Healthcare used to be simple. You called. You were seen. The doctor knew your name. You paid a reasonable copay and left with answers. That version is mostly gone. What replaced it is a machine built to process people, not care for them.
Insurance is the real customer. Billing codes are the real language. Networks, portals, forms, referrals, and “not covered” are the real product. The clinic does not need to know you. It needs to extract enough data, enough signatures, enough billable minutes to keep the machine running. The doctor gets four minutes. The nurse gets eight. You wait weeks, then months, then get three (or ten) separate bills and a phone tree that explains nothing.
It is efficient for the companies in the middle. It is profitable for the ones who sell the software, the plans, the networks, the “patient engagement” tools. It is sad for everyone else. You are not treated like a person who is scared, tired, or in pain. You are treated like a claim that might or might not pay out. Your time is cheap. Your data is useful. Your loyalty is assumed because you have nowhere else to go.
Medicine did not have to become this. It could have stayed a relationship between a sick person and someone trying to help. Instead it adopted the same model as everything else by turning the human into inventory.
Thoughts?
Much Love, Lynn