Wow.  Even doctors have trouble getting the care they need.

It’s easy to imagine that doctors don’t get sick. Surely the hygienic shield of the sterile white coat guards them from ever having to put on the flapping gown and flimsy bracelet, climb meekly into the crisp bed and be at the mercy of the U.S. health-care system. And if somehow they did enter the hospital as a patient, physicians ought to have every advantage: an insider’s knowledge, access to top specialists, built-in second opinions, no waiting, no insane bureaucratic battles and no loss of identity or dignity when you turn into the "bilateral mastectomy in Room 402." But it doesn’t usually work that way. While doctors are often in a better position than most of us to spot the hazards in the hospital and the holes in their care, they can’t necessarily fix them. They can’t even avoid them when they become patients themselves. When Dr. Lisa Friedman felt the lump in her breast in the summer of 2001, she did–nothing. "I just sat on it," she says, "because I clicked into the mode of being physician, not patient, and I thought, ‘Most lumps are not cancer, I’ll just watch this.’" That was her first mistake.

By September Friedman had watched long enough. An internist in a practice that covers much of southern Wisconsin, she went to her radiology department to schedule a mammogram. The administrators turned her down: her HMO paid for routine mammograms every two years, and she’d had one 18 months before. "I said, ‘Wait a minute, I feel a lump. This is not routine.’ They still wouldn’t let me do it."

Read the rest of the Article at Time.

Source:  Time.com