If you are frustrated by wait times to see your doctor, the cost of health insurance and prescription drugs, just wait until there may be no doctor to see.
NBC News recently broadcast a story about how fewer young people are entering the medical profession. The network cited a report from the Association of American Medical Colleges that “projected a shortage of 42,600 to 121,300 physicians by 2030, up from its 2017 projected shortage of 40,800 to 104,900 doctors.”
Only part of it has to do with the high cost of medical school and lengthy residencies. I asked my longtime family physician, Dr. John Curry, now retired, for his opinion. Dr. Curry holds MD and Ph.D. degrees but quit medicine for reasons he explained to me in an email.
“The explanation for the exodus is very simple: Over the 40 years I had my medical office, that which is described as ‘the Practice of Medicine’ underwent a profound and ‘fundamental change’: In 1974, ‘Medicine’ was a transaction between patients (who needed diagnosis, treatment, and/or prevention) and physicians (who belonged to an exclusive […]
I saw this article yesterday; today rereading it leaves me feeling just as discouraged as it did reading it then. Like the rest of us I have been seeing – and eating – the fruits of the steady enlarging dominance of the mega-corporate world, especially as it has played out in the medical system. It, this vast power of the money behind the decisions which keep decreasing and demeaning the quality of our life, is a huge force. It’s like a deep, powerful churning river, pushing along where it wants to go. And we tumble along in its wake, helpless.
In years past there was still some amount of corrective, redirecting effect which government was able to bring upon big business. But government is much more now an instrument of the new monetary barons of the world, and so now even when or if government attempts to correctly intervene – though increasingly rarely – it is saddled with the suspicion that it is more the culprit than something which will help. And that stigma is used by the forces of uber-wealth to run unfettered even more.
Its a good article. even surprisingly coming as it does from Cal Thomas. However, his deep rightwing prejudice does stick out near the end of the piece with the comment regarding “the over-involvement of government in medical care” being of blame for this devastation to medical care.
So many many people, many well intending people, remain blinded to the harm that unchecked mega-wealth is causing. Even now, as we are reaping the harvest from collapse of the pillars of what held together our good, not enough can see critically where the wrong exists, and what is behind it.
Perhaps the tide of higher civilization is turning again west, and China is becoming the emerging epic-center. I feel mixed pondering that.
There is also an exodus of patients to alternative medicine. More and more people are aware that the “health care” system has become a health hazard. A lot of what they do in the name of treatment is marginally effective, toxic, and dangerous.