Q: You're a doctor; why do you care so much about this? You're making bank!
"You're a doctor; why do you care so much about this? You're making bank!" I get this comment a lot. Here's the long and the short of it: yes, physicians make lots of money. Yes, some salaries in medicine are highly inflated compared to others. But rather than go down the "we've sacrificed years of our lives for this" pathway, I want you to remember that physicians are people. We get sick. We have families. We hate knuckleheaded people in positions of power telling us what to
Q: What about ChoosingWisely.org? Won't that decrease costs?
"What about ChoosingWisely.org? Won't that decrease costs?" This question was posed by an informed commentor on a health website I frequent. I think the Choosing Wisely campaign is pretty genius. It provides clinicians with helpful guidelines on how to manage the almost infinite amount of medical knowledge that is out there. It suggests ideas on how to order labs, scans, referrals, etc. Best of all, their intentions seem pretty pure. My issue with the campaign, however, is th
Start With Kids; Their Providers are Nice
In devising the P.S.Y.C.H. plan, I've run into quite a few folks who say, "Oh my god, Americans would never go for this." And I agree wholeheartedly. Trying something drastically different that affects Americans' pocketbooks that they can't immediately digest would take a miracle (and I'm no Steve Jobs). We are a people that need to "test the waters" first. And while typically our children are not test subjects, I think they'd be the perfect way to pilot a universal health de