Happy New Year from Iris and Corey
Happy New Year from Iris and Corey
3 Responses to “Happy New Year from Iris and Corey”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Happy New Year from Iris and Corey
You must be logged in to post a comment.
January 18th, 2010 at 08:40
To view the Kirschner Chronicle: http://www.kirschner1.com/KC10
January 18th, 2010 at 22:18
The healthcare reform debate to me is like a trip down memory lane. When I was studying for my Master of Healthcare Administration, the solution du jours were health maintenance organizations (HMOs), and the often lovingly or derisively called “doc-the-boxes” which promised gatekeepers would keep down healthcare costs. Access to healthcare became a frustrating attempt at trying to fool your physician assistant or nurse practitioner into thinking you had to be treated by a physician. Access to specialists came much later if you convinced the front-end you needed it. The internet and affectations such as “webMD” cropped up as alternatives to these often frustrating “cost-controlling” tactics. When I was a Medical Service Corps officer in the USAF, we saw the resurgence of “cold-packs” which were a throw-back to the “war years” when medical facilities had to gird their proverbial loins for serious conditions and literally hand out mostly over-the-counter medications that masked or, frankly, made you forget your basic condition until the body in most cases healed itself. This Veterans Day we might remember soldiers being handed APCs — combinations of Aspirin, Phenacticine, and Codeine. What grew out of these cost-cutting measures in peace, war, and everything in between was my favorite battle cry of healthcare reform: “patient heal thyself” (which is a play on words from Luke 4:23). By the time patients did see a medical professional, they had such exotic variations of their original ailments that the medical world became shell-shocked seeing 80-90% of their daily patient workload who required intensive treatment when they would have all benefited from earlier treatment. While madam Pelosi pats herself on the back, we must all remember not to confuse access, quality, appropriateness, immediacy and relevance with “public options” or Medicare reductions as solutions. To paraphrase Bill Clinton: It’s the Patient Stupid!