I've had a really great week. Its been a busy week, a hectic week, but overall a good useful week in the life of this country doctor. I've had sick patients and well patients and patients that made a trip into the office just to ask my opinion about the new health care bill signed into law. But mostly this week, I've been proud to see one of my nurses become a Grandma to her first grandson and I watch my youngest daughter learn to make her e's without them looking like some sort of deformed monsters.
While I have been living life, I still have been busy annoying Congress... see that SGR that I keep talking to y'all about was up to be renewed again for like the fourth time this year. And it actually was the second time that doctors worked for 24 hours with a 21.2% pay cut but medicare CMS promises that they will go back and pay us all the right amount. Pardon me, if I am not to comforted in Government promises after having to right out my IRS check this week. I have to pay them on time but they can just decide to not pay me for two weeks while Congress is debating on whether or not doctors are a worthy group to pay. Pardon me, but if the federal government is going to hand out money like lolly pops at my office then why are they so DAMN tight with fixing the FLAWED formula for Medicare Physician repayment. I mean, they have payed for half of Wall Street and GMC, so why cannot we fix the physician payment formula since the President has screwed us all with his health care plan.
I know, that according to the AMA and the AAFP, I am supposed to take hold of the health care bill and be a proud provider in this new system, I am not. If I wanted to be a socialist I would move to Moscow. I disagree with the government mandating any purchase of a product and can see no way that this is going to do anything other than raise the cost of insurance for those of us with private insurance. I disagree with $500 million dollars being cut from medicare. I disagree with forcing the states to take millions more onto their medicaid roles when many states cannot pay the medical bills that they have. Yet, I have always agreed that health care needed reform. We pay our specialist too much and pay too much for procedures. There is not enough incentive to go into primary care and we are letting to much of that care go to under trained nurses who often end up acting like doctors. There is a time and a place for a nurse practitioners care but it is not in running their own clinic and being called Doctor cause they have a PhD in nursing that just confuses patients.
Did you know that we in the US have one of the most expensive health care systems in the world and we get as a society some of the worse care? Japan does worlds better with less cost, but then they don't have quit as many law suits. I think Congress failed to realize that there can be no meaningful health care reform without torte reform.
But, anyway... you have probably gone to sleep reading this by now, but the original question was how do we get the uninvolved involved? Why do most Americans care? As long as they have money to pay their bills and a job, most Americans don't seem to care. But as the jobs numbers showed today with 24,000 new unemployed I think maybe the time has come that more and more Americans will listen... So stand up and speak out. Whatever your opinion is at least lets get it out there... for the first time in years, we as a society are not totally dependant on the major networks to give us our news and information. The more we talk and the more information we share, the more we can hope to get the uninvolved interested.
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