Emergency Without Insurance
- Thread starter enriquetta
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Davidglen77
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It really surprises me that there are people that act like waiting to see a doctor, waiting for an emergency room visit or other type of medical care is unique to Argentina. I come from New York City and let me tell you that if you go to a hospital emergency room and you are not about to keel over and die at that moment you will be waiting hours, days at both public (and yes, the are public but NOT free, like here) and private hospitals.......no joke.
enriquetta
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Hey guys, just un update. I didnt see the other suggestions in time so i went to aleman, also cause i live very close. It didnt take very long but i didnt go to guardia clinica, they sent me straight to a dermatologist cause it was obviously infected and it was quicker. So I only waited 10 minutes to see the doctor. In the end she had to make a small cut to get the stuff out since the infection had spread very quickly in my foot and im in antibiotics for 10 days... I will start on medicus next month but its good to know there are cheaper options of places to go in case anything else happens...
Rich One
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So what was the damage if you had a mini surgery..??? Please report....??
enriquetta
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Well the doctor thought it was weird that it was closed already the cut but it was very swollen, and i told her it got swollen over night so she opened it to let pus out (sorry this is very gross).. It looked for me it was healed cause it was closed, it had created scar tissue and all thats why i paid no attention, but insided it had infected and it spread a bit too fast, i even felt pain on my ankle when she touched it.... So she opened it, it wasnt a mini surgery but it hurt a lot when she squeezed. She said i could have had an absess (algo asi) if I hadnt gone yesterday.. So yeah Im glad I did
I think he was talking about the cost as well
Hospital Aleman has gotten a bit slower in the last two years or so. I have insurance there, have had since about 2008. I'm always happy with the doctors, but they have made it more difficult to access things like eye exams and physicals for school - used to be able to just go in and get any of those done on demand, but now you have to make an appointment and those appointments can take more than a month! I've had to go to a private pediatrician this year to get my two girls' physicals done for school because the waiting time was so long for the appointment.
However, for many things, they are still fairly quick and the doctors are great.
I don't like public hospitals here.
My first experience inside a public hospital was when my brother-in-law's wife had a baby. Shabby does not quite describe the hospital. Very few staff - for example, in the evening and night they do not have stretcher bearers. The elevators didn't work (none of them) and the mother had to climb 4 flights of stairs while in labor. For the stay, there is one nurse who doesn't quite have time to cover everything. The patient is responsible for food and such during a stay, and must have someone to take care fo them (because there is little in the way of nursing staff). Dirty, unmaintained, etc.
My wife has brought family members to public hospitals and waited half a day or more to see a doctor. Almost always treated poorly. But then again, they are Paraguayan and this may have something to do with it - prejudice is rampant here. Doesn't matter that they are all hard-working, tax-paying contributors to the economy (my comment is about my family)...
Recently, another brother-in-law had a baby that was born with a small hole in her heart. No one noticed there was a problem for hours after she was born. My wife had brought earrings as a gift, to be inserted by the staff there. When she arrived, the baby was stretching on her back, trembling and spasming. The nurse said "oh, don't worry, that's normal". My wife had a fit and found a doctor and asked him to come take a look. The doctor immediately took the baby for some tests and came back and told the family that the baby was most likely going to die (just like that). After a couple of hours to stabilize the baby, they sent her to another hospital where they said the same thing. (Never heard of worse bedside manners in my life!) A few more hours, and the baby was taken to a third hospital, where the doctor shook his head, called the other hospitals incompetents, and performed a procedure (I wasn't there and no one understood what was going on, so some things are a bit sketchy) that took care of the relatively minor problem the baby was having. Had it not been for the family insisting something was wrong, the baby probably would have died.
I've heard a lot of anecdotes like this from people who go to public hospitals. However, I also know of an American doctor here whose Argentine wife is head of surgery at a public hospital (don't remember which one). He swears by local hospitals. My indirect experience doesn't bear that out, at least not here in Cap Fed.
enriquetta
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Oh its ok I can say! It was 300, it would have been 250 with a turno, but that was not the case as I wanted to go the same day! the funny thing is I decided to not pay insurance first month to save the money of migraciones, which is 300 something... Nothing never happens to me anyways I never have to go to the hospital! So yeah I learned my lesson
