“No no, I'm not going to your app to fill out the form there! I want to talk to someone right now and preferably a human being and not a computer!” I heard my wife raging as she was on the line with someone from the private health insurance company. She unleashed the Spanish fury within her and the person on the other end of the line-male or female, I wasn't clear- got the full brunt of it. Not difficult, after two weeks of being sent from pillar to post . The most patient woman - I sometimes jokingly call her Santa Paciencia - would go berserk. Here's the thing: Estrella had been trying to get a doctor's appointment whiten the public system for two weeks and had been unsuccessful. The health care system in Spain is a regional competence and organized so that there are ‘consultorios’ in every village and city district. A kind of government-run group practice where you are assigned a doctor from on high. To make an appointment you used to be able to call a central phone number where a lady would ask for your social security number and arrange an appointment with the doctor for you. I always had to laugh at the time of the visit that was passed on, because it was invariably absurd to the minute, an oddity in Spain where time is normally as elastic as in that famous painting of the melting clock by Salvador Dali: - - “you have an appointment in consultorio number 3 with Dr. Helena Matiz at 9:24 a.m.” it would sound. That system changed completely after the Covid woes. We are now all obliged - even those who are 93 and do not have a smartphone - to use the junta's “health app that we had to download for free . So through that app you can request an appointment with your doctor. You then have to specify whether you want to see the doctor in person in her office or if she will call you for a telephone consultation. The latter is mainly meant to renew a prescription for your medications, but is oddly enough also used for telephonic diagnostics. The problem now is that my wife could not get an appointment through the app. The system blocked . Computer says no!, as predicted in the British comedy series Little Britain”. So my wife trotted in person to the Consultorio to ask for advice at the front desk. “ The app's server system is overloaded!” Was the reply. “ It is best to set your alarm at three in the morning and then try again, then the system will not be overloaded, or else you have to come in here at six in the morning to ask for a ticket.”
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