Children’s Faces…
An old favorite smidgen of poetry went lost during one of my office moves, but most parents know it:
Children’s faces looking up
Holding wonder like a cup…”
Last week I had a cute little patient show up in an Alice Blue gown. I asked what the occasion was and her Mom said she always dresses like that (she’s 3 and a half). I grabbed my Polaroid (yes they still make them) and took two quick shots, one for her and one for me. The wonder in her eyes was priceless as she saw her Princess image slowly appear.
Why bring that up? Because I’m afraid for my profession, afraid for tomorrow’s children and the health care they’ll receive. That may be a stretch but these are worrisome times for all of us at both ends of medicine. Will the doctor who starts her practice in 2016 have the time and opportunity to catch those moments as I have since 1966? It seems unlikely.
This last election seemed so foreordained that I wonder how many folks listened to the choices regarding health care as well as so many other issues. In 1993 we were clearly threatened by Hillarycare and responded effectively. This time all of us are sick of insurance companies, $500 prescriptions, and the drumbeat of “47 million uninsured” that we’re permitting a select group of technocrats (mainly unelected) to take over and redesign our most personal health care decisions. The solo practitioner is targeted for extinction – you can look it up in Mr. Daschle’s little book on the government’s plans for your family’s care. If you have elderly folks in your family, they’d better stay healthy!
One of the key strategies in this conversion to socialized medicine is electronic medical records, which will allegedly eliminate mistakes and inefficiencies. Now many doctors and hospitals are going in that direction and for those who can afford it, there may be some benefits. But don’t buy that “efficiency” BS. It’s all about control of the patients and doctors, endangering both our and your privacy so the wise people in Washington and Sacramento can decide who gets what care and whether it’s worth paying for (after the fact of course). Fact is many hospitals and medical groups report a whole new set of problems in this brave new world. Even the Joint Commission, the body that accredits hospitals, has warned that reliance on computers is leading to less focus on patients and more opportunities for errors that keep repeating themselves. The VA system (which is pretty much what medicine will look like if the government takes it over) recently found out after months of errors that their computerized bar-code reading medication system was set up wrong and that thousands of patients got incorrect doses!
Do you really want a computerized robot taking your history and examining you? (I know they can do surgery but humans still have to tell them what to do.)
Yep, our health care “system” isn’t a system so much as a conglomeration of arrangements so typical of America. Foreign visitors are always amazed at all the choices we have, from cars to cereals. Our medical care is a mess but it’s the best in the world, statistics be damned. Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is the worst of all possible political arrangements except
for all the others that have been tried. So it is with our health care.