Matthew Hahn is a family physician author of Distracted: How Regulations Are Destroying the Practice of Medicine and Preventing True Health-Care Reform.
When I began my career as a physician in the late 1990s, I was relatively apolitical. Since then, as our health care system has crumbled, and as its demise (and our repeated failure to fix things) has increasingly affected my patients and my practice, I have become very political. In 2008, I began giving lectures in the community in support of a single-payer health reform model. My political leanings tend …
We are a nation divided. Our two major political parties agree on essentially nothing. Republicans cannot agree even amongst themselves how to proceed on health care reform. It is demoralizing that even though U.S. health care has sunken to last among developed nations, our elected leaders are unable to envision or agree upon any effective solutions. We could all use a win. When it comes to health care reform, administrative …
As our new president has said, health care is complicated. Republicans call for Obamacare’s repeal, but are hard-pressed to come up with a workable alternative. Democrats recommend improving Obamacare, but are largely silent as to how they would do that. Americans are caught in the middle of this apparent health care quagmire. But for America to flourish as a nation, a solution must be found.
To start, we must frame the …
This April, my turn to take the medical board exam rolled back around, necessary every ten years for maintenance of certification. I studied diligently for the better part of three months preceding the test (and I think I did well). It was actually pleasurable to go back over details that I had forgotten and to catch up on newer developments in the field. I realized that I don’t do nearly …
The Senate version of the Republican health care bill lays bare the priorities of America’s current political leadership. It is not pretty. The new bill demonstrates the Republicans’ entirely unbalanced view of government and fiscal policy, where monetary value trumps all other values, and where only the wealthy are worthy of a helping hand.
These are the new values of the Republican leadership as evidenced by the new bill. We once …
Computers, more specifically, electronic health records (EHRs), will someday revolutionize the practice of medicine. In fact, successful computerization of medical care is the most critical step necessary to transform the American health care system from its current sorry state to the 21st-century system of our dreams. It is ironic, then, that today EHRs represent one of the worst problems plaguing medical professionals. At this point, many physicians would say that …
An excerpt from Distracted: How Regulations Are Destroying the Practice of Medicine and Preventing True Health-Care Reform.
If you want to learn what is wrong with the American health care system, just follow …
Last fall I was witness to a miraculous event. I rarely take off from work, but did so on a Friday to go to Baltimore to lend moral support to my family doctor friend, Cathy Maslen. She and her workmates at Chase Brexton Health Care (a community health clinic in the Baltimore area with a focus on the gay and transgender community and the inner-city poor) were doing something that …
A physician friend commented recently that practicing doctors and nurses, the highly trained professionals who understand health care better than anyone else, are always too busy working to be involved in health care administration and reform. It is one of the most basic and profound problems affecting our health care system — one of the reasons that health care in America does not get better. And it got me thinking.
Once …
With the ruination of American teaching using “value-based” purchasing and payment concepts virtually complete, the U.S. government is now training its sights on medicine with similar intentions. With the new MACRA pay-for-performance program, CMS bureaucrats believe they can force health care providers to practice better “quality” care by collecting clinical performance, practice-related, and cost data, and basing payment increases and penalties on the results.
There is one big problem associated with …
The American health care system is broken, but it is not really “health care” that is the problem.|
The science of medicine, the tests, and the treatments available are better than ever. It is health care bureaucracy that is the problem. But doctors, nurses, and patients bear the brunt of the dysfunction. Medical professionals are unable to practice, and patients are denied the care they need, even though it is readily …
We’ve taken care of Jane and her son, Sam, for a long time (the names are fictitious, but the rest of the story is true, and the real patient approved this story, in case you were wondering). At first, the focus was Sam, with typical well and sick visits. He was one of the sweetest kids we knew.
Sam also had a very significant learning disability. At one point I asked …
The Trump administration has made clear its intentions to drastically reduce the size and intrusive nature of government. Let’s hope that extends to the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, otherwise known as MACRA, the heavy-handed new government “value-based payment” program for medical care, enacted in 2015, and set to rear its ugly head beginning this year. MACRA must die. MACRA is administrative overkill in an industry already overburdened by …
Health care reform as it is typically discussed in America is dead for now. By “as it is typically discussed,” I mean broad “big picture” health care reform, which deals primarily with how we organize payments: government vs. free market, multi-payer vs. single payer, profit-based vs. not-for-profit. The Democrats tried. Obamacare’s shortcomings stem largely from the fact that neither President Obama nor the larger Democratic Party had the political power …
Like they have a gun to their heads, congressional Republicans, led by Paul Ryan, are moving ahead at warp speed to pass a sweeping new health care bill to replace Obamacare. Despite an almost deafening roar of objections from the many people who would lose coverage or whose insurance costs might go up; from major medical groups; and even from within its own party, they continue onward with this health …
One of the popular critiques of the American health care system is that it is high-volume, low-quality, and that this is a direct result of the traditional fee-for-service approach to paying doctors for medical care. In the past, doctors and hospitals have been paid much the same way that we pay for other goods and services. When they provide a service, such as an appointment or a procedure, they are …
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