A Doctor's Opinion: How has American healthcare gone so wrong?

[Wolseley]

The sad but undeniable fact is that our healthcare system — the way the U.S. distributes and pays for healthcare — makes it the most expensive failed enterprise in the history of human civilization. Why has the U.S., the world leader in drug and healthcare technology, fallen so far behind? The answer is that the system stopped serving the public long ago. It serves the needs of those profiting from healthcare. Powerful lobbies representing insurance companies, drug companies, doctor groups and others block meaningful reforms.

MSN

www.msn.com

When I was a little kid, I accompanied my mother on a doctor's visit. She went into the office, signed in, and waited to be called back. It took maybe fifteen minutes. The doctor listened to her complaint, gave her a leisurely examination, and pronounced his diagnosis and what to do about it. The whole process was calm, unhurried, and a lot of communication went on between Mom and the physician. He went over to a cabinet on the wall, selected a number of tablets from the drugs kept on supply there, put them into a paper envelope, and gave them to my mother with the appropriate instructions as to how to take them, and that was that. She went back out to the waiting room, paid the receptionist in cash, and we left.

Then came the Health Care Organization and Maintenance Act of 1973. This was a sop thrown to Richard Nixon's campaign manager---who ran an insurance company---as a reward for getting Nixon re-elected. For the first time, American healthcare was permitted to operate on a for-profit basis.

Result?

Now you go on a doctor's visit, and you must provide proof of insurance and pay up front for whatever your deductible is. Your wait will be upwards of an hour. When you finally make it to an exam room, the doctor will be rushed and impatient. He will order a series of tests, most of which will be expensive. You will wait another half hour for the results. Once the results come in, the doctor will return, pronounce his diagnosis, and write you a prescription. You must then take the prescription to a pharmacy and have it filled. In the end, at the very least, you will have a charge for the doctor's visit, a charge for the lab fees, a charge for insurance deductible, and a charge for the prescription, not to mention the cost of the gasoline you burn up going from the doctor's office to the pharmacy across town.

The cost of the drugs will be alarmingly high, probably anywhere from ten to three hundred times the amount that it cost to manufacture the drug to begin with---because pharmaceutical companies operate for profit. It is a given that the lab tests will be expensive, involving the use of complicated machinery to determine your ailment, whereas in my mother's day, the "tests" were performed by the doctor, based on his medical knowledge of the human body and his patient's history, and they cost you nothing, because it was all included in the cost of the visit. Go back a generation before that, and you didn't even have to visit the doctor's office---you called the office, and HE came to visit YOU, at your own home.

Frankly, the system was a lot better when medicine was a calling instead of a way to make money.

 

[mourningdove~]

We are spending more time in and around the hospital these days, with my husband's cancer diagnosis.
It is amazing how things have changed, since the pandemic.
And the changes we are seeing are not good ...

 

[Diamond7]

Now you go on a doctor's visit, and you must provide proof of insurance and pay up front for whatever your deductible is.

When my dad retired he was still only charging $35 per visit. I remember he told a story when he was charging $5 and a TV repairman charged him $10. So he raised his rate to $10 because that is what He had to pay. You have plumbers charging $500 an hour. That is the real rip-off. Doctors are a lot more reasonable than what a lot of people are wanting to charge nowadays. People that do not have nearly the amount of money invested in their education and training. I did home repairs for years. My rates were very reasonable. So I do not have much consideration for people that want to charge excessive rates. I easily could have charged twice what I did. But I wanted to give people a good price and a good service for what they paid.

 

[Diamond7]

We are spending more time in and around the hospital these days

There can be a radical difference between the way different wards are run in the same hospital. I know a girl who worked with drug overdoses. It was nothing for them to tie someone to the bed to make their job a lot easier. There are other wards on the hospital that would never force anyone to do anything against their will.