Another Brick in the Wall
Here is another article talking about a physician in Maine abandoning the conventional model of medicine. Yes! I came from Maine 3 years ago. Why didn’t I stay and do direct primary care there? Well, I miss my partners, staff and patients terribly but my wife’s family is from Forest and we always knew Virginia was in our future. I wish these Maine doctors all the success in the world. I pray they break the vice grip that the hospitals have on them up there. I wish they become free to treat their patients the way they need to be treated (hint: not like an assembly line). Personal. Accessible. Comprehensive. Affordable. Welcome, Dr. Catherine Krouse, to the wall.
Let me race to add that I am not political, not in the Iowa caucus-CNN poll sense. This is not a “left vs right” debate. That in itself is pretty phoney.
The quality of healthcare is a “hard” vital sign of the prosperity of a community or civilization. It has really nothing to do with politics. Is a culture affluent enough to make a structure for training and maintaining healthcare personnel and equipment? It does not matter if it’s occurring in a collective civilization, or an individual-rights based situation. All that matters is the relative prosperity of the civilization to provide for healthcare.
America is taken under the same twilight that set upon Eastern Europe 30 years ago. We were warned, but did nothing to change the process. We spend money on guns and butter – and we see our “leftover money” too meager to spend on healthcare. Our economic APACHE-II score is none too promising.
Who has EVER talked in Washington about APA from the posture of IMPROVING HEALTHCARE first, and DECREASING COST second? That would be a hoot in the Beltway! Washington gets it – healthcare reform is all about draining the ‘excess expenditure’.
Try that with food and entertainment, and the proles will riot. But healthcare’s a great target. Roll out the propaganda machine and target the billions of dollars spent each day on American healthcare. The old Soviet Union made due with FAR less ‘healthcare money wastage.’ Of course, the average lifespan was 65 years – “what, comrade, you want more? You greedy thing? You want to pension off and live off the young people’s labor, you rat?”
It’s politics of a different sort. The question of ‘what is your life worth?’ is answered ‘It depends…”
I fear for them, and the DPC model. It is the Way Out for the average Joe to escape a crumbling medical system. No Workers’ Paradise can long survived with the back door unchained – from Cuba with its people willing to risk the open ocean, to the Eastern Europeans to risk the Berlin Wall, to North Korea – which we barely know.
Anything that has a hint of populism will attract the Alarm of the Authorities – populism is merely terrorism, they will say. People are escaping their duty to the State, they will say. The IPU’s – individual production units once known as citizens – are allowed circumscribed freedoms up to a limit. Want control over your healthcare – well, there’s Press Gainey! or switching healthcare plans! But actually walking out of a rotten system – that’s doubleplusungood, comrade!
There are at least twenty ways that I can think of right now to crush DPC immediately. It is no good having a flower, if they have a tank.
They will, of course, insist that they have nothing against DPC – and then publish reams of propaganda invented by the best liars money can buy, talking about DPC physicians ripping off patients. They will pass laws to “protect patients’ rights,” such as taxing the DPC to pay into the APA mandate, or requiring DPC patients to see a certain percentage of Medicare/Medicaid patients as well, through the APA system, to onerous EMR requirements on DPC.
I love DPC, don’t get me wrong – but it is increasingly threatening to the system, and will be forced into a grey area like the underground Soviet economy, with furtive home visits and kickbacks to the Health Police.
Once American citizens became mere IPU’s, that’s when it started. It’s all about keeping the herd profitable, and any animal that becomes an unprofitable “downer citizen,” that’s when they are to be culled from the herd, dollar-wise.
Sorry to be bleak. I am a great optimist, when the situation calls for it.