One small addition to my previous post. It has to do with medical school. Please God, let someone at Harvard or Emory be listening…
A few days ago I was hanging out with my friend who is a doctor. A brilliant, ridiculously smart doctor. She is out of medical school and in her residency. I should be so lucky as to be injured when she is working. Seriously.
So I figure, who better to bounce some of my theories regarding medical insurance off of than a doctor? Off I go into my shtick about insurance, how it could work better, etc. She says "you know it’s funny, that’s not something I know very much about. We don’t learn about that in medical school." Huh?!? (Scooby Doo voice) Don’t learn about that in medical school???
Of course they don’t. That’s for nurses and admins. Or so goes the thinking at Harvard, Yale, Emory, and The South Caribbean School of Medicine. Doctors need to be above the fray and concentrate on germs and scalpels and such.
I don’t know. Maybe that worked 30 years ago. But…
Here’s the thing: Every medical decision I make is in the context of health insurance. My entire view of the system is overly (and I’m sure unfairly) weighted based on my experience with insurance. Surely that matters to my health care. Surely if doctors were educated on the basics of health insurance it would help them relate to their patients. And it’s just as important to doctors! Their entire livelihood is dependent upon health insurance, with all it’s cracks and nuances. Can Harvard not do better? Emory? Anyone? Bueller?
It’s important to understand the context in which you practice your craft, isn’t it? In medicine. In business. In car racing. In life. No? Am I nuts?
I know medical school is damn long already, but I’m not talking about a 2 year internship at Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
Just a 6-week course.
Interesting (and true) point. My very own Brother is a Psychiatrist and literally one of the smartest people I have ever met. After all those years of school and training, he fully admits that Doctors are taught remarkably little about business, let alone insurance. For most MDs, they end up learning about how the business side of their “business” works (because it IS a business like anything else) on the job with years and years of effort.
The most brilliant degree in the world? M.D./MBA – or at least M.D./.25 MBA – or something like that. Just enough that Doctors could help make informed decisions about the wackiness we all face when it comes to insurance.