I have gotten FANTASTIC ideas for this talk!!! I can’t thank y’all enough. In thinking about it further, I’d like to present a few specific stories of actual people with type 2 who have encountered barriers to good education and/or treatment. Access to pumps, access to CGM, access to Certified Diabetes Educators… My take-home message for the group will be that people with type 2 need greater access to the tools that help us all manage our diabetes, and that that access is currently hampered by wide-spread misconceptions and stigma around what type 2 is and is not.
If you have type 2 and are willing to be one of my stories, please let me know in the thread below and I’ll contact you privately for some pictures and details about your experiences.
I’m not sure legislators are totally the place to start as I think the misconceptions emanate from the medical associations that make the rules and set the standards that govern the practice of medicine, and the insurance industry that pays for medicine. Now the insurance industry includes government-run organizations like Medicare, Medicaid and the “Exchanges” but if doctors themselves took steps to implement a science based approach to diabetes management that involved adequate testing and aggressive treatment to work towards more normalized BG in patients with all kinds of diabetes, I think that we would see astonishing progress.
The vague, space-cadet actuarial side of my head, thinks that we’d see a surprising reduction in cost but I’m not sure about that. Perhaps more testing might prompt government agencies with leverage/ black helicopters to control the price of test strips more effectively but I don’t know what the prospects for that might be. Many of the examples of socialized medicine from our comrades in fingers in Canada, the UK,Germany, etc. suggest that once government is involved, the supplies dry up. Perhaps we need our own helicopters…
I’m t1, but many in my family are t2