When it rain, it poors (warning: Whining rant)

Seriously, would it be cheaper to fly to a nearby location and get this done under your insurance policy? Wisdom teeth are expensive! If your deductible isn't too massive, might be reasonable to go somewhere else and get it covered, stay in a decent hotel with room service, and go home the next day.

 

Sounds very reasonable. Hell, the airfare is probably 10 percent of what an oral surgeon off-network would cost.

 

My sympathies. The system does stink sometimes and sometimes situations just stink.

A week or so after I got laid off a few years ago, my youngest son broke his arm. I still was covered at that point, but the follow-up visits were a bit more expensive.

 

All kidding aside here.

The situation does suck something fierce.

Do the best you can do, and everything else will work itself out.

As my motto goes; When life gives you lemons, throw the bastards away, make your favorite drink, and don't worry about it.

 

It's a government conspiracy to make all wisdom-toothers join the Army and go to Iraq.

Hey, it worked for me. (But that was Desert Storm, which was barely a war.)

 

SC, this is bullshit. It's appalling that the company doesn't have an in-network oral surgeon in a location where there are multiple options. Would there be any benefit to writing whichever state office oversees insurance regulation? An insurance company that wants to offend the good doctors of your state may not be too welcome to do business there in the future.

And I'm sorry that someone who gets every medical need of him and his family paid for by my tax dollars doesn't understand the health care realities faced by the rest of the populace.

 

Plus, if you get impacted wisdom teeth pulled one day, you won't feel liking flying on an airplane the next day.

 

Hope you feel better, SC.

 

Of course, you may be tougher than me, too. I had six - yeah, six - wisdom teeth (I had two extra ones growing off normal ones). I had them all taken out at the same time, and it took me a good two or three days to completely get back into the swing of things.

Then again, one of my friends is all of 5-3, 105 and she was pretty much back up and running the next day after she had her's pulled. Just depends on how your body reacts to the anesthesia.

 

SC's weak spot. Write it down, guys. Good to know.

 

Sure you want to open this door? That debate could go on for days, and HAS on several prior threads here. Bottom line: sportschick's situation doesn't happen if she's using the health care system in virtually any other industrialized country on the planet, it only happens because she's using ours. To me that suggests there's a failure of the system involved here.

 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/
I saw this on TV recently and thought it was a pretty even-handed analysis of the pros and cons of several different health care systems throughout the world. Even with the flaws, they all seemed better than ours.