See on Scoop.it – the treating physician
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. health care system squanders $750 billion a year…. Once again, a litany of where the money goes, but very unhelpful suggestions as to how to fix the problems, such as “For doctors, it means getting beyond the bubble of solo practice and collaborating with peers and other clinicians.”
Anyone who suggests corporate physicians cooperate with non-corporate physicians has not been in the trenches. It’s the fast disappearing independent practitioner — the treating physician, if you will — who has the ability to provide the kind of patient care the reformers put on the pedestal. Yet these same reformers seem unaware of what corporate medicine has done to derail the very kind of physician care the report idolizes, but then labels those who provide this kind of care a “bubble of solo practice.”
The problems are obvious. Clearly, the solutions are not. There is no real admission on the part of health care reformers as to what has acutally caused these health care problems. Only “bubbles” of fantasy which bear little cause and effect relationship to the proposed solutions.
Corporate medicine makes decisions based upon the bottom line. Before the derailment of real health care by corporate medicine, physicians made decisions about patient care with the best interest of the patient in mind, not the bottom line. As long as health care decisions are controlled by the bottom line, denying needed health cannot be avoided.
There is no escape from denying needed health care, whether it’s called rationing or socialized medicine, if the decision is controlled by the bottom line.
Let’s not abandon health care reform, but let’s stop trying to force the bottom line to do what it cannot do — to operate in any fashion which would allow physicians to make medical decisions in the best interest of their patients.
See on www.huffingtonpost.com
