Would Patients Pay For This?

By HANS DUVEFELT, MD Health care in America is fracturing right down the middle, and doctors are going to have to figure out if or how long they can straddle the divide between what patients want and what the Government and Corporate America want them to have. Up until this point, the momentum has been with the payers, Medicare and the insurance industry. But the more heavy-handed they become, the more inevitable the public backlash is becoming. It will come down to this, a kind of “straight face test” for health care: Would patients pay for this? The Annual Wellness visit, better named “Medicare’s Non-Physical” and some forms of “Population Management” are examples. Both are great ideas; an annual health review and planning session as well as doctors maintaining an overview of, and reaching out to, high risk groups of patients – in theory neither would be anything to argue with.   But the way it has to be done today, if we want to get paid, micromanaged from afar through bureaucratic edicts, is alienating the patients this was all intended to benefit. Totalitarian Health Care is Doomed I grew up and went to medical school in a socialist country. I admit Sweden had a kinder, gentler, soft-core socialism, but I also visited and followed the news about the Soviet Union, the Baltic states, East Germany and the former Czechoslovakia. American health care, as manifested by Medicare and the big insurance companies, is more and more starting to look like my vis...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Tech Uncategorized Source Type: blogs