This Week’s Presidential Healthcare Summit: Is It About Money or Satisfaction?

Posted on | February 24, 2010 | Comments Off on This Week’s Presidential Healthcare Summit: Is It About Money or Satisfaction?

Mike Magee

Today is the Healthcare Summit in Washington. There will be a great deal of discussion about efficiency, effectiveness and holding down the cost of health care. Money and time spent were also the topic of a JAMA article this week focused on declining physician work hours in concert with declining physician reimbursement over the past decade.(1) The key facts: 1. Average non-resident practicing physician’s work hours dropped from about 51 to 55 hours per week from 1996 to 2008. 2. The overall decrease in hours coincided with a 25 percent decline in pay for doctors’ services, adjusted for inflation.

Simplistic conclusion: Doctors are working less because they are not paid enough. That bias seeped through most reporting this week, with occasional challenges like this one from from Dr. Robert Perlmutter of Chicago, “”It’s not so much the fees as the hassle factor… There’s so much oversight for what we do, so many people we have to answer to and so little of it improves care, it’s just driving us all crazy.” (2,3,4,5)

So is money the root of this evil, or just along for the ride?. (CONTINUE…)