Well, since the government and hospital administrators have determined that the doctors are the least important part of health care, and since they don’t think that their expertise is of any value in determining the best way to deliver health care, and since they believe that most of the physician’s duties can be handled by ‘physician extenders’ at much less cost, let them deal with this themselves.
Doctors all over the nation are calling for halts to flights from infected countries, but the government is not listening. Bureaucrats are saying there is ‘no risk’ of epidemic when doctors know better. The government is causing this problem, let the government deal with it.
I’ve said it before, hospitals and doctors are not going to be able to contain this because the government is not doing their job. This disease is going to spread in the airports and restaurants and walmarts and buses and grocery stores of America.
If the government expects me to risk my life because of their stupidity, they can think again. The government has insinuated itself between me and my patients to such an extent that I no longer feel I am treating patients when I go to work, but administrators and computers and numbers. They have worked very hard to rewrite the patient-doctor relationship, and unfortunately, they have succeeded in both directions. This doctor will not be in the Emergency Department when the SHTF.
Do I sound angry, you bet I am. It has been building ever since governments and administrators have been telling me more and more how to practice medicine and that I am not a good physician because my ‘door to greet’ time is not what they say it should be and because I am not seeing enough patients per hour because mandated, inadequate computer charting takes several times longer to complete.
I never planned on retiring this early, but every day I get closer and closer. I suspect this is going to push me and many other physicians over the edge.
O2
Government is obtuse and stupid. I completely agree.
“I never planned on retiring this early, but every day I get closer and closer. I suspect this is going to push me and many other physicians over the edge.”
Very true for psychiatrists as well. It’s difficult paying attention to a patient during an interview while typing up the responses to their questions on a computer. It’s depersonalizing medicine. Telemedicine is even worse and it’s use is rapidly increasing.