Thanks to Desidero, I went over to Andrew Sullivan's blog and read a screed by an ER doctor complaining about how Americans drive up the cost of healthcare by acting badly at the hospital. You can find Desidero's post
here and the Sullivan post
here.
Let's take on some of our ER Doctor's complaints:
1) Patients come to seek medical help after "two days of the sniffles" or "back pain they haven't even tried to treat with Tylenol."
Sorry but suck it up, Doc. Everybody has different tolerance for pain or discomfort and you have to treat people according to their tolerances. You'd be just as likely to complain, by the way, if people put off going to the doctor and needed more extensive and expensive treatments because thier conditions worsened. It happens.
2) Patients demand attention in the Er (and, apparently sandwiches) while you're trying to deliver emergency services.
Okay, that sucks. But people who go to the ER are not going because it's a fun place to be. They are in pain and discomfort and so ill-mannered or irrational behavior is to be expected. I'm sympathetic to our doctor here but also to the patients.
3) The patients *gasp* demand certain tests and treatments that they might have heard about, sometimes from TV medical shows!
Yes, but we also live in a time of unprecedented access to information and we never hear about the instances where a patient's demands might have saved their lives. Just saying that our ER doctor is giving us a pretty biased selection of anecdotes where patients demand the unnecessary and the doctor either ultimately gives in (and is proven right in the end) or the patient is fooled by the doctor into believing that a more mundane treatment is actually a sophisticated one. There's another side to this, though: it pays to know your own body and something about your own needs. Doctors are not infallible and the cheapest tests and treatments aren't necessarily the best. So, again, suck it up, Doc.
4) He complains that patients who don't get what they want will sometimes write angry letters to the hospital review board.
And how often do these review boards actually side with the patient? What's the usual outcome of such complaints? And is it really bad that patients who feel they have been inadequately treated have some recourse?
5) He keeps on saying that patients who go to the ER feel they are owed something for their "time."
As if they aren't ultimately paying for their services through insurance premiums, taxes and direct billing after the fact. It's not their "time" these people want compensation for it's the money that they pay.
I understand that our ER doctor is frustrated here and I know it's a hard job (am good friends with an ER nurse) but I really disagree with the notion that American patients are somehow "entitled," that they shouldn't have a voice in their health and care or that they ultimately get more than what they pay for every two weeks in their insurance premiums (be definition they don't -- the insurance industry is profitable and that means, on average they collect more in premiums than people will ever use up in services).
