about my insurance coverage. Of course they checked my vitals too but didn't really care much after that. My husband kept going back and forth to the nurse on duty to ask when a doctor would see me, but the nurse replied that there were people with more serious condition than I had. It turned out I would need two bags of blood for transfusion because I lost too much blood already. I was confined for the night. It would have been better if we called 911 to get medical attention than wait in the ER to die.

Anyway on the other hand, my husband was so amazed with how the ER in the Philippines worked for him. He contacted amoebiasis while on vacation and got really weak from severe diarrhea but he was hesitant to be brought to ER thinking that it would be like in US. But I insisted and drove him to the ER of one of the affluent hospitals at past midnight and he got medical attention right away. He was also amazed at how there was a pathologist at that time and diagnosed what he had right away. So we were at the ER for maybe 2 hours and he came home feeling better.