Meanwhile, checking in on AI:
https://twitter.com/SeamusBlackley/status/1790526863447896296
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Y’know, back in my father’s day,all the docs worried about “socialized medicine”. And what did we get instead? Capitalized medicine. Sad but true.
I don’t know if it even would be possible to do what my BMD and his peers did: just rent office space and start a solo practice.
Americans had the best health care in the world. They used to know it. They let Hilary Clinton convince them otherwise. Yep !
Then the HMOs came in. What a gig! The physicians’ office secretaries had to do all the paperwork!
The point is: people are getting what they damned well deserve. No, we deserve better.
Geisinger, who I get most of my medical services from, seemed to have a policy that doctors could only spend a brief amount of time with each patient, but, that seemed to change. My Doctor seems to spend more time if I need it.
But getting an appointment with another doctor in the system, well another story. Last year, about this time of the year,I had a very painful infected ingrown toe nail. My doctor passed the buck, as he should, to a podiatrist. That office called and wanted to schedule an appointment in September. I said I might have to have my leg amputated by then if the infection spread. They replied with something like; well that’s the earliest we can get you in. I said never mind. I found a podiatrist on the other side of town and he took me in that afternoon and fixed me up on the spot. No charge, insurance and Medicare paid for it all.
The systems, Geisinger for example, are getting too big for their britches.
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This isn’t capitalized medicine. It is regulated medicine. All the benefits of capitalism can and are destroyed with enough regulation. With enough regulation, there is no way to innovate for improvement or cost reduction because your business is told exactly how to do things and therefore there can be no differentiation.
To continue to identify the wrong root cause of issues only makes them get larger. We can all expect to have worse health care because instead of identifying excessive government intervention, we want to blame the insurance companies or the hospitals or the doctors.
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I hate Geisinger. I have had two friends who had to wait weeks for tests and then weeks for results—for life threatening conditions.
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Fear not - all the quality measures look great. It’s just that they’re designed to NOT capture such data!
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I had a doctor at Geisinger I liked, he got promoted to an area that deals only with Geisinger Gold, which I do not have nor want, his replacement I believe is good and I like him. I have a rheumatologist in Wilkes Barre that I like as well. My “labs” are usually done within hours and I can see them online in the evening. I do not know about more specific testing. But their “system” and referrals bluntly sucks.
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This is not the right thread for this comment but it is tangentially related:
Medicare needs to be voucherized or privatized.
We need to repeal the McCarron Act for all insurance not just health. Making insurance industry interstate commerce will lower premiums.
The main reason why healthcare has become more expensive and inefficient since 1965 is Medicare and Medicaid. Over reliance on third party payments and the third party is the federal government.
Medicare is too convoluted with the different Parts and too many rules regarding eligibility start dates etc
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