More Doctors Giving Up Private Practices... multiple layers to this one...

So yesterday when I caught the above the fold Chinese Leaders Divided on Whether to Let Currency Rise... I dug in and didn't get a chance to go back closely through the Business section.

 

Today as my mind strayed away from Husserl I picked up the paper---errr really my eye was caught by the semi-smiling middle aged doctor looking at me--and read an article on the shift away from private practice for Doctors.

 

NYT: 

Traditionally, American medicine has been largely a cottage industry. Most doctors cared for patients in small, privately owned clinics — sometimes in rooms adjoining their homes.

But an increasing share of young physicians, burdened by medical school debts and seeking regular hours, are deciding against opening private practices. Instead, they are accepting salaries at hospitals and health systems. And a growing number of older doctors — facing rising costs and fearing they will not be able to recruit junior partners — are selling their practices and moving into salaried jobs, too.

As recently as 2005, more than two-thirds of medical practices were physician-owned — a share that had been relatively constant for many years, the Medical Group Management Association says. But within three years, that share dropped below 50 percent, and analysts say the slide has continued.

For patients, the transformation in medicine is a mixed blessing. Ideally, bigger health care organizations can provide better, more coordinated care. But the intimacy of longstanding doctor-patient relationships may be going the way of the house call.

In a way this can be dissected in a number of different directions.  One you can point to a decline of the "trade"---that being a "Doctor" is no longer acceptable to most Doctors.  They want salaries, and manageable hours.  At the same time you could say that it is a turn back towards the "trade"--that doing the business end of medicine takes time and energy away from treating patients (if they wanted to manage a business they'd have gone to get their MBA not MD?).

 

I think its a good thing---people will frown that it ruins the doctor patient relationship that for most of us has not existed except in stories we hear when we visit the grandparents.  Most Doctors use bad medicine... I'll take a leap and say some of those "traditionalists" doctors who care more about the human side of medicine are more than likely also predisposed to not caring about the statistical data available on treatments that work.

 

Again I think that the art, or "trade" of being a Doctor is likely in decline.  But I don't think most people can ever master their trade anyways.  The more people realize clock in and clock out... that just means fewer people who will feign "expertise" as Doctors in order to gain egotistical or monetary value from that skill set being 100% of where they get their human worth.

 

I say, clock in and clock out.  Have a family, a book club, and a decent life... my doctor (errr my PA...) doesn't need to get their entire value and self worth from being a small business owner trying to make a profit.

 

I feel like I should go find you a quote from Nietzsche or Marx as both have sections of writing that come to mind.  I'll save it for another day....  As part of me disagree's with some of the things I just said/postulated...

Posted via email from Jim Nichols