August 27th, 2011 by Stanley Feld, M.D. in Health Policy, Opinion
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The Role of Physicians in Controlling Medical Care Costs and Reducing Waste by the RAND Corporation and David Geffen, University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine, Santa Monica was just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). I do not think the JAMA should have published this article.
1.Why would the JAMA publish such an article?
2. Why are physicians blamed for all the waste in the system?
3. Why is it the physicians’ responsibility to eliminate waste when they are not the cause of the greatest percentage of the waste?
“The amount of money spent on medical care is increasing faster than the gross domestic product (GDP), and the federal deficit is increasing.”
The initial statement assumes that the government deficit is increasing because physicians control government spending for healthcare.
This is only partly correct. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Repairing the Healthcare System*
July 5th, 2010 by Shadowfax in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion, True Stories
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I don’t know what’s going on with American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) lately, but it’s disheartening. Their abdication of responsibility and engagement during the healthcare reform debate was depressing. Then there was a rigged poll designed to elicit a predetermined result. Now I see a bizarre op-ed piece in USA Today entitled “Opposing view on drug addiction: Don’t make us ‘pain police'” and authored by ACEP President Angela Gardener. An excerpt:
The patient-physician relationship is sacrosanct, demanding candor and trust. In the emergency department, trust is built in nanoseconds because patients and doctors do not have prior relationships. Knowing that any pain prescription will be entered into a large, public database might prevent patients from being truthful, or in the worst case, from seeking needed care. … As an emergency physician, I can assure you that the drug abusers who use the emergency room simply to get a prescription drug fix represent a micropopulation of the 120 million patients who seek emergency care every year in the USA. … Put bluntly, if legislators have money to spend, they should spend it where it will do the most good for our patients, and that is not on drug databases.
I really don’t know what to say, other than to wonder whether Dr. Gardner and I practice in the same United States in which abuse of prescription drugs is growing exponentially and in which “drug-seeking” patients are a part of each and every shift worked in the ER, where deaths due to overdoses of prescription medications are on the rise, and where diversion of narcotics is a serious and growing problem. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Movin' Meat*
