Thank you David. I have learned a lot from you, and at 71, am beginning to feel there may be retirement in my future (up to this year, I had imagined myself immortal). Thank you for your insights and helpful guide to avoiding turbulence on the glide path.
Obviously, the corporate world has taken over in a big way, and I believe their model is unsustainable in the long run. In the short run, however, I guess we have to turn to them for a "transition model." When I started practice, one bought or bought into someone else's -- now you can't give away a practice, and you are saddled with all those things you so articulately enumerated.
We have had people in our town suddenly cease practice -- leaving many patients high and dry for a variety of reasons, the most difficult of them being their need for controlled substances. Some of those people find homes (we occasionally feel sorry for them and take them on, knowing full well there will be trouble when it is our turn to quit) -- some of them never do land anywhere but on the street or in an alcoholic stupor because no one will care for them.
American medicine has so quickly devolved -- who would have guessed this 10 years ago.
