In recent years, doctor-bashing has become a popular hobby. Physicians seem to blamed for everything. A friend and retired pathologist, Dr. Richard Reece, recently described this phenomenon on his blog as follows (excerpt):
For a number of years, physicians, as the most visible symbol of health care delivery, have been criticized, chastised, and blamed for everything — as the primary source of exploding health costs, practicing poor quality care, to being computer troglodytes for failing to accept money-losing electronic health records designed to document their every act.
You can tax doctors all you want, reduce their fees, regulate them, blame them for system dysfunction, but these actions taken collectively, are likely to reduce the number of existing doctors, discourage young people from entering the profession, and cause mobile doctors to adopt other options. One of the most common options is not seeing new Medicare and Medicaid patients because of low rates of payments and high burdens of paperwork.
The moral of this tale: without more doctors, health care reform measures promising greater access is meaningless, and more regulations, more information technology, more cuts in reimbursement, even more token rewards for installing EHRs and meeting quality indicators, are not likely to produce more doctors.
Marginalizing and blaming doctors is, at best, counterproductive to realizing meaningful healthcare reform. Let’s all come together and engage in constructive dialogue. The stakes are too high and affect everyone in the country.
