Back on December 18, I had my annual mammogram. On January 22, I got a phone call from my doctor. She said I needed a follow up mammogram because there was something that was found on the first one.\u00c2\u00a0 I wound up wondering how bad it was for five whole days until my next appointment when I got to see the original image that they were concerned about.<\/p>\n
The image was of my left breast, and you could very definitely see these white bean shapes up near … basically my arm pit. This is totally not what I expected. They said my mammogram had an anomaly and I just assumed it was in my breast. I even did a breast self exams all weekend (and found nothing of course.)<\/p>\n
Well after all that second batch of squishing AND an ultrasound “just to be sure,” they let me go with a clean bill of health.<\/p>\n
As I left I thought about how problematic and stressful the whoe process is once a year. I know they can use other techniques for diagnosis (MRIs, and Ultrasounds) which seem to the uninformed as more accurate, and a lot less uncomfortable. I knew it’s a cost “savings” measure on the part of the insurance companies – i.e. what they’ll pay.<\/p>\n
Then I put it out of my mind. Until today.<\/p>\n
I <\/strong>apparently OWE<\/strong> $281.21 …and probably counting (That’s just the radiology\/lab cost, not the cost for the MDs to read the darn thing – I think I paid an extra $57 or so for that).\u00c2\u00a0 The insurance\u00c2\u00a0 covered a whopping $137.52 of the bill. I’m one of the lucky ones that can cover this. What if I couldn’t? Would I just NOT have procedure done and wonder if I’m a ticking time bomb until I develop cancer? And it wasn’t even my “fault” – nothing<\/strong> was wrong with my body at the time of the original mammogram, the technician just didn’t do her job correctly the first time.<\/p>\n It’s no wonder that people in this country are broke… we have to keep paying for other people’s mistakes and stingy insurance companies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back on December 18, I had my annual mammogram. On January 22, I got a phone call from my doctor. She said I needed a follow up mammogram because there was something that was found on the first one.\u00c2\u00a0 I wound up wondering how bad it was for five whole days until my next appointment […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-insurance","category-rant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quietlyjudgingyou.brickware.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quietlyjudgingyou.brickware.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quietlyjudgingyou.brickware.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quietlyjudgingyou.brickware.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quietlyjudgingyou.brickware.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.quietlyjudgingyou.brickware.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.quietlyjudgingyou.brickware.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions\/23"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quietlyjudgingyou.brickware.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quietlyjudgingyou.brickware.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quietlyjudgingyou.brickware.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}