An opinion piece came out in the WSJ and it is worth the read. It’s called Doctors Are Losing Their Calling: The sanctity of the medical profession has been lost to corporate centralization and burnout. It is behind a paywall so lend me give you the highlights if you can’t see it:
- “At the center of the doctors’ unionization efforts is a desire to reclaim their identity as service-driven providers and to fight for the autonomy and fair working conditions that they’ve lost as their profession becomes more commercialized and centralized.”
- “Now nearly three-fourths of doctors in the U.S. are employees of a corporate entity and, increasingly, both patients and physicians are finding hospital systems to be as obstructionist as insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Most physicians’ time isn’t spent with patients but on the administrative burdens they were trying to avoid.”
- “As healthcare centralizes into denser urban areas, employed physicians have been cleared from towns and communities. This phenomenon isn’t merely brain drain or the shuttering of small businesses—it’s a loss of an important member in a town’s social fabric. Big-box medicine then constrains a doctor’s hours, scope and place of practice, among other things.”
- “Doctors are proud of their occupation’s mixture of sacrament and science in service to society. Urbanely trained at universities, these learned professionals once left the city to settle into solo practices or small partnerships in the towns they served. This autonomy allowed them to charge patients what they could afford—some more, some less and some not at all. Meanwhile, their authority allowed them to advocate effectively on behalf of their patients, even on nonmedical matters. Their familiarity with their neighbor-patients encouraged participation in the community, both economically and socially.”
The person who wrote the article (Michael P.H. Stanley) is a fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Mass. I don’t know about you but I just get tired of these articles. It’s like these authors have found some type of epiphany that no one knows about. Seriously?
Let me respond to Dr. Michael P.H. Stanley. You want your identity back? Then don’t work for the man. Want to spend more time with patients? Then don’t work for the man. Want to be a member of the small town’s social fabric? Then don’t work for the man.
The answer is Direct Primary Care and Direct Specialty Care. Force the insurance companies to be affordable and make them ONLY catastrophic events the way they used to. Get them out of primary care. Let the free market work. Every other idea on how to fix what we have now has failed.
So, to summarize, I look forward to the day when a patient says: