So, despite being increasingly proficient at financial stuff, our healthcare system is still just too much for me.

I realized recently that deep down, I always feel like I’m spinning a game wheel every time I walk into a doctor’s office. Will this magically be covered? Will it cost me $1,000? Will it cost me $7,000? Who knows?

I also don’t always feel like doctors listen all that great or even that they solve problems a lot of the time. My distrust of the medical system is very extensive.

Why am I raving about this today?

Well, I’ve been trying to get my life a little more together than it has been for the last… decade. Which might seem a little crazy that I really started to think about it on month 14 of this pandemic but here we are.

I’ve had a stomach ache for about six years. Not like a nauseous thing, like a someone punched me intermittent pain. Honestly, I was pretty sure it was my appendix at the beginning and I figured it would just rupture and solve the mystery and then I’d go to the emergency room and they would take it out.

But it never did.

I also thought – maybe stomach cancer? I guess I’ll just die?

(Full disclosure: I can be a bit of a neurotic extremist about any ache or pain that doesn’t go away in a day or two without a clear reason for its existence. It doesn’t help that Google also always tells me it’s cancer. An old coworker once told me I’m 100% calm and 100% panic all the time and I’ve come to learn that was an extraordinarily accurate assessment and it applies to all areas of my life.)

Back to present day. I decide it was time to be an adult and find a primary care physician, as I haven’t had one since I left my pediatrician. I also figured I would get a physical and it would probably indicate anything really wrong, right?

So I braced myself for some epic medical bills because my insurance is total garbage and, in my mind, only good for a major emergency. I mean, the deductible is $6,000 and total out of pocket is $7,000.

I was genuinely expecting this basic trip to the doctor to rack up about $1,500-$2,000 in fees. This is a major reason why I’ve put it off for so long. I mean, I am a fan of preventative medicine. I’ve prioritized going to the dentist every year as an adult because one of my parent’s had terrible teeth. As a result, my teeth are not so terrible.

But the total unknown of how much a simple physical could cost was overwhelming.

I started by using my insurance portal to search for doctors within 15 miles, made a list and then spent about an hour Googling each person on that list until I had it narrowed down to three names for a PCP. I think this was a really important step because a lot of the doctors on that list had terrible reviews, making it easy to just cross them off.

When I tried to book an appointment, the first PCP wasn’t actually accepting new patients, despite my health insurance website saying they do.

All in all, this was a full morning project. I didn’t feel so bad about putting it off for so long. It was as unpleasant as I thought it might be.

One major tip I learned when chatting with my new PCP was to make sure he knew which insurance I had. He thought I had one kind and was about to do a bunch of bloodwork onsite and just because of something he said in passing, I asked to double check if I was covered for that.

I was not. And my PCP was still great and knew the work around and where to send me. It was more hassle for me to have to go make another appointment at a Labcorp to get bloodwork drawn rather than just doing it right then, but it saved me more than $1,000.

I have to say, that move won me over. I don’t feel like his quality of care changed at all once he knew I had the garbage insurance, but he double checked/adjusted some coding on the physical and bloodwork prescription and knew the right places to send me to keep the whole thing affordable.

I also mentioned my 6 year stomach ache, finally opening that can of worms, and he prescribed me some medicine to try out for a week. It did nothing but it did cross a few things it could’ve been off the list.

I am now anxious about spinning the doctor expense game wheel again with a gastroenterologist later in the month, but I guess there’s never going to be a better time than now to hunt down this problem.

Or at least rule out any major problems, since apparently mystery stomach problems that never really get fixed are super common.

What I am excited to report on the physical front though is that it cost a whopping $45.00 for bloodwork and $9.50 for that prescription (down from over $100 thanks to a discount from my health insurance). The physical itself was covered by my health insurance.

Apparently you don’t already have to hit the deductible for physicals to be covered and the bloodwork to go with it is discounted too – even predeductible.

However, because of the medicine for the stomach ache, I had to go back and visit again a week later. That 15 minute visit cost me $114.52 to tell him the medicine didn’t help and for him to tell me to go see a gastroenterologist. And that $114.52 was down from the $339.00 the insurance company was charged, which I can’t even begin to understand why they magically cover $224.48. But cool?

While I was there, we went over my bloodwork results and I’m left wondering if I ever would’ve heard about them if I hadn’t gone back in and paid that $114.52 to go over them because of the stomach issues. There wasn’t anything particularly horrible in them but my cholesterol is kind of high and that seems like a much easier fix now than before it becomes a capital P problem.

Overall, $114.52 is totally fine to me for a physical and follow up visit to go over the results of the physical. Though at no point in time did I know how much that doctor’s appointment was going to cost until I got a random letter in the mail two weeks later from my insurance company.

But isn’t it batshit crazy that we live in a country where I thought a simple physical could cost in access of $1,000 despite paying for health insurance every month? And because I thought that, I just didn’t get one for years?

I’m hyperaware that even though I’m in a good financial place right now, that as an American, I am one health emergency away from possibly being bankrupt. And there’s nothing to be done about it really. It’s like winning the lottery from hell.

Oh, and it’s not crazy I think that. I had a cruise ship physical once that cost me a little over $1,000 because of all the insane bloodwork.

Fun side note: Because of those cruise ship physicals, when I went in to get the bloodwork done for this physical in a near state of panic because they honest to goodness used to take like 7-9 vials full of blood and I don’t handle it very well. I was like shaking and the lady was done in 30 seconds this time. She thought I was crazy. WHAT WERE THEY DOING WITH ALL THAT BLOOD?

Sigh. ‘Merica.

Hopefully the ability to just walk into a clinic or vaccine site and get the Covid vaccine will start to open people’s eyes to what healthcare could be. But I’m not holding my breath.

Have you ever felt the need to hold off on going to the doctor because of the overwhelming confusion of what it could cost?