Parachutes (and balloons)

Do you have your parachute on?

 

No, I am not speaking about the ‘golden one’ that many CEOs and financial wizards seem to deserve for their “financial wizardry”.
I mean the one that you will need when you are swept off the cliff by the ‘lemings’ cascading before the onslaught of insurance companies, Medicare, software vendors, EMRs, RHIOs, P4P, QA and hundreds of other eponyms.  Even as I back-pedal my feet slip closer and closer to the cliff of doom.
Sid Schwab in his most recent blog post of Cutting through the Crap seems to nail the problem on it’s head. (posted February 11, 2010…UNWORKABLE). It goes far beyond healthcare and medicine. It is a problem we physicians have recognized two or more decades ago.   Perhaps it is not because we are smarter or more intelligent than other citizens, but we do seem to be exposed to more human suffering and tragedy as well as a cornucopia of human experience, both good and bad.  For the longest time we were privileged to be able to rise above the morass and observe, without personal threat or financial anxiety.  It gave us the benefit of a certain altruism and privilege of caring for people, not out of financial necessity, but of moral compass and humanity.