After an 18 year career in healthcare from 1973-1991 working from a position of payroll clerk up to an executive and consultant I can say with confidence that Americans have been transitioned into billing codes and business units. The human touch has all but disappeared.
Massive numbers of new drugs for conditions that make you scratch your head and say where did all of this come from; we’re less healthy, over medicated and life expectancy is declining
We live in an era I call “check box medicine.” Give your doc a list of symptoms he gives you a prescription. The game is keep you sick because it makes more money.
When I encounter a medical event and I am referred to as a patient I say no. I am a customer. I come to you asking for a service. For example if I want to continue doing a specific activity and your first response is well you are getting older… my response is see you later, you are practicing checkbox medicine and clearly don’t want to work with me.
We are being treated like a billing unit so behave like a customer. It gives you more power in a corrupt system.
Congress long ago gave giant managed care bureaucracies the perverse legal power to control use of prepaid premiums in the belief that corporations would control the cost of care. This evolved into ratioing patient care by “prior authorization” or denial of care ordered by professionals and by down streaming their financial risk for their populations’ medical care. Downstream are the mini hospital corporations and professional staff impoverished by ever lower capitation rates, i.e., the money paid professional providers of population care. Cost control by rationing care has failed for decades and produced impoverished care, patients, and a few rich corporations.
Can the private and public sectors become affordable? The private sector became affordable briefly from 2004-2009 when congressional reform created a retail medical marketplace for empowered patients with tax-free first dollar coverage linked to low-cost insurance. This program almost put out of business high priced giant managed care pre-paid corporations until killed in 2009 to make way for the giant corporate cartels of the 2010 Accountable Care Act.
The Fix? Eliminate giant “cartel care” by restoring American late 2000s family control of their medical budgets for affordable professional care and insurance. Public programs could follow that same formula to affordability. Why not?
Big Vet has already arrived here in equine centric Aiken SC. The first clue for me were the marketing of services emails I began to receive. These have been followed by recommendations for products I do not need nor have ever purchased.
I've also stopped taking my dog for "wellness" checkups.
Unfortunately, my horse competes so vaccinations are mandatory.
Perhaps you could form a group that researches health outcomes for vaxxed and unvaxxed horses. If the results mirror those for humans, which could be likely, isn’t it time to protest this practice in the competitive equines industry? A LOT of work, but maybe worth it for the health and future of a beloved species that does so much to serve and please humanity.
As long as your feeding you dog and giving him or her the right kind of medicine that is Ok. We didn't take our large dogs in for wellness checks a year.. except one who got his winter undercoat shorn in the spring.. so Vet looked him over then. Horses are very expensive I know that.
When these idiots rant about the "need for Medicare for all," they mean "Medicaid for all."
The clapping seals in media and the fawning "gimme" acolytes don't understand or care that Medicare isn't "free," and actually has a pretty high premium - especially if one has a moderate income.
I didn't sign up for it, but as I recall my premium would be almost $400 per month.
What an excellent article. I am a healthy 84-year-old, but I had to have two knee replacement surgeries last fall. What an eye-opener it was to see what my share of Medicare paid, what the surgeon received, and what the rest of the system received! What an absolute mess we have created. You have laid it all out so well.
And the duplication of paperwork really is an insufferable insult. My husband has a flip phone. He is an old livestock man and isn't digitally savvy. He would be at a loss of it weren't for my being able to take texts and download a gazillion apps! Thank you, President Obama and Nancy Pelosi! And when though I knew that he had a brain tumor, I have never forgiven John McCain for changing his vote on Obamacare at the last moment.
Your statement that "The Independent Physician Is Becoming an Endangered Species," is very sad and very disturbing. I grew up in a very remote and rural community that was fortunate enough to have a local doctor who stayed home from a fishing trip to deliver me in my grandmother's home. Those good, old days are long gone.
