TLDR: Thai GF found a lump on her breast but won’t go see a doctor for 3 months because she doesn’t want her private insurance to learn about it and deny her coverage.
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TLDR: Thai GF found a lump on her breast but won’t go see a doctor for 3 months because she doesn’t want her private insurance to learn about it and deny her coverage. Does a Thai person that is a resident of an Isan province have any chance of getting medical attention at the good gov’t hospitals in Bangkok?
LONG: My Thai GF works for a provincial gov’t agency in one of the Isan provinces, and gets some form of public or gov’t insurance from that. I don’t fully understand the details but she said it is better than regular public insurance because she isn’t limited to just using an assigned hospital in her district, but can use any government hospital in the country (not sure how this works).
She also recently bought some additional private insurance through one of the large private insurance providers because the sales rep was coming to her office often and she decided it was worth the monthly price. She said it will cover some procedures in private hospitals, and will pay some amount for overnight stays, etc. Getting some private insurance was on her mind because she felt some of her relatives have gotten rather poor health care services from the public hospitals in her province. One of her male cousins passed away last year while waiting for health services from a public hospital.
Very recently she found a lump on one breast, and is understandably concerned about it.
But she is afraid to go to any hospital to have it professionally checked (xray, biopsy, etc), because her private health insurance has a 3 month waiting period for certain kinds of conditions, such as cancer. And if any hospital collects her Thai ID and records the illness now, then private insurance carrier will get the information and deny her any coverage for cancer.
So her plan is to wait 3 months before seeing doctor at a hospital for this, so that she won’t be denied insurance benefits by her private carrier. She had one of her aunts check it out — her aunt is a nurse at a clinic in her province — and looked at it without recording her Thai ID. Her aunt can’t be certain, but said there is some chance that it is just a benign cyst (her aunt doesn’t have the skills or equipment to do a biopsy or xray, it was just a manual check).
I’m rather concerned about this. My sister in the US died from breast cancer, and so this is bringing back some hard memories. In my sister’s case she had great insurance and saw the best specialists in her city, but the form she had was quite aggressive and they were not able to prevent it from spreading, eventually to her brain and some other organs.
For my GF, I feel like she should see a doctor right away, to learn if this really is cancer, or perhaps (hopefully) just some kind of benign cyst. If it is cancer, then she should seek treatment as soon as possible.
Her view is that if it is cancer, she wants to get treatment at private hospitals, not at gov’t hospitals, because the gov’t hospitals in her province aren’t very good. But she needs to wait 3 months before getting a real diagnosis otherwise she won’t get any insurance coverage and won’t be able to afford to get treatment at private hospitals.
I don’t really know what to do here but I have heard that some of the gov’t hospitals in Bangkok are quite good, and in many cases as good as private hospitals, especially for Thai people that know how to get into those systems and get referrals to there. Does a person that is a resident of an Isan province have any chance of getting medical attention at the good gov’t hospitals in Bangkok?
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