Medical Care in America

Hello everybody,

Today we visited a high-tech genetics laboratory and after that a general purpose pharmacy called Walgreens. We went to the Children's Hospital in Cincinnati in the morning, to have a look at the laboratories where people try to find out which disease the patient has. We were in the Gene-Laboratories where the employees get small samples of patient's DNA and try to find out whether there is something missing or there is too much information in it. They can ascertain whether a person has a special disease caused by genetic defects like a missing chromosome or one chromosome too many. One example for a disease is Down's Syndrome. You get to know whether your child will have this syndrome by the amniocentesis. The doctor takes a sample of the amniotic fluid, and it's send to the laboratory. People there clean this sample and after that they visualize the chromosomes. Now the hard work begins. They have to figure out which chromosome goes with the other chromosome and so on. After doing this, they can say which errors and failures are there and which disease it could be.

We were told that everybody has these mistakes and errors in his genes, but a few people just have more errors so they are ill and have problems. It can also happen that you have these errors, but you don't have a problem until you are very old. There is only the possibility that you can have this disease.

These methods, to analyse the genes, are in the U.S. only for the people with a good healthcare insurance. Otherwise, it's just too expensive for people because the whole test costs about $3500. That's quite a lot of money, I think, and many Americans think that too, that getting good healthcare is a basic right and everybody in a country should be able to get it. President Obama tries to start a Healthcare Insurance for everybody. It's a very good idea but a hard job because some people in the U.S. think that this duty to have the insurance limits their freedom so they are not able to do what they want. Though these people are only the minority, some political parties try to heat up this theme, and they want to make a big thing out of it. Many other politicians tried to start such an insurance, too but failed, and it's very sad and a big problem for President Obama that Mr. Kennedy died because he was a big advocate for this insurance. So we have to look what happens in the next year.

After this very interesting visit in the Hospital, we went to Blue Ash and had a look at Walgreens. This pharmacy is totally different from those I know in Germany. First their assortment of goods is quite different. In Germany you are able to get the medicine and cremes but nothing else, and here you get make up, casual gear clothing, hair colors, and even dog food. Another interesting thing was that they sell products of big companies as well as their own generic medicine right next to them, but these are much cheaper and packaged in the same way. I learned that it's a big problem for people in the U.S. if they get ill and have no insurance. These people often try to have a do-it-yourself diagnostics. They go on certain websites and type in what pain they have, and then they pick out one disease it could be. After that they go to a shop like Walgreens and get medicine for the disease they are thinking of, but then the real work begins. For example, if someone thinks he could have the flu, he has to decide which medicine out of 60 he has to take. You can imagine that they get the wrong medicine very often, and that's very dangerous. People often waste money by buying the false medicine, so it would be cheaper in the end if they would go to the physician first before buying the medicine.

That's it for today,

Sebastian