My recent dermatology appointment was my second, and they scheduled a third one for next year again for a full-body scan, since I'm now plugged into yearlies.
They have had a shortage of dermatologists in the area and that's led to mild delays in appointments and then on top of that with this last appointment I encountered another few month delay when a provider I had scheduled with left the practice, but overall, those problems are really no problems at all.
Just thinking back to what my health insurance became in the city that I used to live in, it's like night and day... There, Obamacare not only had narrow networks, but fly-by-night low-end insurers who would price low and come in and then leave in a year or two, and their networks would be full of false listings with no-one you could report them to about that, and when they pulled out or even if they stayed in, you'd rarely establish any care relationship with anyone, and files would get lost in the revolving door, too, on top of ungodly amounts of time and energy wasted getting acclimated to the new system and locating providers and setting up profiles and passwords and billpay and whatnot.
Here, it's like one-and-a-half major providers in the area, and that's it, and once you start, you're good to go indefinitely.
Obamacare was much better everywhere at first, but it really has degraded in major metros for people who can't price up into the higher brandname insurers like Blue Cross Blue Shield, who can charge like $60-80 more in premiums a month, which is like $600-800 a year that you don't necessarily have.
I wonder, too, if those sketchy low-end insurers are also mucking up the market since subsidies are pegged to (I think) the 2nd lowest-price plan, and so they not only provide sh*tty care, but by underpricing they depress the average subsidy in an area and make it noticeably more expensive for someone to go out and pay more out-of-pocket for their premium so they can get into a decent and stable and reputable insurance plan.
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