Sanjay Thinks Primary Care Docs Matter
Sanjay Gupta MD thinks we family doctors are still needed. Good for him and hooray for us. I guess. Here he writes a column about the shortage issue and expresses some worry about the overuse of urgent care centers. It’s a typical non confrontational cheesy piece that doesn’t hurt anyone’s feelings in trying to get his point across. It turns out that having a primary care doctor is crucial. That relationship is important for better care. Urgent care centers run the risk of fragmenting that care. I live in that world now and it’s disturbing. Almost as disturbing as the blandness of Sanjay’s article. It would be nice for one of these media docs to nut up and take a real stand on the primary care shortage problem instead of ignoring the pay issue, ripping on the insurers or placating the NPs. Kind of like I do here every other freaking day. Now I know why I didn’t get a TV show.
Everybody says primary care docs are so important, but no one wants to pay them.
Everybody says primary care docs are so important, then they turn around and expand scope of practice for nurses. If the docs were so important, they couldn’t be replaced with nonphysicians.
I am afraid all of this pseudo primary care shortage is just another made up crisis to allow the government to step in further and mandate primary care docs to end private practice and become a govt employer.
I’d rather quit and find another profession.
As Bert Cooper on “Mad Men” observed, “And there they are, the crocodile tears.”
A pathetic vanilla take on primary care. Give me a break. The “team approach” is a copout. If you want qualified, skilled, dedicated primary care PHYSICIANS then treat them with respect they deserve. That means paying them, pay their loans, and give them incentives to choose this dying specialty. Selling out to midlevels as “the solution” to primary care shortages is simply downgrading the quality of care. Do you want a Mercedes or a Yugo? If midlevels are the solution to the primary care PHYSICIAN shortage, then primary care as we know it is truly dead. No medical student will go in debt $300-400,000 dollars, do 4 years of premed, then 4 years of Med school , then 3-4 years residency to be paid $150,000 dollars to work 70 hours a week the rest of their lives. It’s all about RESPECT!
How anyone in good conscience can recommend primary care to a student is beyond me.
As long as patient responsibility is ignored and primary docs are blamed for the problems we have, I tell students to get a billable set of skills and stay away.
Until patients are held accountable for their sh**y habits not a d**n thing is going to change in this country. Period.