Health Care Conundrum

It requires an unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

The daily review of health blogs, social media, and Health 2.0 pundits gives birth to today’s Health Train Express.

I can not but help quoting some profound statements.

It requires an unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

It’s much more important to know what sort of patient has the disease than what sort of disease the patient has.  William Osler, MD, 1648-1919 

There’s no other profession as personal as the medical profession. If physicians continue to allow non-physicians and businesses such as hospitals and insurance companies to control them, they will lose their patients and will be nothing more than over-educated, hired technicians.

The family doctor was an institution. If there has been a change, the physician is not primarily to blame. On the contrary, it’s a tribute to the profession that the older idealism persists in such an unfavorable environment. The fault – if fault there be – is that the profession is now practiced in an industrial world dominated by business.
Walton H. Hamilton, MD, Medical Care of the American People, 1932

These snippets are from Richard Reece’s Medinnovation Blog of this week. It is a refreshing look at why we are going down the wrong path.  It’s a mixture of common sense, and disbelief at what physicians have allow, controlled by government and insurance companies.  Freedom and liberty come at a price, It must be aggressively defended, in all aspects of America.

The promises of entitlements also overflow from patients to their caregivers, physicians, as we become also dependent on the largesse of government guarantees.  This I was taught as a medical student at George Washington University, mid-20th Century in a building built in the late 19th Century. We had no computer labs, internet, iPads, or iPods.  Am I saying those advances are not good? No, I am not. It does reveal that somehow we functioned quite well in a more balanced system.  Were some patients and the aged uninsured? Yes, however the self-correcting mechanisms of charity care by doctors and hospitals, local cities, friends, family and faith based organizations, as well as county hospitals took up slack…adequate health insurance carrier income balanced the negative balance on hospital and physician books. In todays health environment doctors are now rarely giving free care, more patients are sent to collections (an almost never event in the past century). I would even call it shameful that physicians have had to descend into the pit of parasites earning a living off less fortunate people at a time in life when some patients are even more vulnerable.

I am often amazed that there are not more physicians irate and in the face of government and insurance companies….outside the business realm of attempting to collect earned monies

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