Summary: The large-scale corporate appropriation of primary care reflects and enables the profiteering that now dominates US health care. The doctor-patient relationship suffers. Single payer financing may falter if corporations own the vast majority of providers. What are our reform options?
Corporate Giants Buy Up Primary Care Practices at Rapid Pace, The New York Times, May 8, 2023, by Reed Abelson
Why are multibillion-dollar corporations, particularly giant health insurers, gobbling up primary care practices?
The appeal is simple: Despite their lowly status, primary care doctors oversee vast numbers of patients, who bring business and profits to a hospital system, a health insurer or a pharmacy outfit eyeing expansion.
And there’s an added lure: The growing privatization of Medicare means that more than half its 60 million beneficiaries have signed up for policies with private insurers under the Medicare Advantage program. The federal government is now paying those insurers $400 billion a year.
The absorption of doctor practices is part of a vast, accelerating consolidation of medical care, leaving patients in the hands of a shrinking number of giant companies or hospital groups. Nearly seven of 10 of all doctors are either employed by a hospital or a corporation. Experts warn these major acquisitions threaten the personal nature of the doctor-patient relationship, especially if the parent company has the authority to dictate limits on services from the first office visit to extended hospital stays. [The article provides examples of how corporate control of primary care leads to abusive practices to increase revenue.]
“We’re dealing with incredible levels of burnout within the profession,” said Dr. Max Cohen, who practices near Portland, Ore.
Comment:
By Don McCanne, M.D. and Jim Kahn, M.D., M.P.H.
There is not much new here in this report of the corporate takeover of our health care system except maybe for the rapidity and boundlessness with which it is taking place.
Recently single payer financing gained in popularity as people recognized how it could transform our defective insurance system to bring truly affordable, accessible, equitable care with free choices for all. But with corporations now controlling medical delivery including linchpin primary care providers, care has become less affordable and thus less accessible for many, certainly less equitable, and our choices are limited to the dictates of the corporate entity.
The complexity that this has produced was explained by Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein, the founders of Physicians for a National Health Program, in a recent Jacobin interview and HJM post. Just a few years back, all we needed was a public financing program that displaced private ownership of health insurers (single payer).
But now with Wall Street’s takeover of the health care delivery system, reform of ownership of provider resources is needed. Community rather than corporate control of care seems to be what we need, but imagine the hurdle in transferring ownership of our entire health care system from the titans of Wall Street to the inhabitants of Main Street. Difficult times lie ahead, but what can we do? One thing for sure, we cannot leave control of our health care in the hands of the billionaires.
Are there any ideas out there that would actually work, short of socialized medicine (which, of course, would)? We’re contemplating this, and welcome ideas healthjusticemonitor@gmail.com.
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