"My colleagues who have already left practice all say they still love patient care, being a doctor. They just couldn't stand everything else." By which he meant "a never-ending attack on the profession from government, insurance companies and lawyers ... progressively intrusive and usually unproductive rules and regulations," topped by an electronic health records (EHR) mandate that produces nothing more than "billing and legal documents" — and degraded medicine.
You may have zero sympathy for doctors, but think about the extraordinary loss to society — and maybe to you, one day — of driving away 40 years of irreplaceable clinical experience.
And for what? The newly elected Barack Obama told the nation in 2009 that "it just won't save billions of dollars" — $77 billion a year, promised the administration — "and thousands of jobs, it will save lives." He then threw a cool $27 billion at going paperless by 2015.
It's 2015 and what have we achieved? The $27 billion is gone, of course. The $77 billion in savings became a joke. Indeed, reported the Health and Human Services inspector general in 2014, "EHR technology can make it easier to commit fraud," as in Medicare fraud, the copy-and-paste function allowing the instant filling of vast data fields, facilitating billing inflation.
Read the rest of the story
No comments:
Post a Comment