The Closing of the American Hospital

I have been very interested in the health care crisis -- as it's being called -- for the past few years. Recently, the news has been grim. Doctors are quitting in droves especially emergency physicians. Of the doctors remaining many are unhappy with working conditions. Fewer people go to medical school to be doctors and many of them go into specialties instead of family or emergency medicine because the pay and hours are better. PAs and NPs tend to see more patients often than the M.D.s or D.O.s. In some practices it is common for patients never to speak to the real doctor. There are many reasons for these and other problems in our health care system. One reason being that you get what you pay for. When you force doctors to get the same pay (and sometimes no pay) no matter how well they do you're going to get a lot of doctors who would rather spend more time home with their families. Rising costs have not been met with the money necessary to ameliorate them -- unless you count the government wanting to borrow its brains out and institute socialized health care. It is interesting to read the solutions people come up with concerning what to do about medical care in the U.S. The fact is, things are likely to bottom out in the next ten years if something is not done. So, what should we do?

Well, here's the socialized medicine version and here's the free market idea. Think about it.