Healthcare for the Medicare Patient

I recently met a person from Rhode Island sitting in the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport. She was traveling back to Rhode Island for her healthcare needs. She and her husband had recently been transferred to Dallas for his job. After calling physicians’ offices for an entire day, she found no one would see her because she was on Medicare so she was now heading home.

It is strange when physicians can no longer practice medicine with their heart. In my early years of practice in the early 1970s, most physicians would not hear of an elderly person going without their medical care because of financial hardship. It was given gratuitously without a second thought of financial compensation. Physicians no longer have that luxury when on the payroll of giant medical corporations. After all they do have to meet their quotas, don’t they?

The corporations can usually care less about healthcare. Their cares are about the bottom line. Too bad they do not care about the top line and the millions of dollars paid out to overpaid CEOs who bring in the money to their shareholders.