Dr. Joshua John-Ram Schacter argues that current U.S. healthcare is overly controlled by insurance companies, which dictate what care can be provided when approvals are required. He criticizes the prevalence of episodic (rather than holistic) care, links system pressures to physician burnout, and warns that continuously decreasing per-unit reimbursement will further damage care (metaphor: “frog in the hot water”).
So the problem in healthcare today is insurance companies really dictate care. I mean, if you can't get something approved, the idea of a patient's head is that it can't be done. So that's the problem. Episodic care is the norm. We're not looking at patients as a whole. We're not able to spend adequate amounts of time with patients because of our ever accelerating system. It causes a high level of burnout in physicians and it's poor for patient care. Reimbursement per unit is constantly decreasing. So insurance companies are constantly ratcheting down. Ratcheting down, ratcheting down. It's the frog in the hot water principle. They're going to turn that heat up until we're soup. So something has got to get.
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