Thursday, January 31, 2008

Who is the Enemy?

FROM A PRIMARY CARE PHYSICIAN

Proposal: Doctors have been hoodwinked into arguing with each other to distract from the issue of PATIENT RESPONSIBILITY in our very wobbly system. An example of this can be seen in the first post. An ER doc gets dumped on and sees the FP/Internist as the culprit. Deeper, there are many culprits, not the least of which is the demand for and legislation of free health care. I am not arguing that we physicians can not do better, I am merely saying that we need to direct our energies, we need a reasonable but angry voice to speak out against the black comedy of EMTALA and the silliness of JCAHO.

2 comments:

AMDOC said...

Who killed primary care? Answer: TNTC....lots of culprits. At the top of the list is the federal government with price controls and a tax code which guarantees that all money spent on health care is funneled through third parties who place no value on our services and hate our guts. Next, a public which expects free health care. They are going to get it, and as H. L. Mencken said, "Democracy is a system in which people get what they want, and they get it good and hard."

Finally, our professional organizations, almost certainly not run by or interested in primary care docs, are in bed with the enemy. Lots of physicians went along with Medicare when it first started and made hay while the sun was shining. Aneurin Bevan, the UK's first Minister of Health, was asked how he got physicians to go along with socialized medicine when the British health care system was nationalized in 1948, He said: "I stuffed their mouths with gold."

Texdoc/internist

erdoc85 said...

I see the best and brightest students avoiding medicine. They don't want the hassles for the shrinking pay. I am scared to think about the system we will have in 20 years.