While working as a lawyer, I gravitated toward medical malpractice and personal injury cases, of course. I had a special gift, being able to read medical records.
After a while, it occurred to me that most of the people who hired attorneys for this type of work were men and that they wanted to hire a man to work with, meaning that I was always the "assistant" to a male attorney in charge of the case.
Eventually an opportunity to get into banking, foreclosures, and bankruptcy presented itself. This was an area of legal work where women generally "ran the show." You may be shocked, but women also liked dealing with people like themselves and hired me as their attorney.
After 20 years with the "big firm," I started my own firm. Robinson Tait is still going strong, even though I have now retired from the practice of law.
Since I had time to do whatever I wanted to do, I started researching the macroeconomics of the US health care system. It doesn't sound like a juicy subject, but I was concerned about rising costs since I am a babyboomer and not yet eligible for Medicare. I was shocked about what I found.
Now don't get me wrong, I knew about nursing and medical malpractice having worked in these fields. I just didn't know that the reason nurses and doctors have to work so hard is that insurance companies and large hospital corporations want to take profit out of our health care dollars--not just a little profit, but $12.7 billion in 2007!
These big businesses would tell you that $12.7 billion is just a tiny amount of what we spend on health care in the US. That is true, but all the experts agree that we spend an additional one-third of our health care dollars on unnecessary, repetitve, or just plain the wrong tests and treatment because of the way our system is structured. We bounce from one doctor to another when we need treatment from a specialist; and because US health care records aren't digitalized, the doctors that we see often cannot easily tell what procedures or treatment we have had.
Here is an example of how this works. You go to the doctor with a cough. The doctor determines that the problem could be caused by a malfunction in your heart, lungs, or even stomach. He decides to "look inside" your respiratory system first and asks if you have had a bronchoscopy recently. You think back and remember that you had a procedure in which the doctor "looked inside" putting a scope through your mouth, but you cannot remember whether that was for a stomach problem or a breathing problem or even which clinic did the procedure. You just moved across the state and before you moved you had been seen by a number of different doctors at several different clinics. You thought that the problem had resolved, but it has come back. Besides, you have insurance and you want to make sure that the doctor has all of the information he can get about your health.
If digital records were available, your doctor could find out that you actually had a broncoscopy four months ago for similar symptoms and it looked "fine." All you really need is another course of the medication that the doctor gave you that time, over-the-count
er prilosec.
Instead, the doctor's office schedules you for the very expensive procedure, which can cause serious injury and even death. Generally, it doesn't cause a problem at all, but wouldn't you like to know if you really needed the procedure, especially if anything did go wrong or if your insurer decided to deny reimbursement for the test?
The point is that even if you have health care now, and many don't because they don't have insurance, you have a hodge podge of losely interknit hospitals and doctors who don't communicate well, and nurses and doctors who are stressed beyond belief because big business wants to make a profit out of the dollars that we pay for medical and nursing care. Because they want to make this profit, we don't spend money on digitalization of records, or hiring one more nurse per floor or another doctor per clinic so that they can spend a longer time with each patient.
I knew when I worked as a nurse that I was so hurried I almost never had time to think about more than just getting procedures done or medicines to my patients. I rarely had time to assess whether these treatments were working as well as hoped or whether there might something else that would work better. I didn't know that this happened because the people that pay for nursing and medical care want to save as much of your insurance premium as they can for themselves. It is this profit motivation that drives how our medical care is delivered, not what is best for the patient.
The fact that we treat health care as a business means that health care CEO's must devote as little of your medical dollars to actual care as they can. The amount of their company's profit and their own income depends on it. Forbes Magazine has even run stories about which health care related CEO's have become members of the "hundred million dollar club."
This draining of health care dollars from actual care is the reason I decided to write a book to tell people about what goes on behind the scenes in our health care system. It's one thing to read the statistics that 98,000 die prematurely every year from medical error. It's another to see how the system works on an individual basis.
Of course, I wanted to make the book fun to read! The Price of Death is a romantic suspense novel, but I call it "faction." It is an authentic but fictitious illustration of our health care system. Despite the fact that most people who read it think of it as a "can't-put-it-down," it is a realistic representation of the many things that can go wrong in our health care system and often do. Read it with that in mind and you will know why we pay almost twice as much as any other developed country for health care even though we don't cover everyone like they do; and still those 98,000 people continue to die.
What is wrong with this picture?
