As a patient, and reader of KevinMD.com, I’d like to respond to a recent piece, Doctors face difficult choices to save Medicare.
The funny thing about this entire situation is that people refer to numbers. Numbers that consist of how much doctors are in debt when actually entering into the working world, how much Medicare reimburses or pays annually, how many patients are actually on Medicare, and how much in debt our country truly is. The bottom line is that these physicians are the soul of our country.
These are the men and women in this country that spend years in school learning how to save lives and take care of some of the most unruly and agonizing patients in the world. Our country fails to view these physicians as people as well. We expect these men and women to work around the clock to take care of us, individually, with patience, understanding, and knowledge. Expertise in their field that is questioned every day – questioned and denied by insurance companies that believe that they have a say in what medication is necessary for patients. Insurance companies that have now been given the power to make decisions for patients with absolutely no medical knowledge or background, but simply based off of a number step-edit system.
These doctors, these physicians, these people, have families that they rarely see. Have lives that they are barely able to live because despite what our country may believe, these men and women have now been forced to work around the clock simply to make a living that merely pays off what they initially set out to do. These people essentially give their lives away to the number of patients demanding instant results and instantaneous fixes to health problems related to their own decisions and the ways in which they have chosen to live. Regardless of the quality of patients in our country, or our lack to initiate any sort of self-help, these men and women still believe it is their responsibility to provide, provide, provide, as we continue to demand, demand, demand.
In no way do we apply, give thanks, or attribute the respect that these physicians deserve to them regularly. Instead we threaten their practices, their homes, their integrity and we questions their desire to practice medicine; which is perhaps one of the most dangerous things that we as a country can do.
When we demoralize these physicians, we show no respect for their hard work, for their lives being given up to take care of sometimes fifty to sixty strangers a day, then we give up on the survival of humanity. We give up on the people that provide regularly and we give up on the best healthcare system in the world. With lowering our respect for physicians, and only increasing our uncontrolled, invaluable ability to self-proclaim what we as individuals believe that we deserve, we put these men and women in extremely compromising positions. Positions that not only will cause them despise their patience, despise healthcare, but to ultimately despise the practice of medicine; if we continue down this path, our physicians will no longer be practicing for the right reasons, our doctors will no longer desire to have educations that place them hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and we will no longer uphold the strongest medicinal system in the world. We will fall, and we will suffer and we will hurt, because there will not be anyone on the other side to take care of us once it is all said and done.
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