Positions in Health and Finance
It’s ben a while since I have put a post up, and I would like to talk about the things that have been on my mind.
Health position:
I select this topic first cause I have been going through more health challenges. In short, my gastro intestinal track doesn’t agree with me a lot of the times. I have concluded that I’m not able to figure out what is causing the issues, and I have been seeing several GI offices in the past years. This has been happening for the part 16+ years, and over the years, I have had almost every test executed on me during that time. There was one of the doctors that said I have had more than a million dollars worth of testing on me. Anyways, I have come to have less and less confidence in the health care system. I know they are doing their best, and I’m sure that my case isn’t the run of the mill type of case. I am going to be going under the procedure again this weekend, and my family has super hopeful that the outcome will at least shed more light on the problem.
You are probably thinking, what have I been dealing with? Well, it seems randomly, that my small bowel stops working. This results in a pseudo blockage in the small bowel. With this, I get transported to the hospital, and I go through the emergency room. The steps normally follow the same path:
- Pain medication (usually morphine or something in that neighborhood)
- X-Rays/CT scans
- NG Tube
- Complete GI rest
Doesn’t that sound like fun? I will go ahead and answer that, NO. That is a resounding NO. Along with all of the pain and discomfort that comes with all of this. There are the hospital/doctor/procedure bills that continue to pile up. In the first two years, I paid out $20K+. I can confidently say that this has hampered my income for many years, and my personal growth has also been altered, due to this. Imagine if you had something wrong with your body that struck randomly, and there doesn’t seem to be any way you can figure out when it will strike. How do you plan a trip? How about a vacation? How about just to see some friends? It has made me reconsider just about every aspect of my life.
So why do I don’t have a lot of faith in the health care system? Well, there are several family members that have conditions like mine. If you look at them, they seem fine, but what you don’t know about them would shock you. I’m not going to mention names, for the fact I want to respect their privacy. My eldest brother, Chris (no he’s not sick), has probably a lot more stories that would make you think more about the state of the healthcare system. I will be writing a blog post about him very soon.
Financial Position:
While, I have explained some about the healthcare bills, I want to elaborate. There have been several incidents that have BLOWN my mind. Let me tell you about two situations that I was presented with. Forgive me, I do not remember the dates of when these things happened, I will tell you what I remember.
Situation #1: I went into the hospital with the typical vomiting and extreme amounts of pain in my stomach. I was in there a 4-5 days. At the same time, a family friends went into the hospital with blood sugar problems. She was in the hospital for 6-7 days, while they were getting her blood sugar under control. I had a set of X-Rays, CT Scan, and a NG Tube. When I got out and started getting the bills; I calculated it up to close to $3K. When she was released, her bill was less than $500 (splitting the difference from my memory and my pops). I had insurance, and she had no insurance. Why do I bring this up? Well, the most significant reason is the simple fact that I have been told to have insurance or your healthcare bills will bury you(in simplest terms). How does this happen when I had insurance and she didn’t? I’m going to leave that to you to figure out. I would LOVE for an explanation.
Situation #2: I went into the hospital again, with the typical symptoms. I was in there this time for 5-6 days. I don’t remember any of the bills that came in, but I am notorious about not handling my mail in a timely fashion. When I saw a notice from a collection agency come in; I started talking to them to get a payment plan setup. After a year or so passes, I call them back asking why they are pinging my credit every month. The response I got, was that when I make a payment, they ding my credit each time. Even though I was handling the collections payments, and was keeping up with all of my other bills, my credit score was continually dropping. Yes, I did stay below the 20% threshold on my single credit card. I then did an in-depth look at my credit report. Went line by line to look into it further. I found nothing that stood out that would have been making my score drop. At this point, I ask for some advice from friends and family, and they were not understanding how the score was dropping either. Once I deduced that the collections firm was causing my credit score to drop, that’s when I asked them about the ding’ing my credit.
In summary:
There are things that I could have done better with my finances, but who doesn’t look back once in a while and doesn’t think this.
Looking forward:
I hope to be able to keep up with writing blog posts about things that I think about a lot. I’ve been working on crypto trading pretty heavily since I have been watching the markets pretty steadily. I hope to share some good news for everyone to trade by. Of course, this will not be a get rich type of thing; instead, think of it some of the things I have seen that seem to work for me.
