THE REALITY OF MEDICINE IN THIS DAY AND AGE

THE REALITY OF MEDICINE IN THIS DAY AND AGE

Here are some things you may have noticed:

1. You call your doctor’s office for an appointment and it may be days or weeks before they can get you in.

2. The day of your appointment, you arrive at the scheduled time but you sometimes have to wait in the waiting room an hour or more.

3. When they finally get you in the exam room, sometimes twenty or thirty minutes may go by before someone shows up. And what is worse, the doctor you came to see may be busy and send his physician assistant or nurse practitioner to take care of you. These so called “providers” are always less qualified than the doctor you came to see.

4. When someone finally comes to see you in the exam room, it may be a very short visit in which you don’t have time to ask all the questions you have and treatment plans are not explained well to you. You are rushed out of the room with a prescription or orders to have some lab work or x-rays or something else done, and asked to make yet another appointment.

You may ask, why is all of the above happening?

1. Believe it or not, in the past 40 years several things have happened that have created this type of depersonalized medical care. For starters, while what you pay for your health insurance has skyrocketed, payments to doctors for their work has decreased about 40%! Yes 40%!  All the while, office expenses in supplies, equipment, employee salaries, rent, malpractice insurance, maintenance, etc., have quadrupled! So, ask yourself what is your doctor to do? Well, first he/she will increase the number of patients they sees every day. He/she will schedule as many patients as possible each day, which means less time is dedicated to each patient and the more times you are asked to come back for a follow up. In other words, you become just a number and the office door becomes a revolving door that is just turned faster and faster! Another consequence is that when the work increases with an outrageous number of patients, the owner of the practice will hire a nurse practitioner or a physician assistant instead of a more qualified medical doctor (MD) or doctor in osteopathy (DO), so the office is able to see the increased number of patients. Not that nurse practitioner or physician assistants are not an asset, on the contrary they are a great asset but they definitely are not as qualified or have the same training as a Medical Doctor or a Doctor in Osteopathy and they should work under supervision.

2. Even in view of the constantly increases in premium that you pay for health insurance, the insurance companies will constantly deny tests and treatment modalities that your doctor recommends. The people making the decisions of these denials at the insurance companies are not even doctors; they want to save money for the insurance company but still charge you high premium. Insurance companies also to save money don’t provide coverage for some more advanced treatments, such as Platelet Rich Plasma and Bone Marrow Concentrate, - procedures that are routinely performed in best medical centers in the country. Similarly, insurance companies may decide to not provide coverage for some drugs that are less damaging to your body because they are more expensive (for example, paying for Lidocaine instead of Ropivacaine).

3. Another thing you may be exposed to in this crazy medical system are some unscrupulous physicians that will cross the line and unnecessarily recommend certain treatments simply because their reimbursement is high dollars, instead of a simpler and safer treatment for you that pays the physician less.   

What are the consequences of all of the above? More and more doctors are leaving the medical field and the patients are not getting the top medical care they should be getting in the greatest county on earth, the Unites States of America!  Who are the only ones benefiting? The only ones benefiting are Insurance Company executives and Hospital executives that are making mega million dollars salaries and get a golden parachute at retirement!  

Here  is a link to a blog I wrote a while back that will give you some info about our healthcare:  https://www.theorthobiologicclinic.com/blog/what-health-insurance-companies-are-doing