Draining More Brains: Where Medicine is Heading
Watching the Affordable Care Act roll-out and reading about its gestation in Steven Brill’s book, America’s Poison Pill, makes one very aware that there is a serious brain drain under way in medicine. Here’s what anyone can see:
Numbers of applicants to medical school, which once was 10 for every place, is now less than 1. Physicians are telling their children not to go into medicine. There is now more than a 7 foot stack of regulations for the Affordable Care Act. As we all know, the slogan for this whole program has been “the healthcare system is broken.” (If that is so true, why force feed new people into it?)
Some manifestations: the adoption of the ICD-10 coding system, which defines conditions needing care in such detail that there is an unacknowledged administrative cost for compliance and a substantial legal and financial risk if there is mis-coding. Another is the forced adoption of Electronic Medical Records, with rules for “Meaningful Use.” This will produce electronic oversight of all medical care, in the guise of supporting “quality of care” and facilitating “Value-based Payments.” Ultimately, the government regulators expect to have real time access to any person’s care and any physician’s performance.
