[Culturechat] Medicare, good or bad?

[Vance Roy]

I was a senior in medical school when Medicare came into existence. 
Most of my teachers and those in private practice who helped us in 
clinical medicine thought it was a socialist abomination. I remember 
one liberal student who was castigated for his support of this law. He 
did graduate.

Well, it turns out that Medicare made doctors a potful of money. I am 
talking about honest docs who never committed any sort of fraud. All of 
a sudden, they got money for taking care of patients they had never 
charged before Medicare. A lot got rich. Some were/are crooks and 
got/get REALLY rich.

Over my 25 years of practice, I made a nice living, but I never asked 
what patient paid or how they paid. I never wanted to know because I 
wanted nothing about that to color my thinking. It worked well. When I 
got paid with chickens, eggs, or even blueberries (loved that guy), I 
knew that they were not rolling in $$. I can now see that in the not so 
far future, things may reverse. A two tier system will evolve. Those 
who can sign on with the private sector will do just that. Me included 
if I still can do this. A second tier will still be under the "old" 
system. How good will that be? I do not know.

Doctors today come out of ten or so years of training with 100K debts. 
I was as slick as my shaved head when I finished my training, and my 
widowed mother taught second grade. Today's docs want to pay the debt 
off, become stable, have debt free families, and maybe live in 
retirement comfortably. Is that wrong? They are not looking at big 
bucks, so they are happy to take 9 to 5 jobs, lack the personal touch 
with people skills, and I am scared to death that one of them will take 
care of me when (not if) I get sick.

My dad told me when I was in the second grade, and the federal school 
lunch program took over my school cafetiera , that the government did 
not give out money without conditions. He was right, the food became 
terrible, because the feds wrote the recipes.

Now, don't get the idea that Gigli has gone liberal. Not even close. I 
know some of those, and believe me, they can have feet of clay.

Vance Roy
gigli.saw@dplanet.ch
http://homepage.mac.com/fredch

“Never under estimate the ingenuity of the stupid.”
Anon.