PHYSICIAN GREED IS MEDICAL MISTAKE

Recently I suffered from shortness of breath, nothing dramatic or painful. I went to a cardiologist; a couple of weeks later I found myself with two stints. All is well and good! I knew the doctor; previously, I went to him to get him to write a prescription for a common high blood pressure medication. He was a gushingly friendly chap. He asked me why I was there to see him and not go to a general practitioner (GP). I explained that I had been living out of the country for years and that on a previous visit to the United States. A general practitioner referred me to a cardiologist who took my blood pressure and prescribed the drug. This time, I skipped the GP and came directly to the specialist.  I told him that all I needed was a prescription, the same thing I told the woman when I made the appointment, told the receptionist, and told the nurse that showed me to a little room to wait for the doctor. I was there because it is against the law for a pharmacist to give the drug I need without a doctors signature. The nurse had taken my blood pressure, which was normal. He looked at a manila folder for a couple of minutes then wrote the prescription and said next time I should go to a GP. His bill for the office call was $380.

After the shortness of breath, he did a stress test on me and a nurse did a sonogram of my chest and scheduled me to report to the hospital the next morning so he could do what hey called a vascular gram. The result, he put in two stints. The visualization technique and the insertion of stints took about one and one half hour.  The cost was $100,000, roughly $20,000 for the hospital and $80,000 for the doctor. I really do no care for some long drawn out explanation of why it cost so much; I know why and it is plain simple greed. The point is that I worked all my life saving for my retirement as it turns out I was working for the doctor’s Porsche, big house, and future retirement. I expect physicians and hospital administrators to live a little better then most people but this is ridiculous to the point of being ludicrous. My point is that physician greed has driven medical costs so high that it is morally wrong. The price structure is a medical mistake just as serious as a misdiagnosis or amputating the wrong leg and perhaps worse because not just one person is aggrieved but millions of people live a poor quality of life or even die because they cannot afford care.