My knee surgeon was young and had opened his own business. But by the end of this year, he had to give up and join the corporate world of healthcare--one of two Catholic hospitals that used to be "rooted in the community," but are now captive to the conglomerate of healthcare.
Now I hear politicians bemoaning the fact that there aren't rural hospitals and some of their friends have to drive 60 miles to a hospital. My community feels fortunate to have a hospital that close! Heck! We drive that far for groceries. It's a lot easier than driving 8 miles in the city where I now live!!
I look forward to Part 2 of this analysis. Something MUST be done. But first we must vote Republican in the midterms or Medicare for All will become a reality and the end of healthcare as we used to know it.
Oh for "the good old days". When I was a child the Dr. made house calls even at inconvenient times. He recommended a "hot toddy" to get the measles rash out which was making me very sick. It worked! I have spent thousands of dollars on insurance that has almost never been used, just in case of some severe accident. What a rotten bind. (His nickname for me was Pumpkin, I loved the love.)
It was all very deliberately destroyed to enable what happened in 2020. That is what Obamacare, health care consolidation, control by insurance companies, the destruction of private practice and electronic health records was all about. The Great Reset and Depopulation Agenda that was Covid, and that is still ongoing
And now, all we hear is "we need to 'fix' health care," even though that's what oblamercare was supposed to do. And we told them it wouldn't, and it would be VERY expensive.
If we just went back to what we had before obozocare, things would very quickly improve, although the insurance companies would need some time to return to their old, somewhat competitive model.
They could leave oblamercare as an option to choose, if it really is so "wonderful."
I seem to remember Dem VP Candidate John Edwards made a killing convincing juries that the absence of Caesarean Sections caused birth defects - maybe cerebral palsy. The number of C-Sections went up times 4; the number of birth defects stayed the same. Insurance for OBs skyrocketed and many left the practice. The race was on.
The Gubmint runs a Self-Tapering Ponzi Scheme - corporate Flexner-Cutter Docs make it work.
Price’s Law: 1/2 the work in any organization is done by the square root of the number of employees. Too big not to fail - by design.
Medical doctors used to be simpatico...People you really trusted. They related to their patients. They gave them more of their time. However, with the advent of the government stepping in and causing all kinds of paperwork and insurance, etc., CARE went out the window. In all my years, I never came across any doctors who were knowledgable about nutrition, when 95% of people's problems are connected to what enters the bloodstream. I had to find my own answers in regard to health issues. The Father of Medicine was known for his CURES, Why isn''t his information taught to future doctors in medical school? 2400 years ago, he prescribed natural foods and exercise as first and foremost in healing; along with fresh air, sunlight, change of venue and avoidance of toxins.
Here in Oregon, our very "blue" state, mostly done by mail-in-ballot cheating, we are on the verge of being the first state to have what is being proposed as: A publicly financed, single-payer system covering Oregon residents, with comprehensive benefits and little or no patient cost-sharing. “Free” would mean free when receiving covered care; taxes and existing government funding would pay for it.
No citizenship required. Some doctors and other medical practitioners are planning to flee the state. Hospitals are already struggling financially. The practical concern is reasonable: if payments were too low to sustain practices, some providers will relocate, retire earlier, or reduce services.
We like to be first; the first state to legalize abortion in 1969, first for "voting by mail", entire state becoming "sanctuary state", first to legalize assisted suicide. It's very disheartening.
Our ancestors who risked everything to come here 175 years ago would be appalled. I'm appalled.
But meantime I just keep working on my gardening website, and stay focused on the positive. Now I added some really fun free gardening crafts for the upcoming holidays. Free printable seed packet crafts, little gift boxes, an upload-your-own-pet calendar, and lots of others. www.vegetable-gardening-online.com A little crafting is a good stress reliever!
Reading this, I kept coming back to a question I’ve been working on for months.
If regulatory and economic pressures can push independent doctors out of the system, can the same thing happen to entire medical technologies?
