Restoring Healthcare

We are forced to squeeze in more and more patients per day due to decreasing insurance reimbursements for office visits. We don’t get to spend the necessary time with our patients to provide the care they need. We are required to prescribe medications that we know will not work, and months later appeal to insurance to cover the medication that the patient actually needs. We are required to order imaging that we know is not sufficient in order to get the necessary advanced imaging covered by insurance. We spend the majority of our days documenting visits, calling pharmacies, and appealing insurance denials. Physicians try their best to provide good patient care in these circumstances, but we face the brunt of patient dissatisfaction, malpractice liability, and burnout. We went through nearly a decade of training to care for our patients, but in practice we are forced to work in designed-to-fail systems until we get so burned out that we stop practicing medicine entirely.

We pay several hundred dollars a month or have our employers cover a percentage of the costs to have health insurance. Though, at traditional clinics we still cannot get in to see a doctor for several weeks and when we do, we have co-pays, long wait times and rushed or impersonal visits. It is often weeks to months before getting any necessary imaging or referrals due to needing insurance authorization. We often put off routine visits or minor health concerns due to the hassle of going to the doctor. If we need to be seen urgently, most traditional clinics do not offer last minute visits and urgent care/emergency room visits are often considered out of network. If we have a high-deductible plan, health insurance does not kick in until health care costs exceed several thousands of dollars, and even then most plans only cover a percentage of the costs above the deductible. We have health insurance in case of an emergency, but at the end of the day, most of us are paying thousands of dollars to receive minimal benefits, and in most cases optimal care is actually delayed due to insurance hurdles.

Health insurance companies do not have any medical training yet dictate how physicians can practice; they make billions of dollars yet deny necessary medications/imaging and delay necessary medical care; they allow physicians to take on the brunt of the frontline dissatisfaction while pulling the strings from a distance. We wonder why healthcare is so deficient in the U.S. and it is because it is a broken system that is not designed to keep you healthy. Enough is enough.