Saturday, August 23, 2014

It’s Hell to Be a Doctor in America Today

In present day America, doctors spend most of their time trying to game the system that requires endless paperwork, protracted bureaucratic battles and “treadmill medicine”---seeing as many patients as possible in limited time, reports NyPo.

In a 2008 study of 12,000 physicians, only 6% described their morale as positive. Even insurance claim clerks polled in a different study were happier.

As government- incentivied managed care has grown (by the 2000s, 95% of insured workers were in some kind of managed care plans), so has physicians’ discontent. In 1973, fewer than 15% of physicians reported any doubts about career choices. Today nearly 40% say that they would not choose to enter the medical profession if given the opportunity to do it all over.

I have written that the totalitarian state interferes with the lives of individuals in different ways to different degrees. My favorite example is the surfer dude, who lives only for the big wave. I think he could live in a totalitarian state that was very oppressive, but that did not impact his lifestyle in a significant way.

On the other end of the spectrum we have part of the financial sector and most of the medical sector. If I were a medical doctor and really loved practicing medicine, rather than wasting time dealing with  government created bureaucracy and restrictions, I would already be looking at alternative countries to live in so that  I could practice my passion, without major state interference.

-RW

3 comments:

  1. And yet you just KNOW that the conclusion many will come to ("liberals" especially) is that we therefore need universal government-run healthcare to "free them to practice medicine" and other such rot. And they'll studiously ignore what goes on in the UK & Canada.

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  2. Robert you are dead right. I am a physician who will be retiring this year. I can see the writing on the wall. Faced with papar shuffling, constant second guessing, astronomical potential liability and a treadmill existence where you constantly have to do more to keep up with declining reimbursement it is time to call it quits. Just think of this: Medicine is a field where you have no ability to set prices for your labor. Reimbursement is governed by the RVBS (Relative Based Value System) and Medicare. The RVBS is basically just a Marxist Labor Theory of Value system designed by Ivy League Faculty. I have to quibble with your recommendation to go overseas to practice. Medicine has labyrinthine system of credentialing that makes this extremely difficult if not impossible to do in most specialties. It is probably better to set up a parallel private practice in the US and not take any insurance, Federal money like the Surgery Center of Oklahoma. In retrospect anyone wishing to practice Medicine in the US would likely be better off entering the field of Dentistry.

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  3. Some of this is self inflicted by the doctor cartel. AMA. They seek to limit the supply of med practitioners in order to at least maintain or at best drive up salaries. Its a crony cartel that seeks to use the state regulatory machinery to plunder the med consumer.

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