What is your view of the crisis in healthcare?
	Medicine is in crisis today, with more and more people being left out of affordable care (especially primary care), not because of the rising cost of the care itself, but because of the outrageous costs of Managed Care. While the politicians argue over the necessity of “Health Care Coverage” the real problem is not coverage, it’s access to care itself.  The kind of coverage we have in Managed Care makes access to care more restrictive and more expensive. Just think, everyone in Canada or Great Britain has coverage, but do they all get care? And those that do, do they get it on time? And is it any good? Did you know that over fifty cents of every dollar that goes into the Managed Care system that is intended for your primary care doctor’s services is lost? The first part is lost to the administrative costs of the Insurance or Government bureaucracy. That’s 25-30 cents lost to expenses and profits of all the Managed Care entities. These organizations control your health care and health care dollar. The other 25 cents is spent by the Primary Care office on extra overhead and administrative costs. These costs would not exist for the Primary Care office if it weren’t for Managed Care. On top of that, Managed Care doesn’t pay a doctor what the actual service or office visit is worth, just what they decide to pay according to an arbitrary coding and fee schedule. All doctors (and providers) must sign a contract to accept these fee schedules or else they cannot get paid to see a patient who is on a particular Managed Care plan. The solution according to the big government and central control advocates is for the Primary Care doctor just to see more patients. This we are doing now. Many Primary Care doctors now see 35-40 patients a day to make ends meet. This is due to shrinking reimbursements and increasing administrative overhead. Quality of care is compromised. In fact, all medical care today, fragmented by Managed Care, is not even safe. Have you or a loved one been to the Emergency Room or in any hospital lately? The reason care is bad is that the doctor who knows you best is too overloaded to be “in the loop.” Every caregiver is overloaded and spread thin. The real question that should be asked of those politicians who make the rules is:  “What kind of attorney (or consultant, or banker, or anything) would you be if you were forced by the government and the system to see 30-40 clients a day to make a living?” And every year fewer and fewer doctors are choosing Primary Care as a career with more and more residency training positions going unfilled. You can’t blame them. Who but only the most dedicated (or foolhardy) would choose Family Practice or General Internal Medicine as the specter of Nationalized Healthcare or Socialized Medicine looms on the horizon? The solution to the healthcare crisis is to make Primary Care a more attractive specialty, train more Primary Care doctors, and pay them to manage the care and get the administrators out of it. It will cost far less.