Guys and gals, can you please post to HHS Leavitt's blog again?
Topic:
Value-Driven Health CareHere's my recent reply (waiting moderation):
Many positive posts, yet none of the authors are physicians, who are the ones that will be most affected by your drive towards "value driven healthcare". If you go to the physician-only site,
www.sermo.com, there are numerous active discussion threads concerning anxiety about bankruptcy, about how to disenroll from Medicare, and about the poor state of affairs for general medicine and family practice, and of course about you and others in power or trying to manipulate physicians through poorly thought-out legislation. There is now even a letter over at
www.sermo.com is to be sent to Congress that has so far been signed by 2700 physicians.
Quality... standardization... negotiate lower prices... all are euphemisms for processes meant to force physicians to work for the minimalist wage as possible, all the while failing to control high malpractice premiums with tort reform, failing to control the burden of the ever expanding uninsured costs, and failing to control the abuses of HMOs hell bent on trying to force doctors to work for little to nothing. Physicians on the other hand cannot unionize or walk out in the jobs like other workers can so as to negotiate a living wage.
Mr. Secretary, healthcare is not like buying a car. You are buying a complicated service that is delivered by human beings that have spent their lives trying to improve the lives of their patients. Medicine is an art that is very tough to quantify, qualify, and at times to control.
Cutting provider earnings together with forcing them into expensive pay-for-performance and e-prescribing schemes costing tens of thousands of dollars in computers, EMRs, and in more secretarial overhead will essentially destroy medicine and Medicare.
NO studies have yet to demonstrate that EMRs improve quality or cut costs. On the contrary numerous studies have shown just the opposite, including 3 major studies in the past six months alone, from the Centers for Disease Control, the Medical Records Institute, and Congressional Budget Office.
Yet you continue to push your agenda of a "value driven healthcare system". Maybe one day you can actually visit a physician office to see what these practices have to go through simply to keep their doors open.
Sincerely,
Al Borges M.D.
URL:
http://secretarysblog.hhs.gov/my_weblog/2008/05/value-driven-he.html
