Chuckle #487 | March 21st, 2012
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I’m
one of those weirdoes who enjoy spending time in a doctor’s waiting room - the
longer the better. Sounds lame, I know. But as a busy mother of three the only chance
I get to catch up with Brad and Angelina is when I’m trapped at the doctor’s
office. Trashy magazines are a guilty,
therapeutic pleasure, and this guilty pleasure has always had its special time
and place in my life.
Until
now…
You
see, cost pressures from our delicately balanced healthcare ecosystem have forced doctors to become more
efficient. This means that during certain
low reimbursement preventative care visits, docs have exactly 17 minutes to run
us through a gamut of tests while listening to what we have to say. After that they start losing money.
As
a result of doctors “optimizing”, I get to spend less time in the waiting room
looking at photos of celebrity babies. This
makes me sad. I know, to most guys,
this logic must seem terribly flawed.
But
I don’t blame my doctors.
Doctors
have spent years in training, are saddled with debt, struggle with insurance
paperwork overload, and shell out a third of their income in malpractice
insurance. Doctors could continue to work for peanuts, but then only idiots who can’t
do the math (and a few genuine Mother Teresa types) would opt for medical
school. The entire system would
collapse.
And
strangely enough, I prefer to rely on non-idiots for my healthcare needs.
So
what can we do, as patients, to ensure that relatively intelligent people continue
to choose a career in medicine? For
starters, we can all do our part to increase ‘patient efficiencies’, by being
on time, talking really fast, and focusing on the big picture. For example, one shouldn’t waste time describing
the wart on one’s big toe if one has a giant
painful growth on one’s groin.
For
people who don’t like the new ‘assembly line’ approach to primary care, there’s
“concierge”. Concierge is where the
patient pays a hefty fee up front to be able to talk their doctor into a coma. That fee is obviously not covered by
insurance, so the 99% need not apply.
Personally,
I don’t want to pay extra for the privilege of blabbering. I can lay it all on
the examining table pretty quickly; I can strip in a snap, and I regularly access
WEB MD online. There’s no need for me to
spend hours discussing my symptoms with my doctor when there is so much misinformation
available on the web, (most of it, oddly, pointing to “brain tumor”.)
Not
sure if you’ve noticed this, but internet based self-diagnosis has a traumatic downside.
I’ve
made my peace with speed doctoring. But I
still miss my Hollywood therapy hours in the waiting room. Nowadays I’m lucky to have even a five minute
reprieve before seeing the doctor. That’s not nearly enough time to finish a feature
on Demi and Ashton’s break-up, forget about Time’s 20 page in-depth profile on
Steve Jobs.
Like
I said, I don’t blame my doctors for harshing my mellow, I blame the
system. But until things change for the
better, I need to adapt. From now on I’ll
focus on only the best content in
People, and avoid wasting my time on any Lindsay Lohan mug shots.
Americans
all over the country are making sacrifices to ensure that excellent healthcare
is available for all, and not just the wealthy.
I accept my fate and I’ll support this new factory-line style healthcare
delivery system as best I can. In the
interest of the greater good, I will put my magazine down promptly when called,
and keep my conversation with the doctor as succinct as a chatty Cathy like me possibly
can.
That,
and my own personal subscription to People will probably do the trick.
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