Crisis in Health care in the Hands of Politicians:

What is Wrong with this Picture?

It is always the same refrain: "How to pay for health caref or everyone?"

I think the question is the wrong one.

Shouldn't it be "how to drive down the cost and expand the supply?"

Since when does simple economics no longer apply to health care?

Are we all so complacent and cerebrally inert to accept that this problem, and it is a problem, should be left to the politicians?

How many medical procedures are performed every year in the United States?

Of those, what percentage is routine?

Of that group, what percentage is diagnosed with a checklist? You know what I am talking about. You visit a doctor with a complaint and he, or, more likely, his physician assistant asks you a series of questions. These questions are the "checklist."

Does the physician who administers a checklist have to be a straight A student? Does he have to be at the top of his class in college?

Why don't we ask our politicians to increase the supply of physicians for checklist medicine? Recruiting would go like this:

"Hey, all you B students, wanna bea doctor? The state of Colorado is offering you a free education for the Checklist Doctor (CD) degree. Not only is the education free, but the state will pay you a monthly stipend to take the classes. No longer do you have to have the M Deity degree. It is a 6-year program of classes and one year of apprenticeship. When finished (at the age of 25), you can only practice medicine to relieve patients of mundane, ordinary ills. No surgery, no complex diagnostics are allowed, but you will be authorized to make the patient feel better, to prescribe pharmaceuticals and physical therapy."

The objective would be to triple or quadruple the number of physicians, separate the ordinarily ill from the extraordinarily ill, match the skill set to the problem, and drive down costs. It makes no sense to have a rocket scientist changing spark plugs and no one would suggest that that would be a solution to sluggish automobile performance. So why should health care have the elite taking care of the mundane?

And I assert that the elite, after decades of taking care of the mundane, devolve into the ordinary.

I am the son of a physician, the brother of a physician, and the brother-in-law of a physician so I understand how they feel about these issues.

They hate me.

I also spent many years working as a consultant to improve the processes of hospitals. The idea was to make the hospitals deliver what they promised to deliver on-time, correctly, and at the lowest possible cost.

And that, my friends, is another story that must be told, but not today.