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Well, I'm sorry you aren't coming back to this post because I think you should read the reply. The healthcare system has problems, but NOT because of most doctors. Yes, just like in every field, there are unscrupulous individuals... but most of the people I have known and worked with are not sociopaths in white coats. Just follow the money... Medicare Part D was the single biggest travesty visited on the American people in recent memory. It was literally a theft of our tax money and a gift to the drug companies. While Insurance companies, hospitals, drug companies, devices companies, etc. continue to increase gains and conspire to steal from the healthcare system (inversions, mergers, price-fixing, the list goes on...) physician pay actually represents a small percentage of healthcare costs. (Depending on who you get the numbers from, it is about 10% of the total). Believe me, when I have to get healthcare, I see the same problems you do. I've waited on hold, been over-billed, late appointments, all of it... even medical complications. The fact is, the bureaucracy is strangling any attempts at improvement. I'll give you an example, I work in a bunch of different healthcare systems and each one of them is required to independently verify my credentials. Everything from my medical school diploma to my training and license. It requires primary source too! So every hospital--even different hospitals owned by the same system--has to do this incredibly redundant and wasteful process. Not to mention that it does nothing to ensure quality. So here's a whole army of people doing something that should be a simple database query that takes 1 minute. That's increased cost. There are these companies now that an insurer can hire to field imaging orders and determine which are appropriate and which are not. If they save the insurer even $1 over what they are being paid... then they win. Meanwhile, that's maybe $1-2 million that could've just been used to pay for care... instead it's going to a middleman simply to DENY care! Believe me. Your frustrations are justified... but don't hang the physicians out to dry. My generation was not the architects of this disaster and we are suffering from it too. We are still individuals, wage-earners. We are not the corporations that would happily merge and invert our way off-shore. They are the real conspirators in this. |