Fleet Marine Life #73 – Free Medical
Free medical isn’t really free in the Corps. Of course the tax payers pay for it so you don’t. In the Marine Corps, medical isn’t exactly top notch. You have to go to these Corpsmen who aren’t exactly college degree holding professional doctors. You can’t pick and choose the docs/doctors that you want to go to unless you want to go out of town and spend money that you don’t have.
The taxpayers pay for these Corpsmen (docs) and doctors. The government doesn’t want to spend too much money so this causes them to not have the adequate amount of medical facilities or doctors to account for the growing amount of patients. This socialist type of medical care doesn’t allow Marines to get proper care when they need it. My friend, Dan, had to get an appointment in order to get an appointment. How inefficient is that?
Dental was always booked for months. It took me almost 2 years in the Corps to get the surgery to remove my bottom 2 wisdom teeth. But on the road to getting that surgery, my appointments were always booked 2-3 months into the future and then they always get mysteriously cancelled due to “unforeseen reasons”. ALWAYS with these fucking mysterious cancellations! My fellow Marine told me that I should just lie and tell them that my mouth hurts like hell because apparently, lying or dying is the only way to get an appointment.
I remember one day my corpsman gave me some weird tasting cough drops to help me stop coughing so I can go to sleep. It worked and I fell asleep but then the next morning I woke up throwing up neon yellow puke for almost an hour. After that wonderful experience, I just started carrying my own personal medical supplies. Is it really the Docs fault that they were given shitty low-cost medicine by the government?
Some Corpsmen don’t even get medical supplies. Some of them have to buy all their own shit from the PX.
Getting an appointment to get an appointment since 1775.
Only if you have an obvious problem do they pay attention. I hated the medical care because you have to go to THEIR doctors, and to see a doctor, you have to see a corpsman first who will treat you like you are malingering. While that does happen, I had my blood poisoning misdiagnosed as a fever. For a week. Finally, with a fever of 104.9 degrees, I was taken to Balboa and they figured it out immediately. One thing that annoyed me was sick call numbers increased around the time a PFT, CFT or hike was scheduled.