Healthcare Reform - Doctors & Nurses Burned Out
February 22, 2023
Good Day Healthcare Advocates
I am so thankful for all of you and for the actions you take to move us towards a universal healthcare system. Some of the topics in work are:
The current state of healthcare providers and the potential impact of Universal Healthcare on them
How Universal Healthcare affects the insurance industry (it’s not what you think)
Rural healthcare challenges
Hospice Fraud revisited - this is worse than was reported
Please send topics to me via the chat button and I will research and report. If you need assistance in other ways, lectures, presentations, etc. Just let me know, I’m happy to help.
Current State - Workers Fed Up
We have all heard about COVID-19 pushing doctors and nurses to leave their chosen professions. In 2021, about 12.4% of the physicians (117,000) in the US left the profession. A survey in Nov 2022 of nurses found that a full 50% were planning to leave. They have had it.
Dr. Eric Reinhart, a physician at Northwestern University hospital in Chicago, wrote an opinion article for the New York Times, 2/5/2023, on physician burnout. His views from the trenches are eye opening. He also did an interview for a news program and I’ve included that link here.
I heartily recommend reading or watching these.
Doctors and nurses go into those professions for a reason, they want to be able to help others. They have been stopped over and over again. Politicians claiming that public health is not in the patient’s interest, the inability of patients to have sufficient insurance to allow them to be adequately treated, 43% of us according to the Commonwealth Fund, hospitals and clinics that measure how many minutes are spent with a patient and reward caregivers for increasing the number of patients seen instead of for providing healthy, positive outcomes and overload the staff because increased volume makes money. People who game/cheat the system and keep their licenses and continue to amass wealth at the expense of patients not receiving sufficient care, highly placed individuals who cheat Medicare and Medicaid out of billions and walk away as if nothing had happened. Of course it’s demoralizing and they want to leave those professions.
The patchwork of bandaids masquerading as healthcare systems is not built to support public health. The 330,000 Americans who died unnecessarily during the pandemic are witness to that (Scientific American).
This sad situation is exactly what you expect when market forces compete with each other to carve up the money available and the focus on health is just the money delivery system.
Ask anyone who designs and builds anything. You need to start at the bottom and understand the problems you have so you can design a system to address those problems effectively. This is called systems engineering. I did for years, so did my wife, so did so many of the people with whom we worked.
35 Industrialized nations have decided that public health and the public good and helping people stay healthy so they are more productive is more important than greed at the cost of human lives. What we have is not a solution. Some of the largest numbers of preventable deaths, bankruptcies and untold human misery for so many when the truth of it is it can be better for everyone. Even the insurance companies (see how Switzerland implemented universal care).
The apolitical Congressional budget office has been investigating Universal Health care for years. Here are three of their latest publications on how to do it.
CBO report 1. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/55150
CBO report 2. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56811
CBO report 3. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57637
If you want a system to work you have to design a system, not patch it every time it springs a leak, because this is not working.
There is a set technique for designing healthcare systems that work at scale. This is a larger task than a company can do or a conglomeration of companies. It is building a healthcare infrastructure and just like building interstate highways it needs the focus of the federal government to make it happen.
Call on the President and your elected representatives in Congress to authorize a committee to design that solution now.
What You Can Do
Use RESISTBOT to send a message to the President and your elected representatives in Congress and ask them to get Universal Healthcare Underway NOW.
Text “SIGN PEVQNI” to 50409 to send them the following email.
I’m sure you have heard about Dr. Eric Reinhart’s article in the New York Times about physician burnout. 117,000 doctors quit in 2021. Half of all nurses don’t want that job anymore, 43% of us have no healthcare or are so underinsured that our health suffers, 330,000 of us died needlessly in the pandemic. More than 100 rural hospitals have closed in the last decade.
We need Universal Healthcare NOW. The CBO has identified how. See these publications
CBO report 1. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/55150
CBO report 2. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56811
CBO report 3. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57637
Authorize workgroups in Congress and at the Executive, presidential level to design a Universal Healthcare System. Do it now. No more of us need to suffer and die needlessly.
Resources
Contact the White House
https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
Contact State and Federal Representatives
https://www.commoncause.org/find-your-representative/addr/
Healthcare Advocacy Reading List
Today’s Story
Dr. Reinhart Op-Ed in the New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/05/opinion/doctors-universal-health-care.html
Dr. Reinhart Video Interview
Nurses Fed Up
Congressional Budget Office Reports on Universal Healthcare
CBO report 1. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/55150
CBO report 2. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56811
CBO report 3. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57637
Thanks Gary, I hadn't thought of all those complications. Just reading it felt overwhelming. I'm glad you made it out. I was talking to a young doctor a couple of weeks ago. He is caring and compassionate and bright and quitting. He has had enough and will go into another line of work. Sigh
Great post, Alan.
As a psychologist I was feeling the pressures of the collapse of workable healthcare for too many.
We used to have adequate social service resources to follow up on crisis prone clients and the ability for them to have extended inpatient treatment when in crisis.
With the advent of psychiatric medications for psychosis and other psychiatric meds, many state hospitals were shut down. Community mental health was supposed to meet the needs of many but has been increasingly underfunded. So the burden falls on outpatient psychotherapists to keep these folks safe.
Police are underfunded and don’t have adequate mental health crisis support teams and it’s harder to get safety checks. Insurance companies sometimes challenge long term therapy.
Clients needing medical care for more rare or complex conditions have to wait and jump between isolated doctors instead of being worked up and treated by a team. Some with severe chronic pain had to struggle to get adequate dosing under current opiate mandates. And I had to help these folks stay hopeful and keep trying.
Then clients shuttle between insurers and we need to register with those companies, some of which vastly underpay, like Medicaid.
We have to limit access to attend to all of this and turn away people seeking help.
On top of this, mandates are legislated that we must follow. Licensing boards make it harder to get credentials approved. Education is expensive for professions that are underpaid.
When I could afford to retire, I chose to do so rather than carry the stress and worries.