Podcast: What's broken about healthcare and how TCM is working to change it.
This episode is about the overall brokenness in the way that healthcare is delivered, and how one doctor in Southwest florida is joining the fight to change things.
Southwest Florida is one of the fastest growing regions in one of the fastest growing states in the nation, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released in May of this year.
The Cape Coral-Fort Myers metro area’s 3.1 percent growth rate was the second-highest in the state and fifth-highest in the nation, according to census figures.
The metro area grew by 22,051 people between July 1, 2015, and June 30, 2016, and now has a population of 722,336. And 25% of the population is over 65 and our population is expected to grow to 754,815 by 2020.
The main reason concierge medicine isn’t growing faster is that the insurance model is so entrenched in our understanding that we now think of getting routine care through insurance as the “regular” way it works. We don’t have a name for it anymore. If someone says “I saw my doctor” we just assume that someone else paid for it. If she says “I saw my concierge doctor” we understand that she paid herself.
But it should be the other way around. We don’t have a word for an accountant or a plumber or a lawyer who gets paid directly by his clients. They’re not concierge accountants or concierge plumbers or concierge lawyers. We need to get to the point that paying a doctor directly doesn’t deserve an adjective before the noun “medicine”. Paying your doctor is just medicine. Having someone else pay for you is insurance medicine.