I read an interesting sign thumbtacked to a wall near a desk in a doctor’s office:
Quick medical care
Free medical care
Quality medical carePick any Two
Apparently this is an offshoot of the Engineering Project Triangle, but the analogy applies to medial care just as much as engineering.
Perhaps that’s part of the problem with the great discord in patient care right now – especially in the ED. Everyone wants quick, free, and quality. I don’t think you can get all three in our system.
So which one do we drop?
Personally, I would like it good and cheap. I don’t really want to have a poorly done surgery that would leave me crippled in some way for life, and I doubt anyone wants to pay large amounts of money to be healthy. Speed isn’t exactly that important to me. I wouldn’t schedule anything dreadfully important right after a appointment, and I doubt I would care much about some sort of appointment if I was feeling sick and going into the ED on the spur of the moment. Only if I was stuck in a surgery wait list for months upon months would I be cursing the health care system.
Also, hi.
The paradigm isn’t that you have to pick only two, but that if you push in one direction, the other two suffer. Fast costs more, good costs more, cheap isn’t good, etc. Actually, the way I have sen this stated( Everett Koop in the 1990’s) was the three, cost, accessibilty(?=fast), quality, and you could only maximize two of the three.
I agree with the concept of balance. I do not believe the market is a balancing force…
Simple! Free and quality medical care. Because if the care has quality, then it would be quick; The “free” comes as an asset!
Dx is right – we are not talking about absolutes.
But it is interesting that two people chose free and quality. That system exists in many other countries right now in the form of socialized medicine. People in such systems who can afford to do so are going elsewhere to get their health care faster.
http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=2748.
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070914/belinda_Stronach_070914/20070914
love this-thinking i’ll put it up at work!
[...] goes back to the “quick care, free care, quality care” [...]
[...] or more access to specialist care. Everyone will get all their care for free, but in the “fast care, quality care, free care” paradigm, people should be able to purchase a right to faster and higher quality [...]
[...] Fast care, free care, quality care. Pick any two. [...]
[...] A House Subcommittee recently approved a bill that would limit the Feres Doctrine for armed service members. Currently, members of the military and their families cannot sue the military for negligent medical care – regardless of how egregious the care was. The Carmelo Rodriguez Military Medical Accountability Act was named after a sergeant in the military whose bleeding buttocks lesion was repeatedly misdiagnosed as being a wart or a birthmark. Sgt. Rodriguez died from metastatic melanoma. I agree that doctors should be responsible for egregious care, but if we turn the armed services court system into another civilian medical malpractice system, how many military docs will leave? Another point of view from Walter Olson at Point of Law here. Fast care, free care, quality care – pick any two. [...]