Excellent letter in the Huffington Post from the “Healthcare System” to POTUS (President of the United States for those that didn’t get the acronym – don’t feel bad, I didn’t know what it meant until recently, either).
Shows a lot of insightful thinking on how to change the system for the better. Throwing money at the system will not change the lack of healthcare providers, medical errors, avoidable deaths, the horrible medical malpractice system, or the worsening health of our population. Get rid of the bloat. Focus on outcomes that actually matter (and 4 hours to antibiotics isn’t one of them). Pay attention to infrastructure.
I hope that the powers that be incorporate these ideas into whatever new system that is created.
I routinely see the claim that we don’t have enough healthcare providers. Is there an optimum number per capita that we’re supposed to have? Is it broken down per specialty? This claim gets made all the time in support of this or that reform. Shouldn’t we establish the number we’re looking for before we start trying to fix this alleged “problem”?
Matt, yes a issue being discussed these days.
I personally doubt we have a doctor shortage. We have a doctor distribution problem. First, we have plenty of doctors in nice livable metropolitan areas – NY, SF, even here in Portland, Oregon where I live. We have too few doctors in the the middle of the country and in rural areas. Second, we have plenty of specialists, many of whom who by GPs in another medical system.
So to say we have a physician shortage is simplistic and would be better phrased as a primary care and rural physician shortage.
Again though, we still have to define what constitutes a shortage and an oversupply in some way. I see the “doctor shortage” claimed as the allegedly terrible result of everything from the legal system to the payment system to federal regulations, as WhiteCoat does above. Yet for that to be a meaningful claim, it must be defined so those of us who are asked to vote on changes to those various “problems” can know what we’ll get in exchange if we support what physicians want.