Health in America 

These are the truths:

Government or “Single Payer” monopolistic health care does not work. Look at the VA or British or Canadian heath care with all their restrictions and delayed treatments and delayed surgeries. Also, look at the low quality of Cardiology big health care companies like Kaiser provide in their outlying facilities. 

Free health care will be abused by some patients 

Salaried doctors are forced to see more patients in less time than is safe. Most patients have multiple problems that can’t be addressed in 15 to 20 minutes of an office visit. Hospitalists, seeing over 18 patients a day, cannot give patients the time they need

People without health insurance go to Emergency Rooms because they are open 24x7 and they can’t be turned away (so they are basically free) - and we all end up paying for this with higher premiums for our own health insurance as the hospitals have to charge more to us because of all the free care they are obliged to give.

Emergency Rooms would see 90 percent less patients if patients were subsidized to see good primary care with doctors that had the time and staff to control diabetes, hypertension, cholesterol, drug abuse etc. Primary care docs are a dying breed as they are not paid for their time and suffer from high office overhead. They can make three times a much as a Hospitalist, so why have an office?

Doctors order more tests because they are afraid of lawyers

Some Doctors order unnecessary procedures and tests because they profit from them

Most physicians are not trained well to do physical examinations and rely too much on technology to make the diagnosis when symptoms occur, but basic physical exams will find problems long before symptoms occur 

Nurse practitioners have 1000 hours of training. Doctors have 11,000 hours of training. Nurse practitioners should not be used as diagnosticians as they have very little knowledge of the over 100,000 medical diagnoses that can take 50 years to learn or see. They do poor physical exams are often do not know how to treat simple diagnoses outside of the narrow range of things they have been taught to do. I know of Heath Plans that are using people as “primary doctors” that have had only 6 weeks of training and had never had exposure to the health field before!

The solution is to encourage more MD’s or DO’s to become Primary Care docs by paying them enough to make a decent living. This will be cheaper in the long run by keeping people out of Emergency Rooms and hospitals with good primary preventive care. 

Also, make a national cap on malpractice damages, so that malpractice insurance would not be as expensive and doctors won’t need to order so many unnecessary tests