Posted on 03/28/2010 12:33:00 PM PDT by AlanD
This is over 50 years ago, but when I was a child, the doctors actually drove to your house. When and why did that stop?
Check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCMzjJjuxQI
The Doctor will see you now.....”I be very pleased to be helping you now so where is the hurting?”
I’ll point this out because I grew up in the rural south. Up until the 1930s...if you wanted any real doctor help...you tended to have to drive fifteen to twenty miles to a county hospital/clinic. I can still remember growing up in the 1960s and my mom taking me to a clinic that was 24 miles away.
From a historical standpoint, from seventy-five years ago...the vast number of Americans rarely saw a doctor even once a year...and some guys might have gone their entire life after birth....without ever seeing a doctor.
Medicine simply is not medicine anymore. Since the 1960s...it’s progressed into a business atmosphere and we have these expectations of a pill for just about everything....even gas. I think we all need to stand back a moment and ask ourselves some questions over just how much medical care we really need and if this has become some amusing addiction.
Who said anything about doctors? Everyone will be seeing “health care providers”.
RE: “Or, better yet, refuse the gov. mandate and find a doctor who will take cash payment.”
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That is my goal — but many will retire early or quit. Perhaps quitting will soon be against Obama’s laws. “You WILL practice and you will practice where I tell you!”
RE: “Look for more generic walk-in “doc-in-a-box” urgent treatment centers. Look for your doctor to struggle with English.”
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Suggest we all familiarize ourselves with good internet health websites, like Mayo, etc., plus buy a Merck Manual and a Physician’s Desk Reference (for drug info). We need to be our own best advocates.
I cannot tell you how many times I have been right on the money about my various conditions and docs have asked, “How’d you know that?” Must be careful not to get too crazy with self-assessment but some of it is very helpful, especially with what we face very soon.
This is a disaster.
Demand side:
1. 32 million more recipients to be covered by 2014
2. Aging population will need more health care (unless we have ZEKE Emanuel running the Soylent Green show)
2. Amnesty, illegal aliens
3. Advances in medical technology will continue (albeit a slower pace)
4. Increased lifespan (although disputed by the dwarf ex Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich)
Supply side:
1. No provision for training physicians. Medical schools and residency programs can’t handle a surge in positions. But, I don’t think there will be a surge of applications anyway. Maybe we will get some foreign docs and learn to speak their language.
2. Time lag: it takes at least 8 years to train a primary care doc after college and 11 years after college for specialists (neurosurgery, cardiology, etc.)
3. Older physicians indicate that they will retire and they are telling their kids to stay out of medicine. This is being driven by more regulation and lower reimbursement.
4. More physicians are joining hospital organizations as employees. They will have an incentive to unionize. More money for less productivity. But Andy will be very happy.
5. Medical homes. Artificially reduces access and thus supply to specialists by creating incentives to withhold referrals. Maybe the primary care physicians can deliver more babies, try putting in some artificial hips, prescribe complex chemotherapy regimens or even do brain surgery. Fun, huh! What a great leap forward!
Thanks for the reply. Unknown to almost all, the Feds ran a pilot program in NY state in 1999 or 2000 to see if all the specialty training residency program slots could withstand a reduction of 25% of the residency-training workforce. The work/service was picked up by the teaching and private staffs without difficulty. THE NEXT YEAR, the feds cut the funding, which has been entirely from Medicare Part B since 1965, for 25% of the MD specialty training slots NATIONWIDE. The 25% reduction in specialists in the US was never corrected. The doctor shortage is completely in control of the govt., and has been since 1965. Rumor at present is that the govt is going to cut specialty residence training slots by 50% SOON. Rationing, with services to be provided by only salaried, unionized, govt medical 8 hour a day bureaucrats is the order of the day.
Forget nurses too. Salary caps will be applied to all, and the unionized, collateralized medical labor force can easily be conceptualized as being securitizable, as with subprime mortgages, and the labor contracts sold world-wide. This can be done with the entire US labor force if private business is eliminated...who is to say that private business, private property is not to be eliminated? After all, the healthcare bill amounts to taxing your body...see the recent FRP posted article on that.
correction: change collateralized to COMMODITIZED.
No, I simply learned how to do suturing and basic CPR on YouTube like everyone else. Most of the people in the waiting room simply have “the flu” or something. I give them a Z-Pak and they go away grateful. Now please, you are disturbing my curry time and there are 15 drug salesman waiting to bring me gifts. /sarc
LOL! Be sure to tell them to get plenty of ‘bed rest’ if they feel really ill, like they do in other countries with better healthcare than ours.
(My Dr. Nick Riviera photo was deleted, that was a Dr. Nick quote)
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