The Major Cause of Rising Health Care Cost with Decreasing Quality: A Scarcity of Primary Care Physicians

by Fred W. Lafferty MD

Overview

Since 2000, the author has observed the soaring costs of health care in the United States which has accompanied a decline in quality of care for the average citizen. This has been the result of the intrusions of Medicare since 1985, the profit motivated private health insurance companies, the development of large corporate hospital chains, and the irresponsible increased cost of medications by the pharmaceutical industry. In 1985, Medicare mandated what physicians could charge with a clumsy coding system, which essentially socialized medicine. This system heavily favored the procedure driven specialties to the detriment of the primary care doctor. During the past thirty years, the percentage of American Medical School graduates entering primary care has diminished from thirty-five to five percent resulting in a scarcity of family physicians. Despite America's outstanding medical schools, academic physicians, and technology, the United States ranks from fifteenth to thirty seventh among the industrialized nations of the world in quality of care and longevity of its population. Regardless of Obamacare's promise to provide healthcare to most US citizens, it will fail unless at least fifty percent of America's physicians enter primary care as in Europe. Our fault lies with allowing the Medicare bureaucrats unrestricted power since 1985.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940157797577
Publisher:	Page Publishing, Inc.
Publication date:	01/26/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	337 KB

About the Author

Fred W Lafferty MD is a 1956 graduate of Harvard Medical School, following which he spent three years in the Army Medical Corp practicing internal medicine and pediatrics at Walter Reed Army Hospital and Fort Meade Maryland. From 1959 to 1963 he did a residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in endocrinology at University Hospitals in Cleveland, Ohio. From 1963 to 2006 he published twenty articles in leading medical journals and five chapters in medical textbooks. He rose to the rank of a clinical professor of medicine in 1984 at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine. Doctor Lafferty entered the solo practice of internal medicine in Cleveland, Ohio in 1963 until his retirement in 2014. He has observed firsthand the changes in the practice of medicine by the primary physician over the past fifty-one years accompanied by soaring costs of health care in the US.