I had known Dr. Lown as a doctor and a patient; now I got to know him as an activist. We agreed that the health care system needed to change. To do that, Dr. Lown said, “doctors of conscience” have to “resist the industrialization of their profession.”
One Comment
Good post. I would have enjoyed reading your thoughts on the subject.
The NYT author, Dr Rich Joseph, is naive. While Dr Lown has the fire, the author lacks the knowledge and maturty to speak with conviction and persuasion on the topic. The medical industrry machinery will chew him and spit him out.
We are fighting an entrenched system with myriad parties that refuse to walk away from opportunities to drive their personal wealth. This is America. It is all about capitalism and greed. HCA, AMA, Aetna. Humana, medical education systems, NBME, ACGME and noncompliant patients with self induced chronic medical illnesses all want their cake and eat it too. So Dr Joseph needs to do more a honest moral inventory and adopt a Don Quijote approach.
The best answer was provided, unwittingly, by Dr Elisabeth Rosenthal. To wit, “The current market for healthcare just doesn’t deliver. It is deeply, perhaps fatally, flawed. Even market economists themselves don’t believe in it anymore. ‘It’s now so dysfunctional that I sometimes think the only solution is to blow the whole thing up. It’s not like any market on Earth,’ says Glenn Melnick, a professor of health economics and finance at the University of Southern California.”, Excerpt From “An American Sickness” by Elisabeth Rosenthal, M.D., 2017, Penguin Books.
The system needs to fail. Just like Presidents Bush and Obama saved big banks, they should have been allowed to fail. Too much coddling and enabling going on in our culture. Blow up the health care industry.
Failure is a healthy, natural way of shaping evolutionary trends. Let the health system fail, encourage physicians to take back medicine, have them put aside their own greed and hunger for revenue, and make patients decide whether they will be compliant in their treatment for their self induced chronic illnesses or be discharged by the physician because they are using limited resources.
Failure is like burning agricultural crops after being harvested. The following year they produce much fruit
Choices matter. Choose them wisely