As some of you know, I am suffering from an…odd medical condition; nothing life-threatening, just really annoying, and it’s slowing me down considerably. My ENT couldn’t find anything obviously wrong, so I was referred to the local pulmonary practice here in York.

The first contact I had with this WellSpan division (I’m beginning to think we should stop calling them “practices” and start calling them what they really are; profit-center divisions of large corporate entities) was a packet of information they sent, which included a cover page literally covered with yellow highlighter telling me what I “must” and “will” do. Gotta tell you, I kinda hate having people I am paying for service treat me like I’m either an idiot incapable of understanding simple English, or a sheep who needs to be lead; the whole, “Do this my way” cruft we’re taking from companies we pay is beginning to annoy me. But that wasn’t the deal-breaker…

There was also a HCFA waver form, holding WellSpan and the practice harmless for any privacy releases.

Yipe.

Ok, ok, I understand the practice’s greed in scheduling multiple patients to one appointment (they call it a “Shared Medical Appointment,” and how insurance companies are being bilked into paying for nonsense like this is beyond me), since if we can collect multiple billings for the same time spent, that maximizes profits, and who cares if it’s at the expense of the patient actually receiving proper medical care, or the patient’s privacy being shared with a bazillion other patients at the same appointment? I mean, after all, it isn’t like these people are sick and so probably less concerned about protecting themselves than they are about getting well or anything…

So my plan was to telephone the practice today and cancel the appointment, but they saved me the trouble; some low-level receptionist telephoned this morning to “discuss” my appointment. I told her it was a good thing, because I needed to cancel. She of course asked to reschedule, at which point I told her I thought not, that I’d prefer to find another practice I could trust not to share my medical information with whatever strangers walked in off the street. She said, and here’s the most telling piece of this, “There aren’t any other pulmonary practices in York.”

This explains a lot; with only one “local” practice (I know of at least three other practices within a half-hour drive, and the world-renowned Penn State Hershey Medical Center is only fifty minutes away - trust me, I’ve made that drive more times than I care to count the year they were saving the lives of my wife and daughter!), they figure they can get away with anything. Most patients who are sick and need medical attention now, unlike my condition which is bothersome but not critical, aren’t going to consider their options, they will simply roll over and do whatever these dictators demand, including sharing their private medical information with scores of strangers.

Nope, kids, there’s no bloody way in hades I’ll sign your silly waver, holding you harmless when the inevitable happens and strangers are told of my medical condition in complete detail - you’re welcomed to shove it somewhere you can’t tell me about without violating confidentiality. And I’ll not spend my, or my insurance company’s, money at any practice that puts profits above patient care and privacy. Wow…if that means I have to drive a pleasant half-hour on a warm, bright Spring day to a nearby town to find a physician I can trust to treat me as a patient and a human being, instead of some cog in a corporate structure (cue Apple’s “1984″ commercial here), then so be it…guess I’ll just have to “suffer” that way.

And I’ve already told my family that it doesn’t matter how sick or infirm I become, I do not want treated by scum who would have the gall to require any such waver. If more of us said, “Stuff it!” instead of rolling over and taking this presumptious nonsense from organizations we are paying for service, there would be a lot less of this crap to deal with in the future. (And insurance companies - stop paying for this assembly-line medicine. We all want efficiencies in the medical system, but this is a ridiculous and embarrassing extreme.)

(And for whatever it’s worth, I don’t always gripe and complain; I’ll soon be telling you a quick story about a bunch of folks who went above and beyond to do me a kindness…)