Comments
I certainly think it’s a good idea. The vast majority of medical inflation starts with medical equipment manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies, passed on through docs to patients to diagnose and care for chronic conditions caught too late by overworked, underpaid (and often the least skilled since they are the lowest paid) docs. This is counter-intuitive… the best docs should be in primary care, and the most time should be spent there. …Comment by Ready for change
Comments by “Ready for Change” are proof positive of why we are in this medical/health mess–ignorance and wrong-thinking…Moreover, primary care docs are not the least skilled. By the very nature of their occupation, they need to be a “jack of all trades” when it comes to their knowledge and practice of medicine. Because they are on the “front lines” of medicine they need to know a lot about everything as opposed to a specialist which knows a bit more about a few things…Comment by Rick De La Pena
As an emergency department doc, I can state this with certainty: different PCPs have different capacity to keep their patients out of the ED. The patients of some primaries only come when they are in seriously decompensating. The patients of other primaries are in the ED all the time for trivial issues…Comment by jz-mdJZ has it right — Blanket statements about primary care being “better” are off-base a fair amount of the time. As a specialist, many of my referring primary care docs are excellent — and some are marginal. After you see patients who have been watched with rising PSA for several years, then finally sent to the urologist with late-stage, incurable prostate cancer (as I have quite a few times, unfortunately), you realize that “primary care” and “preventive medicine” are just comfortable phrases which do not guarantee better care. Of course, the late-referring doctors were practicing “cost-effective” care by keeping their patients away from “expensive” specialists, keeping the third-party payors happy, and would have scored well therefore under most current “pay-for-performance” measures…Comment by Dr Bob
the state of primary care is disastrous. with rising costs and malpractice premiums and no increase of fees for service there will not be a primary care physician left who will accept insurance fees and medicare.if you want to see a barefoot practitioner in the future keep the system as is…Comment by rr md
Health Blog : Payers Propose to Boost Primary Care.
Whew! The article announcing the NCQA initiative focused on Primary Care-focused services as a preventive cost measure sure generated some interesting comments.