"When many cures are offered for a disease, it means the disease is not curable" -Anton Chekhov
''Once you tell people there's a cure for something, the more likely they are to pressure doctors to prescribe it.'' -Robert Ehrlich, drug advertising executive.
"Opinions are like sphincters, everyone has one." - Chris Rangel
A Simple Solution: One Vermont doctor has cut the middle man and managed to offer lower cost medicine as a result. I remember reading about her two years ago and thinking that’s the way to go. It seems much more just than “retainer medicine.” More and more doctors are talking about dropping out of insurance plans completely, though few do it out of fear they’ll lose their patients. Someday, though, I think it will happen. There will come a time when payments are squeezed down so low that overhead can’t be met and we’ll have no choice. As it stands now, most insurance companies have abyssmal reimbursement rates. You can only see so many patients in one day. It’s impossible to keep increasing productivity to compensate for the lower payments. Patient care suffers and the physician’s mental health suffers. Simple fee-for-service where the patient actually pays the doctor just like he pays everyone else from the grocer to the plumber to the lawyer, just may be the answer to our health care woes. posted by Sydney on
8/01/2002 06:16:00 AM
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