Believe it or not, there are those of us still alive who remember when doctors did house calls; you went to the same doctor for most of your life and he knew everything in the world about you, your family and your physical state of being. Those were, by and large, the days before healthcare insurance, when people took care of themselves and were really sick or in discomfort before they went to the doctor's office; nobody went to the emergency room unless they arrived by ambulance. The finest, the greatest medical system in the world is in bad need of emergency care of its own. I believe it all started when employers started to offer group health insurance as a method of attracting and retaining quality employees. From then on, the whole ball game changed. Healthcare was no longer an out-of-pocket expense and emergency room visits came into vogue; you just weren't a member of American society unless you'd been to the E.R. lately. Surely, E.R.'s were designed to be just that, and you were supposed to take care of your colds and warts during the weekdays with your doctor. But, your doctor wasn't necessarily your doctor anymore, unless he belonged to your plan and the net cost to you was no difference.
The cost of insurance inevitably started to rise. Around that time, doctors started to invest in pharmaceutical companies, pharmaceutical companies started to invest in hospitals, hospitals started to invest in insurance companies... everybody started to invest in everybody and the incentives for cost control disappeared. Circling the pools like sharks, attorneys decided they wanted a slice of the pie for themselves and they started to sue the arms and legs off of any medical provider who could walk or talk. Profits for doctors started to dwindle; all of the money involved in the primary medical care industry had left the doctor's office and headed out the door.
The result is easy to foresee: fewer students taking up the practice of medicine, doctors retiring early or leaving the profession, and a dwindling presence of qualified doctors pushing those remaining into unsustainable workloads. By 2025, just 12 years down the road, there will be a critical shortage of 130,000 physicians according to the American Association of Medical Colleges. In the biggest irony of the century, our good doctors are leaving the country to practice someplace else, when it used to be the other way around.
Now enter ObamaCare. The era of socialized medicine is going to bring its own pressures and frustrations to the system. Don't try to tell me it is not socialized medicine; anytime all doctors get paid the same for a procedure, anytime all citizens have to participate, anytime the government controls the quality of your healthcare and decides whether or not you get it at all... you have socialized medicine.
We need Congress to show some leadership on the issue. We need Congress to work together to not only throw ObamaCare out, but to solve the not-so-complex issues that put upward pressure on the cost of medical care. We cannot fix a broken system by installing another broken system. And we cannot afford to wait until 2014 to get started on the project.
That's MY AMERICAN OPINION, respectfully submitted.
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