“Don’t worry, doc. It’s just one eye. I’ve got two.”
My stomach lurched to hear this statement. A guy who has done nothing wrong aside from choosing self-employment (and perhaps inheriting less-than-stellar genes) is left with the choice: financial devastation or blindness in one eye. He works hard, has served the country, didn’t complain to me at all, yet here he is about to be swallowed by the ever widening maw of impossible medical expense.
The real question I am asking here is not if this care is good or bad (the answer to that is, yes, it is good and bad), but whether it is patient-centered.
This should be a silly question, like asking if car-repair is car-centered. But it is clear that much of the high cost of care in our country is due to the huge number of unnecessary procedures, medications, hospitalizations, and services given to/done on people. Unnecessary care is, almost always, not patient-centered.
Rather than dwelling on the malfunction of the system, however, I want to turn my eyes toward what most people don\’t see: what real patient-centered care could and should be. It\’s not that I am suddenly wiser than my colleagues in the sick-care system. Despite 18 years in practice, I was not able to see what true patient-centered care looked like until I left the system.
Fortunately for this my patient, I was not only able to reunite him with the joys of sitting, but I was able, with a little research, to find him his proctological savior at a low cost. Unfortunately, most patients don\’t have docs who are economically incentivized to save them money, and most people don\’t realize all of the games played by pharmaceutical companies and pharmacies to routinely perform wallet biopsies, nor do they know how to find the cheapest prices for their medications.
I don\’t know what can be done about this kind of thing aside from increasing awareness. I\’m not real confident in any government solution. People just need to be smarter shoppers when it comes to their care. It\’s just a shame that people who are dealing with health problems (even if it is just trouble sitting) have to outsmart the gaming done by those supposedly trying to help them.
Until our system can figure out a way to handle this kind of thing, we will pay a big price. Waiting for problems to become emergencies is a terribly expensive practice. I\’m not sure I know exactly what needs to be done for this, but it\’s becoming an increasingly common problem. Some say that a single-payor system will be the remedy, but they ignore the fact that a third-party payor system is what got us in this mess in the first place. Things are far too expensive because patients don\’t have to pay for them. That\’s why stress tests, which don\’t actually cost thousands of dollars to do, are so expensive. That\’s why there is $100 hemorrhoid cream. That\’s why medications are unreasonably expensive: someone else pays the bill.
