MedPage Today July 29, 2019
Once government financing entered the picture, the doctor-patient relationship was doomed
Medicare ushered in the greatest explosion of medical advances in the history of mankind for twenty years, but it also guaranteed the destruction of the hallmark of our system: the physician as patient advocate.
In the 1950s I contracted pneumonia at age 10. Our general practitioner, Dr. Wilson, who delivered my brother and took out my father’s gallbladder, admitted me to the hospital and saved my life with antibiotics developed during World War II.
The ethical rule in the 1950s and 1960s was: “Charge the patients according to their ability to pay.” In essence, the wealthier were subsidizing the physician’s care of the needy, “balance...
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