Quote:
Originally Posted by joelfmi
Anyone moving to The Villages needs to check out the health care situation first. Good physicians are few and far between and difficult to find. A physician told me today that general practitioners in the area are "sketchy." The much touted Villages Health Care system only accepts United Healthcare Advantage plan for primary care. The Villages Health care doctors sign 2-year non-competes. So, even if you have the correct insurance, if your dr. quits or is terminated by The Villages Health Care, you are out of luck if you want to continue seeing that physician because they are no longer permitted to practice medicine in the area.
If you are thinking of living at the villages make sure that you can get good healthcare before you leave you home city
|
It is a fact that health care is different in TV than in areas where many of us came from. I don't think that necessarily means that the physicians are any less skilled, but we've found in several instances that support staff services; scheduling, record-keeping, ordering prescriptions, etc., are often haphazard at best. Case in point: I was originally served by a physician about three miles from our home. But calls to his office routed to a call center in, I believe, the Bahamas. Messages were not passed on, or passed on in garbled form. Calls were not returned. The pharmacy we use had similar problems trying to contact the physician. It was a mess. He may have been the most skilled doctor in Florida, but the incompetence of his support staff made health care from that particular organization more or less a crapshoot.
Another thing to be aware of is that a lot of the providers here in TV are one- or two-physician clinics, sometimes with CNP assistance, with only basic services provided onsite. Lab work may mean driving several miles to a lab. X-rays, same thing. Specialist services require yet another referral and a drive. Many of us come from situations where everything is provided on-site: for instance the town where I lived, 25,000 people, had a state-of-the-art medical complex that included a full-service hospital with two clinics attached. Everything was done on-site; an annual physical usually meant an initial examination by your doctor, who then sent you down the hall for labs, maybe x-rays, whatever. About an hour later you had your final visit with your doctor, who had the results of all the tests done, discussed them with you, made any changes necessary to prescriptions and transmitted the prescriptions to your pharmacy before the end of your visit. There may be exceptions but in my experience things are not done that way here.