I’m looking into an older school of immunology that once existed across several European countries. In Poland, one of the most interesting examples was Delbeta, an injectable multibacterial preparation built around a different idea: not just targeting one pathogen, but trying to strengthen the host’s broader defenses. I’m finding similar threads in Romania, France, and the former Yugoslavia.
The more documents I uncover, the less this looks like a story about one forgotten product. The bigger question is why an entire medical approach, the institutes behind it, and the ability to manufacture these products largely disappeared.
Maybe the issue goes beyond who gets to practice medicine. Maybe the system also helps determine which kinds of medicine get to survive.
If anyone knows of American parallels — older injectable multibacterial products, manufacturers, research institutes, or archives — I’d genuinely like to hear about them.
A great discussion about how bottom line profitability, supersede, good medical decision processes. A key discussion has to be about the pharmaceuticalization of medicine. The objective has become to maximize bottom line profitability over cures and reversal of disease states.. John Abraham a professor in England has spent his career explaining this to anyone that will listen!
"are disappearing"....correction: "disappeared"! MD's today are not trained in relationships. They practice by spreadsheet. Old time Drs. used experience and wisdom along with the spreadsheets. Critical thinking is no longer taught in this countries public schools. If you have a heart attack or stroke in N. Virginia, it takes months to see a Cardiologists or Neurologists.
Other countries that allow individual practitioners to utilize AI independently, offering superior services for a fraction of the cost, will lure Americans away from the U.S.
After an 18 year career in healthcare from 1973-1991 working from a position of payroll clerk up to an executive and consultant I can say with confidence that Americans have been transitioned into billing codes and business units. The human touch has all but disappeared.
Massive numbers of new drugs for conditions that make you scratch your head and say where did all of this come from; we’re less healthy, over medicated and life expectancy is declining
We live in an era I call “check box medicine.” Give your doc a list of symptoms he gives you a prescription. The game is keep you sick because it makes more money.
When I encounter a medical event and I am referred to as a patient I say no. I am a customer. I come to you asking for a service. For example if I want to continue doing a specific activity and your first response is well you are getting older… my response is see you later, you are practicing checkbox medicine and clearly don’t want to work with me.
We are being treated like a billing unit so behave like a customer. It gives you more power in a corrupt system.
You are spot on!! Isn't it sad.
Congress long ago gave giant managed care bureaucracies the perverse legal power to control use of prepaid premiums in the belief that corporations would control the cost of care. This evolved into ratioing patient care by “prior authorization” or denial of care ordered by professionals and by down streaming their financial risk for their populations’ medical care. Downstream are the mini hospital corporations and professional staff impoverished by ever lower capitation rates, i.e., the money paid professional providers of population care. Cost control by rationing care has failed for decades and produced impoverished care, patients, and a few rich corporations.
Can the private and public sectors become affordable? The private sector became affordable briefly from 2004-2009 when congressional reform created a retail medical marketplace for empowered patients with tax-free first dollar coverage linked to low-cost insurance. This program almost put out of business high priced giant managed care pre-paid corporations until killed in 2009 to make way for the giant corporate cartels of the 2010 Accountable Care Act.
The Fix? Eliminate giant “cartel care” by restoring American late 2000s family control of their medical budgets for affordable professional care and insurance. Public programs could follow that same formula to affordability. Why not?
RW Geist MD
rgeistmd@comcast.net
763-276-8092
This is an important historical point - I will weave it into the next essay on this. Thank you! Jill
Big Vet has already arrived here in equine centric Aiken SC. The first clue for me were the marketing of services emails I began to receive. These have been followed by recommendations for products I do not need nor have ever purchased.
I've also stopped taking my dog for "wellness" checkups.
Unfortunately, my horse competes so vaccinations are mandatory.
Do your own vaccines - I buy ours through Jeffers. There is a form at USEF for owner administration.
https://files.usef.org/assets/rFaeuDpW6YI/equine-vaccination-record.pdf
I grew up in rural Idaho. Livestock people always do their own vaccinations. That's also how we knew about Ivermectin and coronaviruses.
