Politics in Healthcare - Part 1

Greetings my dear Steemians. In this blog, & the series of blogs to follow, I will be discussing what I find to be some major problems in modern day healthcare. I write from the perspective of a licensed physical therapist assistant who has worked almost exclusively with the elderly, but has experience with all ages & demographics. Within my profession, I have a lot of freedom to actually really help people not only, survive but thrive. That's one of the PRIMARY reasons I got into healthcare in the first place. A lot of time, effort, and might I add money, was put into my persueing this profession. I certainly have the student loans to show for it.

I started out right after I turned 18 working in a local hospital as a rehab aide. It's is somewhat interesting for me to point out, but I've never worked a "normal" job such as having a job as a waitress. Anyway, I digress. Back on topic... A rehab aide is a minimum wage job of which many people treat as a stepping stone position when in college. I knew I loved exercise & that I wanted to use exercise and my knowledge of it to help other people. So I got myself a four year exercise science degree. All the while I kept that same job as a rehab aide. During that time I also picked up two other jobs - also as a rehab aide - one in an outpatient setting and one in an orthopedic hospital setting.

Once I got my 4 year exercise science degree, I started applying to all these prestigious once master level now doctorate level physical therapy programs. And that's where my heart for healthcare first really got broken. I didn't get in!!! Out of four schools that I applied to, only one even asked me to come for an interview and that was Georgia State University.

I'll never forget that day. I went with two other colleagues of mine. Were we qualified?
Hell yes. I can personally vouch for that! I, at that point, had a 4 year degree, good grades, the student loans to show for it (have to reiterate that) and over 2,000 hours of time worked as a rehab aide which FAR surpassed the bare minimum requirement at the time which was for students to have 40 hours of "observation." The two that went with me to this interview had equally impressive resumes. We all deserved to be there.

Guess what? None of us got in. That's when I learned that if you didn't have someone working in the program or one of your parents wasn't serving as a judge or governer in the state of Georgia you were probably NOT getting in.

That's why I ended up going into an assistant program instead of using all those years of hard work towards the full blown "physical therapist" program. Mind you, I could've saved at least TWELVE GRAND if I had known about all of these BS politics I would've went straight into the assistant program. I spent about 6 years in college when I could've spent roughly half the time.

However, everything happens for a reason and what that reason is we don't always figure out right away. Maybe it's because I turn 30 next week, so I'm big into reflection mode but, I have now been in healthcare for well over a decade. By the way, I still am paying off that student debt of which in case you couldn't tell, I'm bitter about! That's a whole 'nuther ball of wax that's heavily dealing with politics of which I plan to delve into in a future post.

Thanks for reading. Stay tuned if you'd like to learn more about the politics and general BS that is sadly called health "care" these days.