Tuesday September 15, 2009 at 9:04
What family physicians are reading today in Family Practice management: how to help their uninsured patients get the care they need.
Here are the issue highlights posted to the web:
- What You Can Do to Help Your Uninsured Patients
- Offering Financial Assistance to the Newly Uninsured
- ICD-9 2010: New and Noteworthy Codes
- Five Communication Strategies to Promote Self-Management of Chronic Illness
- A Tool for Assessing Suicidal Patients
The goal of FPM is to support practicing docs in their everyday professional lives. What’s depressing is how much time and effort we have to pour into problems like “Offering financial assistance to the newly uninsured” and “New and noteworthy codes.”
None of that is about being a family physician - it is all about trying to slow the flow of those our society chooses to let go down the toilet.
I hear that Senator Olympia Snowe is suggesting we don’t have to rush in with a public option to stem the excesses of the insurance industry - we can wait to see if they clean up their own act and ‘trigger’ the public option if necessary.
Senator, please forgive my bluntness, but we hit that trigger more than a decade ago. The excesses are rampant. Unchecked by realistic options they will continue ad infinitum.
The promise of ‘cooperatives’ fails to sway me. I live in Seattle now with the truly excellent Group Health Cooperative. That venture took decades to get rolling and while it provides excellent care it has not changed the landscape of health care in the US.
The trigger has been pulled.
Real options, right now please.
