Alternative view: Your friend has a deadly disease that requires regular doctor visits and prescriptions. It sucks. It’s not fair, but it requires him to take some level of responsibility for his own care. He seems to have failed to do so by not keeping his appointments and letting his prescriptions run out.
Type 1 diabetic here. Regular doctor visits are actually pretty useless to us, other than refilling the prescriptions. Every six months is customary, but excessive. Every three months is scamming money out of insurers.
Regarding the price of medicine in Canada: I believe the fixed low prices in Canada are being subsidized by your friend and all Americans.
It’s cheap literally everywhere except the United States. It’s not a matter of subsidized capital costs, because those were all paid off more than a decade ago, and prices were cheaper then.
Measurement every 3 months in patients with type 1 diabetes determines whether glycemic targets have been reached and maintained.
Measuring HbA1c can be done cheaply with an over-the-counter test kit. It does not require a doctor visit. Also, testing HbA1c that frequently isn’t important and isn’t done by most diabetics.
I think your first remark is exactly the point. If the visits are useless then this is a crappy doctor scamming money and time out of patients and insurance companies, if the visits are important then asking OP’s friend to come in (for being over 4 months late on a 3-month checkup) sounds very reasonable to me. I think Zyryab’s suggestion of asking a doctor to Turing Test this makes a lot of sense—maybe the checkups are more valuable in certain life stages/demographics/early after diagnosis? Maybe the checkup is something more complicated than recording the HbA1c levels? I’m surprised to hear that without outside medical information the doctor is guilty until proven innocent.
Type 1 diabetic here. Regular doctor visits are actually pretty useless to us, other than refilling the prescriptions. Every six months is customary, but excessive. Every three months is scamming money out of insurers.
It’s cheap literally everywhere except the United States. It’s not a matter of subsidized capital costs, because those were all paid off more than a decade ago, and prices were cheaper then.
Measuring HbA1c can be done cheaply with an over-the-counter test kit. It does not require a doctor visit. Also, testing HbA1c that frequently isn’t important and isn’t done by most diabetics.
I think your first remark is exactly the point. If the visits are useless then this is a crappy doctor scamming money and time out of patients and insurance companies, if the visits are important then asking OP’s friend to come in (for being over 4 months late on a 3-month checkup) sounds very reasonable to me. I think Zyryab’s suggestion of asking a doctor to Turing Test this makes a lot of sense—maybe the checkups are more valuable in certain life stages/demographics/early after diagnosis? Maybe the checkup is something more complicated than recording the HbA1c levels? I’m surprised to hear that without outside medical information the doctor is guilty until proven innocent.