1) Such completely unrealistic patient expectation, that it borders on Fantastical( Disclaimer: I think I may have made up this word…) i.e. ACOG’s endorsement of C/sec’s on patient demand. Since when does the patient have the years of theory and experience of Fetal/Maternal Medicine to march in and demand a C/sec, because they are afraid of ruining their vagina?

2) The Aging, Obese, Sedentary life style and SAD ( Standard American Diet) causing 1/3 of our
society to be obsese with an enormous number of expensive Co Morbidities.

3) The over use of the limited health care resources used by the aforementioned group, what percentage of American’s would die without a week of their Meds, perhaps a 1/3, that’s pretty scary, especially when most of those disease states are life style preventable.

4) EMR as the answer, give me a break! I work at a large HMO in Southern Cal. and we just went to 100% EMR, Inpatient and Outpatient, and I will admit it does help tremendously with certain aspects of Bedside care, i.e instant look up of patient’s entire Medical Hx, current labs etc, it also adds about 1 to 2 hours to every 8 hour shift, in the shear volume of information, mostly useless regulatory charting requirments that you have to pick through to get what you are looking for, that it takes me 10 to 20 mins just to read all the notes, labs and etc to present the patient to my brain so I can telephone triage their complaint. Now I have this time, I am a RN, but providers in the clinic who are double and triple booked into 20 min slots, Yeah ROB, doctors work 20 hours a week? According to my math it is more like a 60 to 80 hour work week, depending on how many patient’s they see, which has to be A LOT b/o cr—y reimbursement, Would a great Hair Dresser charge anything less than $100 for a 20 min Hair Cut? Not where I live and how much education do they have? 1 year? But women pay this amount routinely. If you break down the hourly rate and thtow in overhead, I can assure you they do not make a ton, with the exception of Orthopedic and Plastic Surgeons. Compared to my Attorney brother in law who works 60 hours a week, makes $250,000 per year plus a guranteed $100,000 yearly bonus, and he does not have to nightly worry about being sued, or that he forgot something in the daily INSANE multi tasking that has to be done to stay afloat. AND I can guarantee it will not decrease Med errors.

5) Finally, this Economic crisis, which comes at the same time as the Health Care Crisis, Education Crisis, Food and Water shortages caused in part by Climate Change, and an exploding population,
and WOW, I am going to make as much money as I can now, buy a VW van and a Yurt and hope for the best. Thank You to all my fellow Care Givers who routinely put the needs of our patient’s before our own. I can’t count , the times are too numerous, how many times I have skipped lunch and breaks in a 12 hour shift and held my bladder for 10 or more hours, just to make sure that the 15 patient’s I was in charge of with just myself and a Corpsman, were medicated for their pain and calm and comfortable. How many other profession’s require this?

Sincerely, A Frustrated Nurse, Lisa

As a doctor I can say I work hard, very hard, for nothing like the money I would be making if I had chosen law or business, or some other form of paper pushing, and with much higher stress. That is not a complaint – I chose this profession and every day I have the privilege of caring for people in a very real way, which just has got to be more fulfilling than selling widgets or just about anything else I can think of. however, our system is broken and I would like to see it fixed. Here is what we need to do:

Create a single-payer system that provides care at a reasonable cost to EVERY PERSON in the U.S.

Make sure that no non-physician bureaucrat makes any more money than the lowest paid full-time primary care provider in the country.

Stop overpaying radiologists, dermatologists, and orthopaedic surgeons.

Cut out the miriad middle-men who skim off billions of dollars/year.

Stop paying pharmaceutical companies so much for drugs.

Stop spending so much on the last 3 months of people’s lives – ration critial care services. Do away with the concept of actively having to make people DNR when over 60 – rather, people should have to opt in by signing PRM (please resuscitate me) papers and agree that their estate will pay the costs when the heroic measures don’t work.

Take medical malpractice out of the hands of lawyers. Fix the tort system.

Tonight, you go home to your family and retreat from the day’s worries. Your boss may have made your day intolerable or a colleague may have agitated you to no end; however, you’re able to remove yourself from your work environment and sink into that one thing that takes you away from the world which is your job.
For doctors, there’s no such removal from the day’s worries. Each and every day our hard working, dedicated physicians bring home with them the tribulations of what it means to be a caregiver. They bring home with them the single mother of three young children of whom they’ve had to inform has an incurable cancer and only has six months with which to spend the rest of her days. They bring home the HMO that tells them they can’t practice medicine as they deem necessary for the benefit of the patient because it does not fit the “protocol” some hoity, pencil pusher has come up with. They bring home with them the patient, who despite the physician’s best efforts to care for, looks the physician in the eye and and tells him he is going to sue him. They bring home with them a paycheck that is 40% of what their actual work load is worth.
Fox’s article leads with the title, “Doctors Sick of Work”. I beg your pardon, but doctors are not sick of work they are sick of the bureaucracy, the red tape, and those who would stand in the way of doctors doing what they do best…and that is being doctors (i.e. and caring for the sick and healthy alike).

One thing is correct about the article, physicians will seek other things to do with their time rather than be pushed around by those who know absolutely nothing about caring for and treating a patient.

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Absolutely, right on point. I’m not affiliated with the medical field, but I’ve had enough work and life experience to say the government takes on too many things they know nothing about. As a grad student in accounting, I question their current efforts to bailout companies and proposed corporate and capital tax hikes. How can Congress and the Senate make decisions on a variety of topics without understanding the logic behind their decisions? Might as well flip a coin. They are the reason the medical field is fed up, but they won’t admit it. The Bureaucracy is continually expanding and we are suffering. Doctors are hurting and we’ll all feel the hurt when there’s less willing to serve the public. It’s looking like socialized medicine is not far off…God help us.