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This was meant to be a post on Spring! And how Spring seems to be coming! And pretty blossom! Because today is officially September 1^st and we have, as they say here, pasado agosto (gotten through August), the worst month of the winter, successfully. But no. Today I’ve been feeling rather wintery. My asthma problems that we thought would be solved once we moved out of mould are back and I’m feeling generally crappy for general non-specific winteryness reasons as well. So, today I made myself go to the doctor’s.

On one hand, healthcare for us here is really efficient. We have an ISAPRE, which is sort of like private health insurance. If you see a doctor, you go straight to a specialist. Which can be baffling, as whom do you go to if you have the flu, for example? But the clinicas, in our limited experience, are clean and a bit nicer than the ones at home, and we’ve heard treatment is good.

Today, I walked into a clinic a few streets away and got an appointment within 45 minutes to see a bronco pulmonar (respiratory specialist).  Which was all fine and useful, apart being asked the usual annoying stuff like a) do you dry your hair after you wash it? (not doing so is seen as pretty life-threatening here) b) you do know that your Flixotide is a preventative inhaler, right?  And c) let me write your prescription in English for you, but just the bit about taking things at bedtime. All very useful up until I took the prescription for my inhaler (my stash from the UK is running low) and new anti-allergy stuff to the pharmacy.

Where I had to pay $32,000 CLP (£40) for my Flixotide inhaler.

Where they charged me $12,000 CLP (£15) for a nasal spray.

And wanted $53,000 CLP (£65) for some tablets, or maybe $32,000 CLP (£40) for the cheaper generic version.

This was not for bulk quantities. Just a month’s worth of prescriptions.

So, looks like it’s going to cost me around $100,000 CLP or £125 per month to have asthma. On top of our insurance, which costs around $90,000 CLP for both of us (I’m the expensive one, as I have a uterus. See further rant about this here, from another expat).

The question is: how on earth can anyone afford to have a relatively minor medical problem like my not particularly serious asthma? I don’t earn very much, a fraction of what I did in the UK, but I earn more than the average salary here. I guess I will be going back, probably to another doctor, to ask that they change my meds to cheaper ones.  And I will be attempting to make use of the little discount we get with our ISAPRE for going to one particular pharmacy chain.

Oh NHS, how I now appreciate you, with your £6.50 flat charge for any prescription,  with the option of buying a pre-payment certificate which allowed you to have as many prescriptions as you needed in a set time period… OK, the NHS is really really bad on waiting times – the trouble I went through in London to get a simple GP appointment,  and the delay patients face on tests and scans, really important ones at that, is ridiculous to the point of being dangerous in some cases. Not to mention the postcode lottery on your treatment and whether your local trust will pay for particular new but expensive drugs. But I’m beginning to see that healthcare here isn’t as straightforward as I’d thought. And of course, I have no experience of the public healthcare system. And I haven’t been ill enough to have to take a day off yet, which is lucky as I don’t have the right to sick leave. Yep, that’s right. No sick leave.

And here we shall leave this topic. This post has been cathartic, but I guess I took a lot of things for granted at home. Things that I thought were pretty basic.

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