I am actually planning a more in depth review beca...

I am actually planning a more in depth review because this office actually very much exemplifies basically all the problems with navigating medical care in Highland Park. It s a good learning experience (but expensive and not medically useful) in the kind of red flags to navigate away from when finding medical care.

I ll expand, but the notes I jotted down were

If the office does not verify insurance, do not schedule an appointment.

This is not because an office has to take all insurances to offer care. It represents do they care about you? Are they upfront? And more sinisterly, it is gaslighting to act like that is not a normal part of scheduling appointments with a new office. If they are obfuscating this, then the question becomes are they set up to offer you good care, or to rack up charges?

When you arrive, is the office indifferent to accessibility? In this case, they re eye doctors. Forms with small fonts that force you to track across a paper add a bad sign. That ask you to fill it out when they actually copy your insurance card anyway? Maybe the doctors in this case got overwhelmed by the administration side of things and just can t do both effectively even if it s some reasonable stand that they don t want to pay for a service for this kind of thing (or joining a network.). It doesn t matter what reason. Clearly, the office is distracted from what is offering good care. Any accessibility issues are a big red flag, eve. I d they don t pertain to you.

If the office runs you through a battery of tests before you see the doctor or they have explained their purpose. It s something that seems obvious in hindsight, but doctors are authorities and we are too trusting. Of course, it all should have ended at flag one. Predictable wasn t it?

These are the flags. The results for me were that I scheduled an appointment for an already diagnosed issue wanting to discuss treatment options. This appointment taught me I had the thing I knew I had and that I could google the treatment. In this case, I got a $160 out of network bill a wasted day and a day of wasted pay. I ve lived with double vision my whole life perhaps prisms would have helped me, but I ve put it off for 20 years unsure of who to go to. This experience may put me off another 20. I ll just continue not being able to read well. That s the life I know.