Perhaps you could form a group that researches health outcomes for vaxxed and unvaxxed horses. If the results mirror those for humans, which could be likely, isn’t it time to protest this practice in the competitive equines industry? A LOT of work, but maybe worth it for the health and future of a beloved species that does so much to serve and please humanity.
As long as your feeding you dog and giving him or her the right kind of medicine that is Ok. We didn't take our large dogs in for wellness checks a year.. except one who got his winter undercoat shorn in the spring.. so Vet looked him over then. Horses are very expensive I know that.
When these idiots rant about the "need for Medicare for all," they mean "Medicaid for all."
The clapping seals in media and the fawning "gimme" acolytes don't understand or care that Medicare isn't "free," and actually has a pretty high premium - especially if one has a moderate income.
I didn't sign up for it, but as I recall my premium would be almost $400 per month.
What an excellent article. I am a healthy 84-year-old, but I had to have two knee replacement surgeries last fall. What an eye-opener it was to see what my share of Medicare paid, what the surgeon received, and what the rest of the system received! What an absolute mess we have created. You have laid it all out so well.
And the duplication of paperwork really is an insufferable insult. My husband has a flip phone. He is an old livestock man and isn't digitally savvy. He would be at a loss of it weren't for my being able to take texts and download a gazillion apps! Thank you, President Obama and Nancy Pelosi! And when though I knew that he had a brain tumor, I have never forgiven John McCain for changing his vote on Obamacare at the last moment.
Your statement that "The Independent Physician Is Becoming an Endangered Species," is very sad and very disturbing. I grew up in a very remote and rural community that was fortunate enough to have a local doctor who stayed home from a fishing trip to deliver me in my grandmother's home. Those good, old days are long gone.
My knee surgeon was young and had opened his own business. But by the end of this year, he had to give up and join the corporate world of healthcare--one of two Catholic hospitals that used to be "rooted in the community," but are now captive to the conglomerate of healthcare.
Now I hear politicians bemoaning the fact that there aren't rural hospitals and some of their friends have to drive 60 miles to a hospital. My community feels fortunate to have a hospital that close! Heck! We drive that far for groceries. It's a lot easier than driving 8 miles in the city where I now live!!
I look forward to Part 2 of this analysis. Something MUST be done. But first we must vote Republican in the midterms or Medicare for All will become a reality and the end of healthcare as we used to know it.
Oh for "the good old days". When I was a child the Dr. made house calls even at inconvenient times. He recommended a "hot toddy" to get the measles rash out which was making me very sick. It worked! I have spent thousands of dollars on insurance that has almost never been used, just in case of some severe accident. What a rotten bind. (His nickname for me was Pumpkin, I loved the love.)
It was all very deliberately destroyed to enable what happened in 2020. That is what Obamacare, health care consolidation, control by insurance companies, the destruction of private practice and electronic health records was all about. The Great Reset and Depopulation Agenda that was Covid, and that is still ongoing
And now, all we hear is "we need to 'fix' health care," even though that's what oblamercare was supposed to do. And we told them it wouldn't, and it would be VERY expensive.
If we just went back to what we had before obozocare, things would very quickly improve, although the insurance companies would need some time to return to their old, somewhat competitive model.
They could leave oblamercare as an option to choose, if it really is so "wonderful."
Healthcare will never be fixed until Baphomet is ousted as the CEO.
:)
Thanks Docs: thorough and clear, per usual.
I seem to remember Dem VP Candidate John Edwards made a killing convincing juries that the absence of Caesarean Sections caused birth defects - maybe cerebral palsy. The number of C-Sections went up times 4; the number of birth defects stayed the same. Insurance for OBs skyrocketed and many left the practice. The race was on.
The Gubmint runs a Self-Tapering Ponzi Scheme - corporate Flexner-Cutter Docs make it work.
