Thursday September 10, 2009 at 7:29
“Jens N. Olsgaard manned a community health center in Butte, Mont., where four of five patients had no insurance, and treatment was often structured around ability to pay. The students learned not only to deliver babies and suture wounds, but also to order unnecessary tests as protection against lawsuits, to hector specialists into seeing Medicaid patients, to match patients with prescriptions on Wal-Mart’s $4 list. And they saw firsthand what Mr. Olsgaard called “a tidal wave of chronic disease” — diabetes, hypertension, obesity, depression — that left many questioning how much any one physician could really accomplish. “I often wondered what we were actually doing to help people,” Mr. Olsgaard said.”
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Summer of Work Exposes Medical Students to System’s Ills - NYTimes.com
Want a peek into the status quo of primary care? Ever wonder why US outcomes lag so far behind that of the developed world while we spend 1.5x more per person on health care?
This is just the tip of the iceberg, folks. The USS Health Care Titanic is full steam ahead.
