More Time With a Primary Care Provider Means
Better Care, Lower Costs and Less Frustration — A Win, Win, Win
This is the 10th article in a series on America’s dysfunctional healthcare system. Here is a link to the last article.
For most Americans, and I suspect that includes you, your primary care provider, if you have one, has a “panel” of 2500–3000 patients and sees about 24+ per day. That means 20-minute visits but actual face time with you is probably 10–12 minutes. This is simply not enough time to manage someone with multiple chronic illnesses taking numerous prescription medications who almost certainly has a variety of family, financial and emotional issues to boot. So, let’s take a look using a real person as an example of what happens every day.
I introduced Henry in an earlier article; here is his story in more detail. Henry is a 69-year-old widower living alone in a small town about 60 miles from the nearest metropolitan area. He has a small pension and healthcare coverage via Medicare, a Medigap policy, and a Medicare Part D drug policy. He was recently hospitalized in the ICU with a serious urinary tract infection that spread to his kidneys [pyelonephritis] and to his bloodstream [septicemia], and then his lungs [acute respiratory distress syndrome.] This was a recipe for rapid demise, but the needed intensive acute care is where American medicine…
