DIAGNOSIS: TERMINAL

My brother asked me to give a medical examination to our medical industry.

Once healthy and robust, admired as the best in the world, America's health care system is teetering on the edge of fatality. The decline began, I believe, in what seemed innocent, even progressive, at the time. Fifty or so years ago, juries began awarding humongous awards to patients who had been injured, mistreated, in some way by their physicians. Based on an untenable standard of virtual perfection, which few if any physicians could consistently meet, jury awards skyrocketed into the millions.

To protect against the possibility of losing all their accumulated money, physicians turned to insurance companies and malpractice policies. As the awards continued to increase, so did the malpractice insurance premiums. To offset those increases, physicians began to raise fees...easy to do since doctors' fees are rarely discussed with patients before the medical services are rendered. Higher medical fees triggered a substantial increase in the number of people buying health insurance policies to pay the costs of catastrophic illness, and then to pay for all medical services, blood tests, etc. Physicians, who once looked solely to patients for payment of their fees, now had to deal with insurance companies and all of the record keeping and documentation and reporting that the insurance companies required. Their costs mounted, their fees followed suit. Ill people being turned away because the physician does not accept their insurance. The medical profession had transformed into the medical industry.

Compounding the problem, as it always will, was the intrusion of government into this aspect of our lives. Increases in longevity meant greater number of people covered by medicare, medicaid and other government programs. Arbitrarily imposed limitations on fees paid physicians, greater bureaucracy, the requirement that emergency care must be made available to all (overloading emergency care facilities, promoting quicker than advisable treatment and discharges from many hospitals) has brought us to a critical health crisis. The pending takeover of our health care by the federal government makes the diagnosis: terminal.