Bending the Cost Curve: ACO’s – Maybe Ford was on to something

Maybe the American health care system of the past, where people were to be treated as individuals and doctors were allowed to consider each patients personal needs is inefficient.  It is certainly too inefficient to be allowed to go on, so say the academics trying to change a system they know nothing about.  Certainly all aspects of the American health care system are under attack, but the rubber hits the road when you turn into a number and your doctor won’t even be allowed to consider you anything more than a statistic that needs to be pushed to the next column.  Maybe Ford was on to something when he invented the assembly line.

John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis, posted this blog at the NCPA website where a physician is describing what it is like to work within an ACO.  Accountable Care Organizations, the panacea of efficiency for Medicare patients under PPACA.

She states:

I am a Board-certified general internist. I worked for many years for…an Accountable Care Organization. It was factory work: we were interchangeable cogs in a vast machine.  The people who saw patients, especially “primary care providers” like me, were at the base of the pyramid and the bottom of the pecking order.

The future is clear. The management of the ACO — professional administrators, and physicians who see few if any patients — will schedule every moment of every primary provider’s day, critique every decision, continually scrutinize and evaluate every aspect of one’s practice. At my ACO, yes, we were on teams, but given no time to communicate with one another. We were forced to complete clunky electronic records we had no time to read. Despite years of training and experience, we had no input to the system that controlled our lives. We were not respected as professionals. It was demoralizing.

The health policy elite appears to have concluded that the crux of the problem is primary care practitioners, internists included, who are largely ignorant, lazy, and indifferent to their patients’ welfare, and oppose change of any kind. We do not know or care that a diabetic’s hemoglobin A1C should be below 7.

Therefore, we need tight supervision, complex systems of financial incentives and penalties, and frequent “feedback” about our deficiencies. We need electronic records to remind us that our female patients are due for mammograms that we should advise smokers to quit. And we must reach our goals efficiently, using the minimum number of those expensive tests, and managing large panels of patients.  (So we can’t spend much time with anyone.)

I highly advise everyone to set down the burger and fries, get to the gym and plan to be healthy until you drop.  It’s a wonder why we are starting to feel the effects of a primary care physician shortage.  Obamacare isn’t going to do anything to make medical practice any more attractive to our best and brightest.   The best and the brighest that would normally be attracted to Primary Care medicine don’t want to be part of an assembly line.  For that matter, neither do I.