Is It Really That Bad? by Dominic Bagnoli, M.D.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Dominic Bagnoli, M.D.It is so easy for us to complain about our health care system as providers, why it doesn't work, why it is unfair, why we shouldn't be graded by patients on Patient Satisfaction forms. Are you kidding me? Are these valid issues? Or are we like the whining adolescent child that complains because the hotel room they are in has no air conditioning?
It is all about perspective, and no one is going to look at physicians as an under compensated, taken advantage of cohort. Most are in the top 2% in the country in annual income. Most have a lifestyle 99% of the worlds citizens would trade for in a nanosecond. Sure we work hard and make personal sacrifices to get where we are but to others this sounds like......blah blah blah.
I am currently on a family vacation to Italy (now you know where the air conditioning comment came from), and I have asked many people about their health care system. I am appalled by how bad it is. But more importantly, they talk of how great it is in America and all of them, if they could only afford it, would come to America to get their health care. Sure it is not a scientific study but I bet the results are similar around the globe.
We have the highest quality healthcare in the world, we are compensated fairly, and those few of use who are lucky enough to make it our profession are extremely well off in a career that is more recession proof than most. If you don't believe me look around at your neighborhoods and country clubs...not many docs having issues, but lots of others are struggling.
What we need is a real look at utilization. At what point do we need to stop spending money as we try to prolong life. I say we are not prolonging life, we are prolonging death. These are the tough questions we need to answer if we want to solve our systems problems, not whether or not patients should fill out patient satisfaction forms.
By the way, they should!
Bagnoli, Complaints, Quality in Miscellaneous
Reader Comments (4)
Agree with many of the points made by Dr. Bagnoli. However, the statement that "we have the highest quality healthcare in the world" is simply not supported by WHO data on objective measures such as life expectancy and infant mortality. This does not even take cost into account--many countries spend less and have better outcomes, though admittedly the reason for this may be due to social rather than medical problems. Regardless, I doubt if many doctors in other western democracies are spending hundreds of dollars out of pocket to pay for their children's 4 and 6 month immunizations because they have used up the annual preventive care allowance in their health insurance plans. Food for thought...
just got back from Italy and they may live longer , but has absolutely nothing to do with the health care system, don't believe the statistics.....oh yeah... and the shots for the kiddies, not about quality, about the payer system, that can be fixed if we stop spending 300k on the 80 year old with mild dementia in the icu during the last two weeks of their lives
If we have the "best health care" in the world, then why do we rank at the bottom of the OECD statistics in terms of health care outcomes?
I'll answer my own question for you: because of rationing. Instead of explicit, open rationing, we ration care based on wealth and based on the whims of private insurers. When you have a fourth of the country without meaningful access to primary care (meaning the uninsured and the underinsured) the consequence is poor health.
We may have the highest quality health care, for those who can access it, but we do not have the best health care system.
Yeah, if we had great health care then the 23 yo guy with a ruptured Achilles would not have lost his job because no one would fix it.
And great health care would.... Lordie, I could go on and on.
Where the author is right is that the docs are going blahblahblah about income and workload.