The nice thing about being a member of the 1% is you can hire an advertising agency to write a nice Meme based on sound psychological research and even focus groups to tell you if the Meme will work and feed them to the general public, who you have made certain are under educated, through the media that you own.
As usual there is about 2/3 of the truth missing from that Meme, I used as a title.
Why are there so few doctors when there were plenty? Is the answer really too many patients or too few patients? Huh??? How can it be too few patients?
When Michael Jackson died, you didn't even wonder how much it costs to have a private doctor sitting by your bedside watching you sleep because he's got like trillions, right?
You really should have paid attention to that little thing. You see, a very disturbing trend is removing doctors from the general middle class population and they are not the quacks like poor Michael got stuck with and caused his death.
Doctors, particularly those in the fields of General Practice, Obstetrics, Pediatrics, Oncology and Geriatrics, are finding that they can charge $500.00 and up an month to patients for "priority appointments". What that means is around here for a grand or more a month, you can get an appointment the same day and often within an hour, of calling into the office. It doesn't take that many affluent patients that can afford $12,000.00 a year, or at least $6,000.00 a year, to replace all the other regular annoying patients that are really sick and you even have to fight with insurance to paid for their bills. You can reduce you office staff to one clerk answering the phone and filing insurance and one nurse. Think about it if you can...I'll do the math for you. The average doctor makes $188,000.00 per year; a specialist: $377,000.00 per year. So, if you have around 16 to 32 patients paying you for priority care at a grand a month, you can dump the rest of us and keep in mind, they also get paid for the appointment and the treatment via insurance. So, they can actually cut that number of patients almost in half. You start making a really good profit and working less than 1/5 as much. So, very gradually you, dear reader, have discovered it takes a week, a month, six months to get an appointment with your doctor and then he/she just disappears with his private clients he services on a need to see basis.
In essence, he/she becomes like a lawyer on retainer to a corporation, making plenty of money and only working when he is needed by a few people.
There is your real drain in cities and areas with a high number of the affluent not the poor or even the middle class. It's the 2% that are taking your doctors away from you.
Then, students discovering what fields are hot with the affluent, abandon the less profitable and higher work areas, like emergency medicine and even General Practice, because the rich do like their specialists. Rather than General Practitioners, they become referral specialists or, you might want to remember this name as it is a new one: diagnosticians. This person never treats a patient. They use a sophisticated computer program to analyze symptoms and then refer the patient to the proper specialists. Of course, they have to have M.D. after their name because the 1% won't settle for a peon computer specialist.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are left with the truly dedicated doctors and the quacks. I'll let you guess which are the larger number.
Guess you'll have to stop demonizing the poor. They can't get an appointment either.
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