12 Most Overrated Jobs

right up there with Flight attendant

As a physician I can vouch for my profession being on the list.

What's your specialization? What type of practice do you have?

[just curious]

Anesthesiologist. Once I had kids I started working for the VA - regular hours.

when i had my second daughter, there were 3 (3!!!) attempts to give me a functioning epidural. they failed and i had to deliver her without any drugs. no drugs! and unlike intentionally drug free moms, i hadn't prepared for it in any way, mentally or physically. it was horrible. i wished for death. fuck anesthesiologists.

Lucille you aren't alone. It's called a window and I had it as well. Sucked as I had no desire for drugfree birth. Then I had to have a csection and get a spinal after all that labor with pain.

I hoped and planned for a drug free birth and ended up with an emergency c-section. God bless my sweet and calming anesthesiologist.

pollyanna

mmmmm, anesthesia.

i'm just saying. some people don't like "wall street bankers". some people don't like anesthesiologists. no "banker" ever repeatedly stuck needles into my spine with no desired result.

Anesthesiologist are sneaky bastard$ & crooks! When my wife received her epidural, we received a $3800 invoice. When we shopped for an hospital, we made sure everything was covered by our insurance but it happened the Anesthesiologist was a 3rd party service working in the hospital! They didn't tell us, they didn't warn us! The Anesthesiologist took advantage of my wife in distress to service her and overbill her!

If u don't like an epidural or paying for it: don't get one.

Bottom line is that epis don't work on all people.

And there you have it.
Today's local RE market is so boring....
Anesthesia chat is more interesting.
I'm off to the glue factory!

Average income for real estate agent is a textbook false average. 9 make 1 sale a year. The other one pulls down $4m a year. A multiple of that for NYC

>I'm off to the glue factory!

Sorry to see you go.

I guess you missed the "work at a VA" comment. Sorry your pain free delivery didnt happen or you feel you were ripped off. I actually work with people who need surgery because they have hideous burns or dreadful injuries that will significantly alter their lives. And they complain less than you lot.

Eliz: it is a small world :) Have another friend who went from private practice to VA for the same reasons. I have other anesthesiologist mom friends who say it is very family friendly as well.

Sledgehammer, wow. That exact thing happened to me when I had an appendectomy! Now, it was an emergency so we didn't get to check with our insurance company first, but back then we still had a good policy via spouse's ex-job.
The hospital registered us an got all of the information.
Several weeks later comes the anaesthesia bill. What th' ?!
Two years worth of dunning, hostility, outright lies (from the anaesthesia co), collection notices and on and on (the insurance company was actually great and totally on our side,btw).
Finally, spouse wrote a Strongly Worded Letter to the anaesthesia company, with timeline, names of their angry, yelling, nasty a**holes etc. He sent a copy to each of the top brass -around eight people -via registered mail.
The end.

What you said in your comment sure was interesting as was your explanation as to why such a clusterf*ck could happen.
How long did it take for your problem to be resolved?

eliz is how does VA work?

just curious, do most VA physicians work for low income types who use the VA government program, since they can't afford regular doctors?

Insurance - that happened to us once at the hospital, with a pediatrician at birth. I'm not sure who is to blame exactly. I think it's more of a hospital issue.

In my experience, when you have an "emergency" situation at the hospital, they just get whoever is on staff and get that person to your room (or OR) ASAP. There is no attempt at matching up physicians who take the patient's insurance with that patient - if there were such an attempt, wouldn't that open the hospital up to lawsuits if there was a delay in getting the patient care?

In our situation, a pediatrician was required the minute that the baby was born to check on (any) blocked nasal passages. There wouldn't have been time to wait for a pediatrician with the right insurance and also, it wouldn't have made any sense to have the pediatrician waiting there, because there was no way of predicting exactly when the baby was born unless we agreed to pay for that level of attention.

Sledge: sympathize with the bill, but would your wife really have been okay with waiting an extra half hour to find a doctor with the right insurance, and also chance missing the window?

Helen,
The Anesthesiologist office kept calling us repeatedly for 6 moth to pay for the bill and i told them, they should have told us the epidural was not covered as we booked the Hospital a month in advance, which should have given them plenty of time to do so. We told them to get as much as they could from the insurance because we wouldn't give them a dime extra. We wrote the insurance asking them to make an exception and not to consider this prestation "out of network" but i don't know how much more they paid them. What happened eventually is that the Anesthesiologist office kept sending us a reminder bill, each time dropping $500 of the due amount. The bill went from $3800 down to $500. We still havnn't paid it and never will. We havn't heard from them (nor from any collection agency) in over 1,5 year so i think we're good.

As far as hospital billing, they are notorious for padding the bill. That has nothing to do with the care of the medical staff. You can go over a bill with the insurance company and they will let you know what the erroneous charges are and when confronting the hospital billing department they can be removed. As far as third party not covered by insurance, that's an issue that the insurance company should be correcting, in a perfect world.

nyc10023, ask any woman who gave birth are ask them how you feel when you've been pushing,legs up, for like 4 hours straight. It's like you're dying a slow death and think you're not gonna make it! You're not in condition to think if the Epidural is covered or not. That's the kind of matter you deal with when you shop around for an hospital "in Network", and we thought we had actually chosen it carefully!

Sledge: You can't ask "any" woman, because labor experiences are very different. Also, by the time you're pushing, it's generally too late to have an epi anyway. Pushing <> labor.

But I'm agreeing with you - it's a matter of how the hospital assigns the anesthesiologists, and you can't know ahead of time even if you've chosen the hospital because:

1) you don't know when if you'll need an epi
2) you don't know when you'll need an epi (the person on "duty" is often not the same as the one you started the day with).

For some reason, hospitals don't do this "matching". Don't know the reason why and I'm not jumping to the conclusion that they want to "rip you off". I simply don't know, I'm not a hospital administrator.

Yes, sledgehammer, physicians - anesthesiologist in particular - go to school for most of our twenties and don't get a proper night of sleep until our early thirties and take on enormous debt and pressure so we can lurk hospital corridors and rip off people when they're most vulnerable. You nailed the entire business model. Do you seriously think that it's not hospital administration and insurance companies?

nyc10023 - I probably know your friend. It's a small VA world.

ss - know they're not low income types. Sadly, they're often very young men and women who were wounded. There is a large division that treats older vets who choose VA because they can't afford private insurance. Hopefully with the pulling out of troops I'll stop seeing the former.

a resident did my first epidural, then the anesthesiologist watched her do my second one, then he came back and did the third himself. happy to be the practice pin cushion for the nearsighted turd who now randomly stabs people with needles as a bonafide doctor.

right, i forgot the best part. those idiots actually did numb something - my legs! i had no control of them for the duration of labor. some people have been wronged by "bankers". i've been wronged by anesthesiologists.

and of course i still had to pay for their services. even though they absolutely failed at their job. not sure i paid x3, could check.

go get 'em, hfs.

in Columbia County, do women go to the hospital to give birth, or do they just squat down while working in the field and let the newborn come out?

you sound more idiotic than usual.

>you sound more idiotic than usual.

No problem, just turn up your hearing aid and you'll hear better.