Doing Better and Feeling Worse: Why Aren't Doctors Feeling Better About the Future?

“ ‘Age and disease will be our next engine of growth,’ says Teresa Ghilarducci, a professor of economics at the New School. ‘That’s the really good news.’

As millions of baby boomers retire, she says, they will segue from their accumulation years into their spend-down years.

‘They’re going to be spending a lot on health care,’ Professor Ghilarducci said, ‘to forestall disease, to make themselves look younger. Low-end services, high-end services. CT scans, face lifts, bionic knees. We all think that health care is a high percent of gross domestic product now, but we ain’t seen nothing yet.’ “

But is it a good idea to nip, tuck and CT scan our way to prosperity? “

David Segal, “Economic Fix-Its,” New York Times, November 28, 2010

Why, if health care will be the next engine of growth and will consume ever more of the GDP, are doctors feeling so glum about the future? If you doubt how they feel, I invite you to read Health Reform and the Decline of Physician Private Practice (Merritt Hawkins. October 2010).

This feeling of dread is not new. In 1977, John Knowles, MD, a Massachusetts General internist who became the President of the Rockefeller Foundation, edited a book Doing Better and Feeling Worse: Health in the United States (W.W. Norton and Company).

The problem then, as now, was the system was doing better in improving health outcomes but doing worse in controlling costs, and many of the bad things, in both the economic and health realms, that happen to people were beyond the reach of medicine. The health system didn’t have all the answers.

To take a leading example, why can’t we contain demand and control health costs?

That, of course, is this year’s $2.7 trillion question.

According to Regina Herzlinger, PhD, a tenured professor at Harvard Business School, the problem is we don’t let consumers, spend their own money. pick their own providers, drive the system.(Who Killed Health Care? America’s $2 Trillion Medical Problem – and the Consumer-Driven Cure (McGraw Hill Companies, 2007).

Dr. Herzlinger identifies the five “killers” of a consumer-driven system as:

1. Health insurers, who insure the death of cost control through their dysfunctional culture.

2. General hospitals, which kill cost-control through their building of centralized. Ever-expanding empires of care.

3. Employers, who doom consumerism because they generally give their employees the “choice” of only one plan.

4. The U.S. Congress, who spur cost growth through lavish entitlement program riddled with fraud, abuse, and overuse.

5. Academics who contribute to the death of consumerism because of their elitist, technocratic, superior attitudes.

“Sadly, “comments Herzlinger, “on the federal government level, representatives from Republicans and Democrats have quaffed deeply form the Beltway Kool-Aid well. Neither believes in the power of innovators and consumers to reshape markets. Neither is in the-small-is-beautiful camp. Both believe the more oversight of health care by the government and academies is the solution. Both believe that big-is-beautiful.”

She goes on, “The federal government has not only specified what should be measured but also the protocols that health care providers must follow. These monopolistic powers are cloaked in the pseudoscientific mantle of ‘evidence-based.” The title implies that the guidelines are shaped by intelligent saints devoid of a shred of self-interest or vanity, guided only by ‘evidence’”

Small wonder doctors are glum. Everyone else, other than themselves and their patients, think they know what is best about the practice of medicine and the health care business. The health reform law effectively squelches health savings accounts which encourage consumers to shop for what they consider to be the best deal and doctors to compete for the consumers’ dollar. Rules and regulations forbid doctors to creatively re-design their practices and repackage their services. Medicare laws prohibit patients and doctors from privately contracting with each other. Prices keeps rising as regulations keep growing.

Medicine, it seems, is too important to be left to doctors and consumers. Trust us, is the mantra. We’re from the government and other large institutions, and only we know what is good for you and yur health.