We're having another health crisis at my house.  Of course these things always happen on a weekend and a holiday.

This time my mom, who is 81, has a reoccurring   sever eye infection.  We need to call the eye doctor, but he isn't in and probably won't be until tomorrow.  Of course we could go to the emergency room, but after hours of frustrating waiting, they'll only patch up the eye and tell her to call her regular physician when he's in.  She's better off waiting at home where she's comfortable.

I don't have to explain what a problem this is for caregivers. 

We all know that often we can't really get help when we need it because our system is too complicated.  We live in strange times when we have very sophisticated  medicine but the delivery of it is somewhat sub par.  It's only going to get worse. 

So we'll spend our holiday worrying  and continuing   to watch mother's  eye, while getting ready to do battle tomorrow for a place in the eye doctor's patient line.  And there are no guarantees and it means losing a day of work during our busiest season of the year. (We're in real estate.)  

But this also reminds me  that the  Governor of Tennessee,  who had  made his personal fortune in health care,  recently hired Federal Express as consultants to try to figure out how to better organize state bureaucracy.  Maybe companies like Federal Express could do something for the health care industry in general.

Don't laugh, I don't think it's that far fetched.  If we can get an Amazon delivery within hours, why can't we get some relief for our chronic health conditions, or at least see a doctor?  Am I asking for too much here? Amazon doesn't stop your order because it's a weekend.  

How many of us  who are caregivers face these types of situations every day?

I came across an article by  Pamela Varkony who has been through this very same maze for the last few months.  Pamela describes herself as "informed" and wonders what the uninformed do.  That's a good question. 

One solution, which we are all predicting will gain popularity in the future, is to hire a health care project manager.  Maybe that doesn't seem so far-fetched now that many of our aging parents have  three to six or seven doctors and specialists they have to see on a regular basis. 

Read Health Care Barrel Ride Can Be Disorienting

Popularity: 3% [?]

• Basic Tips To Consider During Your Health Plan Open Enrollment Period It's that time of year when employers are beginning annual open enrollment for employee group health insurance plans. Even if you think your status has not changed recently or since the last enrollment period, it is recommended you follow these simple steps to ensure you are getting the most from......
• The Real Debate of the Health Care Debate President Obama may take the government run health care option off the table and some have interpreted that as a major concession. But is it? Will the President bring this option back later in the form of bits and pieces in other bills? What exactly is his plan, or was his plan? Why......
• How to Find the Best, Most Trustworthy Caregivers You're worried sick because you can't find a good caregiver for your aging parent.You want to keep your parent home and out of a nursing home as long as possible but your parent needs 24 hour  care and you've got a job and  a family.  To make matters worse,  you live out of state.You've......
• Home Health Care to Replace Many Nursing Homes? Forbes has an interesting post on home health care and the future of taking care of the elderly in their own homes. I believe this is a coming trend, mainly because it will be too expensive to care for our aging parents in hospitals or nursing homes. High tech will......
• Warning: A Trip to the Emergency Room Could Kill You  This is a subject I debated about discussing.  However, it's so important I think I need to write about it. It is about empowering ourselves as wise medical care consumers.Within the past 24 hours I have heard two horror stories involving  two different people who are  of different races, economic and......

• Best Reads of the Week: the Inconvenient Truth of the Health Care Debate Edition For some unknown reason, I've been taken aback by the recent debate in government sponsored health care.  Maybe I'm having some sort of an extended empathy moment (extremely rare for me), or I've developed a chink in my pro-business, pro-Wall Street armor. In all likelihood, it's because I've been listening......
• Cases and Select Readings in Health Care Marketing (Haworth Series in Marketing and Health Services Administration, No 2) (Hardcover) Directed specifically at the practicing marketing executive, Cases and Select Readings in Health Care Marketing integrates understandable explanations of marketing concepts, articles selected for topical timeliness and pragmatic value, and case studies illustrating the detail and complexity of market decisions faced by today’s health care and human services marketing......
• Health Care Bill Proposal Drops Public Option and Looks to Avoid Medicare Expansion Unless you've been living under a rock, you've heard all kinds of speculation about the proposed health care bill and the controversial public option. With President Obama determined to find an answer to the unacceptable challenge of affordable health care in the United States, the idea of a public option......
• Real choice in health care There's so much confusion out there about health care reform, and it's all to the detriment of consumers. For one thing, the very phrase "health care reform" is a misnomer. What we really mean when we talk about health care reform is "health insurance reform," because the real problem with......
• Health-Care Reform Scares, Lies & Bogeymen Seems the right-wingers have forgotten the lesson of Saddam Hussein's Iraq lacking those vital "weapons of mass destruction," as they go off seeking Britain's health-care policies of mass euthanasia! Conservative Republicans and the right wing media are embroiled in an outright war of skewed words and emotional manipulation, founded......