Finishing 3rd Year
Understanding how systems work is integral to learning to excel within the system. Medicine and the healthcare system is no different. I am starting to see how patients work the system, how nurses, PA, and other healthcare workers fit into a rather efficient and often dehumanizing system.
As a medical student, I am now starting to understand more personally both the frustrations patients have with medicine and what doctors have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. What the overarching feeling that I get is that every resource is overtaxed, overworked, and underutilized by both the population at large and healthcare professionals.
I see people who often use the emergency department as their only access to healthcare. And by law, ERs mostly cannot turn anyone away. At least at my university hospital we are a federally and state funded institution so we have to accept anyone and everyone who reaches our doors. Unlike smaller community hospitals who can regulate costs by turning away people, large tertiary hospitals will often take everyone.
Everyone being people without insurance. It begs the question: if people run up large sums of money regardless of insurance, especially publicly funded institutions, would having a single payer insurance or even universal coverage decrease cost because people may utilize other venues of healthcare before reaching the ER and more importantly, relieve stress from healthcare providers?
The first point is probably the most argued as helpful for everyone, but I feel as a future healthcare provider the latter is much more important for the sustainability of our system. If physicians find billing and policy and getting paid just as time consuming as talking to patients we should have been accountants than doctors. Although we have social workers to help with insurance companies, why not have social work do what they're trained to do - support patients in all other psychosocial aspects of their life.
They have more to do than argue about coverage with insurance company representative. Healthcare is not a point to be argued, yes, it should be debated and regulated, but restricting costs at the sacrifice of patient care should never be appropriate for a system that tries to define itself through physician-patient relationships.
Am I the only one who feels this way?
http://awesome.goodmagazine.com/goodsheet/goodsheet002health.html
As a medical student, I am now starting to understand more personally both the frustrations patients have with medicine and what doctors have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. What the overarching feeling that I get is that every resource is overtaxed, overworked, and underutilized by both the population at large and healthcare professionals.
I see people who often use the emergency department as their only access to healthcare. And by law, ERs mostly cannot turn anyone away. At least at my university hospital we are a federally and state funded institution so we have to accept anyone and everyone who reaches our doors. Unlike smaller community hospitals who can regulate costs by turning away people, large tertiary hospitals will often take everyone.
Everyone being people without insurance. It begs the question: if people run up large sums of money regardless of insurance, especially publicly funded institutions, would having a single payer insurance or even universal coverage decrease cost because people may utilize other venues of healthcare before reaching the ER and more importantly, relieve stress from healthcare providers?
The first point is probably the most argued as helpful for everyone, but I feel as a future healthcare provider the latter is much more important for the sustainability of our system. If physicians find billing and policy and getting paid just as time consuming as talking to patients we should have been accountants than doctors. Although we have social workers to help with insurance companies, why not have social work do what they're trained to do - support patients in all other psychosocial aspects of their life.
They have more to do than argue about coverage with insurance company representative. Healthcare is not a point to be argued, yes, it should be debated and regulated, but restricting costs at the sacrifice of patient care should never be appropriate for a system that tries to define itself through physician-patient relationships.
Am I the only one who feels this way?
http://awesome.goodmagazine.com/goodsheet/goodsheet002health.html