Does Obama owe physicians an apology? EP cardiologist Dr Wes thinks so. And he points to Obama's remarks the other night:
In my six short illustrious years as a hospitalist, practicing medicine with my eyes and ears wide open, I have come to the absolute conclusion that
- Some doctors practice great medicine for the right reasons.
- Some doctors practice terrible medicine because they are terrible doctors.
- Some doctors want to get filthy rich pretending to practice great medicine.
In all situations no one is accountable for anything. Would you go to work for a company that paid you 1/2 what they promised, charged you double the going rate for your parking pass and made a product nobody liked and couldn't afford? That's our health care finance system.
The only people making a financial windfall in the current finance scam known as fee for service RVU economics are the folks pretending to practice great medicine. The good doctors go unrewarded. The bad doctors go unpunished. And the doctors pretending to practice great medicine end up with the financial windfall.
Pretend medicine is costing us billions of dollars a year.
If you want those providing medical care in this country to be held accountable, it's time to start paying the good doctors more, to pay the bad doctors less and to make the pretend doctors quit or retire as their financial windfall gets destroyed.
In his remarks above, Obama was talking about doctor #3. I have met these doctors. These doctors are not few and far between. They are everywhere. And they are killing the good name of Doctor #1's everywhere. Obama owes Dr's #1 an apology. That's it.
We need to protect the Treasury from the rest of them. And that can only happen in a bundled care model of financing. I'm sure of it.
Many other bloggers found it necessary to leave their two cents worth
ED doc at Moving Meat
Hospitalist at Notes from Dr RW
Family Medicine doc at Musings of a Dinosaur
Dr Parks over at Buckeye Surgeon
Few of these doctors choose to hold their colleagues accountable for their actions. I'm saying we have to. To protect doctors #1 and keep them from leaving, we have to flush out doctors #2 and #3. We owe it to ourselves and our profession to stand up for what's right and to acknowledge the faults in our current fee for service. We owe it to our current patients and our future generations to protect the Treasury from the unsustainable health care inflation, driven by over treatment and unnecessary care.
If we can not acknowledge faults within our own profession and work towards a frame work that works most of the time, we have no business being in the business of health care. I acknowledge, as did Obama, that we get what we pay for: costly, well paying, expensive, volume driven, procedure driven health care.
We get this because that's what we pay for. The goal is to change the payment model so we only pay for the care we want. That can't be done in third party fee for service because you cannot hold anyone accountable to cost in this model. That I am sure of.