Price’s Law: 1/2 the work in any organization is done by the square root of the number of employees. Too big not to fail - by design.
Medical doctors used to be simpatico...People you really trusted. They related to their patients. They gave them more of their time. However, with the advent of the government stepping in and causing all kinds of paperwork and insurance, etc., CARE went out the window. In all my years, I never came across any doctors who were knowledgable about nutrition, when 95% of people's problems are connected to what enters the bloodstream. I had to find my own answers in regard to health issues. The Father of Medicine was known for his CURES, Why isn''t his information taught to future doctors in medical school? 2400 years ago, he prescribed natural foods and exercise as first and foremost in healing; along with fresh air, sunlight, change of venue and avoidance of toxins.
Here in Oregon, our very "blue" state, mostly done by mail-in-ballot cheating, we are on the verge of being the first state to have what is being proposed as: A publicly financed, single-payer system covering Oregon residents, with comprehensive benefits and little or no patient cost-sharing. “Free” would mean free when receiving covered care; taxes and existing government funding would pay for it.
No citizenship required. Some doctors and other medical practitioners are planning to flee the state. Hospitals are already struggling financially. The practical concern is reasonable: if payments were too low to sustain practices, some providers will relocate, retire earlier, or reduce services.
We like to be first; the first state to legalize abortion in 1969, first for "voting by mail", entire state becoming "sanctuary state", first to legalize assisted suicide. It's very disheartening.
Our ancestors who risked everything to come here 175 years ago would be appalled. I'm appalled.
But meantime I just keep working on my gardening website, and stay focused on the positive. Now I added some really fun free gardening crafts for the upcoming holidays. Free printable seed packet crafts, little gift boxes, an upload-your-own-pet calendar, and lots of others. www.vegetable-gardening-online.com A little crafting is a good stress reliever!
A little off subject: what has the COVID JAB caused in Illnesses? Friend had the jab, and now
Suffers from sjogrens and Immune disorder - I'm betting caused by the COVID JAB ?
Am I wrong? what are other issues this JAB has caused !
This was a problem in the middle 1990s which exponentially exploded in subsequent decades.
I spent $100 yesterday to get my cat spayed. At a non-profit place staffed by volunteers. What do for profit vets charge nowaeays? An arm and a leg?
This cost $40 couple of decades ago.
Reading this, I kept coming back to a question I’ve been working on for months.
If regulatory and economic pressures can push independent doctors out of the system, can the same thing happen to entire medical technologies?
I’m looking into an older school of immunology that once existed across several European countries. In Poland, one of the most interesting examples was Delbeta, an injectable multibacterial preparation built around a different idea: not just targeting one pathogen, but trying to strengthen the host’s broader defenses. I’m finding similar threads in Romania, France, and the former Yugoslavia.
The more documents I uncover, the less this looks like a story about one forgotten product. The bigger question is why an entire medical approach, the institutes behind it, and the ability to manufacture these products largely disappeared.
Maybe the issue goes beyond who gets to practice medicine. Maybe the system also helps determine which kinds of medicine get to survive.
If anyone knows of American parallels — older injectable multibacterial products, manufacturers, research institutes, or archives — I’d genuinely like to hear about them.
A great discussion about how bottom line profitability, supersede, good medical decision processes. A key discussion has to be about the pharmaceuticalization of medicine. The objective has become to maximize bottom line profitability over cures and reversal of disease states.. John Abraham a professor in England has spent his career explaining this to anyone that will listen!
"are disappearing"....correction: "disappeared"! MD's today are not trained in relationships. They practice by spreadsheet. Old time Drs. used experience and wisdom along with the spreadsheets. Critical thinking is no longer taught in this countries public schools. If you have a heart attack or stroke in N. Virginia, it takes months to see a Cardiologists or Neurologists.
Other countries that allow individual practitioners to utilize AI independently, offering superior services for a fraction of the cost, will lure Americans away from the U.S.