Live or Die in Las Vegas
We all know that healthcare in America can be scary, but healthcare in Las Vegas is even scarier. I've been back in Sin City for a couple of months visiting family, and I'm instantly reminded as part of the reason I left Las Vegas in the first place. If you have a serious or chronic health condition, you could literally die here. I worked for three years here in the health industry for the largest health insurance provider in the US. During my stint as a Patient Advocate, we received approximately 9,000 incoming calls per day. Yes, per day! Each day I wondered, how it was possible to receive so many calls every single day. Was everyone in Vegas sick or what? The problem back then was largely due to a lack of doctors in Las Vegas, causing it to rank near the bottom in healthcare across America. Why? At the time, there was no place for new doctors to do their residency here, so it was difficult to convince doctors to come...and, the fact that Clark County School system also ranked at the bottom which meant that doctors would be inclined to put their kids in private schools. Financial burdens on new doctors are steep, considering the costs of malpractice insurance, etc.
It wasn't until I saw my own health start to decline that I got to experience the heartache of those nearly 9,000 daily callers. Numerous lab tests, both necessary and unnecessary without any real significant diagnoses of my increasingly problematic issues. The frustration of never really feeling better. I saw that the saying, 'the money isn't in the cure, it's in the treatment' to ring true. I started to see the existence in a monopoly in Vegas that was about pure greed, as it was scarcity of providers.
Why can't you see your doctor for six weeks or get a specialist appointment for nine months? Honestly, sometimes it comes down to which insurance you have rather than how sick you are. Do they really expect someone who is sick to wait six weeks to see their primary physician? Ever wonder why you can only see a PA or a nurse practitioner instead of a doctor? And they wonder why MEDICAL TOURISM IS BOOMING! People have to actually leave the US to get their health issues taken care of with respect, and a helluva lot cheaper. I left Las Vegas in 2019 after having back surgery, that could have been avoided if they'd just done an MRI months before! Being back in Vegas and wanting to see a doctor while I'm here, is aggravating and causing my stress levels and blood pressure to rise. I see that all around prices have gone up tremendously in the last few years in Vegas, because people are moving here from California and other places by the droves. But, in terms of healthcare quality and service they may be sorry they did.