Article “Patients Mired in Costly Credit From Doctors” opens: The dentist set to work, tapping and probing, then put down his tools and delivered the news. His patient, Patricia Gannon, needed a partial denture. The cost: more than $5,700.
“Ms. Gannon, 78, was staggered. She said she could not afford it. And her insurance would pay only a small portion. But she was barely out of the chair, her mouth still sore, when her dentist’s office held out a solution: a special line of credit to help cover her bill. Before she knew it, Ms. Gannon recalled, the office manager was taking down her financial details.
“But what seemed like the perfect answer — seemed, in fact, like just what the doctor ordered — has turned into a quagmire. Her new loan ensured that the dentist, Dr. Dan A. Knellinger, would be paid in full upfront. But for Ms. Gannon, the price was steep: an annual interest rate of about 23 percent, with a 33 percent penalty rate kicking in if she missed a payment…”
WATCHDOG: It is a sad thing to say and it certainly isn’t true of all health care providers, many of whom keep their rates reasonable out of a sense of humanity and decency, but a visit to a health care provider is often like a visit to a used car lot. Buyer beware!
This applies across all fields of medicine with dentists often being the most craven.
To what do we ascribe an attitude which has evolved considerably from the “Marcus Welby” image that was the usual a half century ago?
I recall our very successful family physician who had several waiting rooms and patients progressed over the course of a couple of hours from one to another. Yet his fees were moderate, he drove a Plymouth and lived in a pleasant semi-detached home in the neighborhood. He also made house calls!
Of course part of the problem today is the high cost of education with young doctors facing hundreds of thousand dollars in debt. No wonder they often develop the ethics of a jackal.
And then there is the difference in times. Perhaps our memory is too rosy, but the post Second World War the ethos was to feel a sense of togetherness with the entire (white) population. People wanted to be admired within their community of family and friends, even if they did move to modest homes in the suburbs.
Today it is how to climb up to the top 1% (or 1/10th of 1%), move into a big house in an upscale community, and spend the rest of one’s life in the company of the equally self satisfied and privileged.
And so it goes. (To borrow a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut.)
Or maybe it’s because of the most significant change of all over the decades you describe — government intervention and the socialization of medicine. Like everything else the government gets involved with, prices escalate drastically and the level of service declines. But then, the wealthy editor of Newslanc, who lobbies continuously for more government intervention in all aspects of American life, doesn’t really care about the growing costs of government services and the subjugation of the citizenry, as he is able to obtain services without regard to cost for himself and his family.
EDITOR: EDITOR: On the contrary, it is because of concern for those who cannot afford adequate medical care that we have long advocated a single payer system in general and some variant of Medicare.
The problem lies with our aberrant system of funding health care through employers and paid for through insurance companies.
This generates layers upon layers of redundancy in record keeping; controversy among patients, insurers and providers; and causes health care to consume half again as much of our Gross Domestic Product as any other system in the world, including the highest rated France.
In place of employer funding, many nations finance health care through a Value Added tax. This also enables them to export more goods because it lowers their cost by the amount of current employee contribution.
In turn, the USA places in the mid-teens for quality of care, next to Cuba.
So our efforts are to expand access and reduce cost of health care to the individual as well as the nation.