Greed is Still Greed

Two recent articles in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal concerning healthcare and health insurance are quite telling about our medical community, or at least that portion that gets published.

The article in the New York Times discussed a patient who had not seen a doctor for 15 years appeared at an emergency room one day with abdominal pains. Within five days she died. She had no insurance. What was interesting was reading the comments, many submitted by physicians.

Many questioned why she had not seen a doctor for 15 years. Perhaps it was because she had no insurance and was on a limited income.

The majority, however, wondered whether any physician would be “properly” compensated. They were talking not so much about Medicare and Medicaid, but about health insurance in general. This strikes me as greed.

What happened to concern and care about the patient. Do these comments reflect that they, the physicians, got into medicine more for the money than the art of health care. I have come to wonder about many of the providers’ motives. The fact that cesarean sections peak on Friday afternoons could be telling us something about providers and when they want their time off.

The Wall Street article by Abraham Verghse on “The Myth of Prevention” is even more interesting. His argument is that with a single payer system, there will be a great deflation of income, in part from the people no longer employed by insurance companies and doctors’ offices handling the paper work.

This was pointed out to me in the late 1980s when somebody compared billing departments in a 500 bed hospital in Canada to a 500 bed hospital in the United States. The Canadian hospital had seven people filing claims to the Canadian single payer system. The US hospital had 70 people doing the same job.

In this example, the single payer system would reduce the work force by 90 percent. OK, so these clerks would be temporarily be unemployed. But they would have health insurance.

The comments to this article are also revealing. Most are from the medical community worried about reimbursement and their return on their investment. I suspect by that they are talking about their schooling and training.

Again, greed before patient care.

I question how many physicians view patients as cash cows. From my experience, I suspect that the majority do just that in spite of their protestations. They can prove it by not milking the insurance companies and patients with extra unneeded tests while hiding behind the excuse of providing better health care.