Understanding the future problem
by admin on 04/10/2014 12:46 PMThe Major Future Problems in HealthCare
The clarion call in the healthcare debate is to repeal Obamacare—repeal and revise. When one looks at the investment of time, energy, and lawyering spent over several years on the current rendition, which has caused a marked increase in cost, anxiety in our patients, causing a loss of a doctor they trusted, then being shoved into an HMO which still identifies that as welfare, which combination then causes even more doctors to shun them, because the pay is not better but the regulations are not easily manageable, which in turn increases the overhead costs of doctors, which makes more consultant care off limits, which increases the cost of the family physician to find a consultant in difficult cases, which then makes more family physicians eliminate their Obamacare/HMO/welfare patients, which causes loss of access to healthcare to many sick and needy patients, who are then shunted into community clinics now staffed by nurse practitioners and physician assistants, with no physician oversite any more, lowering the quality of healthcare in America, with lower levels of “healthcare providers” using the laboratory and x-rays to make the diagnosis, since they don’t understand the concept of making a differential diagnosis, which places the hundreds of possible diagnosis in perspective, which doesn’t allow these lower level of healthcare providers to make an intelligent stab at the array of diagnosis to be considered, and then choosing any diagnosis they may be familiar with, possibly shoving the patient to an operation that may make the situation worse, when a simple correct diagnosis could cure this unfortunate patient in less than five days!?!
This circuitous route could cost $35 K (10 or more office visits at $150 or $1,500 + 5 or more laboratory visits at $350 per panel or $1750, + a dozen or more x-rays at $350 each + hospital ER visits, avg cost $6500 + CT scans at $900 each + surgery consults at $850 each ) when a more astute physician captain of the health care ship may have made the diagnosis in one visit (est $150) and one prescription ($50).
This is not a hallucination. We have personally seen a surgical miscalculation, with a surgical complication requiring a 180-day hospitalization with $900K hospital bill.
Healthcare administrators talk about a 10 to 20 percent savings or increase in premiums per year. They are unable to comprehend these 1000 percent variations in costs; the very thing that HMOs were designed to prevent. But it seems they have not been successful in controlling costs.
Government health care will never be able to control costs. Never has. Never will.
We hope the American people will realize this before it’s too late.
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