Yuletide
  • Yuletide blog
  • About Me
  • Links
  • List of All Posts

Post-178: Doctor's Visit in South Korea Without Insurance

1/12/2014

2 Comments

 
Now here is an amazing story. The amazing part is down below. The first part, above the divider, isn't so amazing.

I was sick for about ten days, straddling New Year's Day 2014. I mentioned this in post-176. The sickness was  unpleasant at best. At worst, thoughts of Death began to creep into my disoriented, pain-addled mind.

It will pass. It didn't. It got worse. Swallowing became an intense, body-jolting experience. Breathing got more difficult, and that's scary. An endless headache, concentrated in one spot (also scary); sleeping all day, either shivering under the blankets, or waking up with everything drenched in sweat. On January 2nd, I finally went to the doctor, in Seoul's Guro district, where I am staying during my month of intensive Korean studying. I was diagnosed with tonsillitis. I got a bag full of pills to take. The pills helped. My friend J.A. gave me called "propolis" and it also helped.

.
Now here is the amazing part:
Read More
As a total foreigner in South Korea at this point, with no insurance at all, on a tourist visa, paying in cash...you'd think that I wasted a lot of money on this doctor visit. No! Visiting the doctor, without insurance, was refreshingly cheap. Let me tell you exactly what I spent:

A measly 10,000 KRW in cash, or around $9.00 USD, got me an examination by the doctor, a shot of some kind of medicine (administered, embarrassingly, in the rear end by the nurse, a practice out-of-fashion for decades in the USA for adults, I think), and a prescription from the doctor for pills to take for the next few days to relieve my symptoms and kill the bacteria (or whatever it was).

After leaving the doctor's office, down I went down to the first-floor pharmacy to buy the pills I'd been prescribed. There were a total of 75 pills, five pills with each meal for five days. (This was problematic at first as I wasn't eating meals much due to pain in swallowing.) The price for those pills, in total, came to 19,340 KRW (around $17.50), or 23 U.S. cents per pill.

More details about my doctor's visit:
  1. I had only a few short minutes' waiting time.
  2. There was no need for an appointment. It was a walk-in-walk-out thing.
  3. From walking in to the doctor's office to walking out of the pharmacy was not more than thirty minutes.
  4. The medicine was effective, and I was 80%-recovered by January 5th and 100% recovered by January 7th.
  5. I paid $26.50 for the whole deal (doc+pills). Again, this was with no insurance at all and on a tourist visa.
  6. [Note: I did actually pay into the Korean healthcare system for two of my three years of legal employment in South Korea (my first job did not pay into it), usually about $90 a month, but I never used it.]

"They can put a man on the moon, but...."

Sadly, my native land, the USA, with its tiring and endless "health care problems", looks a little like a third-rate clown show in comparison to the above. I'm sorry to say it. I mean, even with "insurance" from a U.S. insurance company, I'm sure my $26.50 wouldn't even cover the "deductible" just to see the doctor in the USA, to say nothing of buying the medicine. For someone without insurance, the same visit in the USA might reach ten times the price I paid, or $200-$300, rather than $26.50.

I have no idea why we Americans, most of whom still think that the USA is the richest and most-powerful political-entity in the history of the world, can have such a nightmarishly-expensive, confusing, oppressive, intimidating, headache-inducing health care system. Why? As Homer Simpson once said, "Did we lose a war?" (See post-60).
2 Comments
LJ
1/13/2014 01:08:11 pm

Sounds like an example of single payer government sponsored health care to me. Take out the profit motive in health care and wonderful things happen to real people in need. Every citizen (in this case non citizen) deserves health services. It should not be how much a person can afford or what job benefits a person has. Similar examples to yours are often quoted by Americans living abroad, including ones that could be told by this writer too.

Reply
Peter
1/13/2014 09:43:47 pm

That's true, and health care is not the only example. The USA, as I've known it as an adult, of the 2000s and 2010s, just compares very poorly to other rich countries I've become familiar with in my time abroad.

It's amazing, because even the laziest reading of the history of the past 400 years really proves that Americans are capable of great things. I've read the USA produced half of World GDP in the early 1950s, with <6% of the population. America was the envy of basically everyone on the planet in those days. Today, just two generations after that apex, even what-should-be straightforward endeavors (making a sensible health care system) seem like major stumbling blocks. Are the good times over for good? I ask.

Reply



Leave a Reply.


    About

    Welcome. This is a place I write things that may or may not be of interest. Thanks.

    See here for more.


    Search this site:

    List of All Posts
    List of all posts
    Subscribe via email:

    Subscribe to the Feed:

    Enter email address to subscribe to daily updates:



    RSS Feed

    Archives

    November 2018
    March 2018
    January 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013


    Contact by Email
    Yuletide5142 at y@hoo.com


    Picture
    Me

    I thank you for
    stopping by
    this quiet corner
    of the Internet.

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.