Eric Larson: “The candidates’ proposals to expand health coverage are not enough. Americans also need better access to high-quality care that the nation can afford. Unless patients can get in to see the family physicians, internal medicine doctors and pediatricians who provide that first level of contact to the system, we can’t achieve the reforms needed in quality, safety and cost.”
Dr. Larson pretty much touches on all the points I repeatedly make on this blog. Well worth reading.
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- Op-ed: Shortage of primary care threatens health care system
- Why nurse practitioners and physician assistants will not solve the primary care shortage
- Primary care shortage
- Primary care shortage and physician recruiters
- How to fix the primary care shortage
- PointofLaw.com takes apart Public Citizen’s critique of tort reform
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“Need” is a subjective judgement. If people aren’t willing to pay what it takes to support high-quality primary care, then they have decided that they don’t in fact “need” it. Beginning my junior year of medical school, the same year that my law career bound classmates graduated law school, I spent the next 5 years working what amounted to two full time jobs and sometimes more with every 3rd or 4th and sometimes every other day spent working 36 hourse or more. If they don’t want to compensate me at hourly rates at least close to what my bachelor’s degreed CPA charges me, then they don’t value my services at a level commensurate with the resources invested in the skills, and must not be in such great need afterall.
If I accept fees lower than one reason dictates people will do this for, If in fact I accept fees that are even now resulting in a shunning of the field by those best able to do it, then I am cheating not only myself and my family, but also the community of patients who in the future will not get the service because I helped drive the price down to non-viability. Charity is waiving ones fee for the poor. Agreeing to unsustainably low fees for those able to pay is false charity and actually socially irresponsible.
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