Vote for the “Health Care Cat”–or your choice among other entries in Dr. Wes’s “2009 Health Care Reform Photoshop Contest.” Only one vote per person, Dr. Wes warns: This isn’t Chicago!
And don’t miss Dr. Wes’s prediction that Congress’s health bills may not mean more good health–but they sure will mean more paperwork, leading to a worsening of an already critical problem, a shortage of primary care physicians:
This is one of health care reform’s biggest problems and right now, just about every piece of legislation promised to further overwhelm primary care doctors with more hoop-jumping than ever before. From ICD-10 with it’s 150,000 billing codes, to mandates to purchase expensive medical record systems that, so far, have proven their worth to administrative collection agents in their protected silos well before they have proven their worth to our nation’s health. Or to pay for performance, a form of least-common-denominator medicine that forces compliance before enabling innovation in health care efficiency. Primary care is no longer sexy, it’s becoming cookbook. So much so that nurse coordinators have become the new buzzword for primary care – not exactly a reason to enter four long years of medical school and three more years of residency training. Who wants to go to school of become a doctor only to find out that you’re really going to school to become a nurse manager?
Read it and weep.