A $45 office call?

Available on The Tulsa World.

If your child has a sore throat and sees his regular doctor the office call will be around $78 and a test for strep $30. That’s $118 for a sore throat and you haven’t been to the pharmacy yet! That’s unacceptable and prices care out of reach, and it is one of the reasons President Obama is calling for health care reform. True reform must address the cost of providing care, which is translated into higher insurance rates, which means more uninsured Americans.

In any business, personnel are a major cost driver. Medicine is no different. Next time you are in a doctor’s office or hospital business office, take a look at all of those people on the payroll who are not involved in patient care. This is a far greater cost than the well-publicized cost of malpractice insurance.

We must get back to medical care being a doctor-patient relationship. Insurance needs to return to being a contract between the patient and the insurance company. Presently insurance companies too often stand between the doctor and patient. This situation is the major cause of all of those folks you never see being on the payroll.

Doctors need to be made more aware of the cost of tests, treatments and pharmaceuticals. We need true price transparency for both patients and doctors. Physicians should follow evidence-based treatment protocols that are the most clinically sound and cost-effective. These are being developed for more and more diagnoses.

Medical schools (state funding) need to ramp up immediately to increase the number of

physicians who are needed by our aging society. Yes, even in medicine the law of supply and demand helps determine costs.

Excessive tests are sometimes ordered in the practice of defensive medicine. True lawsuit reform will help eliminate this expense and hold down malpractice insurance rates that are passed on to the patient. Test duplication can be avoided by having all medical test results in a central repository available to physicians electronically.

Patients themselves are sometimes responsible for high costs — requesting unnecessary tests or having unhealthy habits such as smoking (the No. 1 one cause of preventable illness).

Insurance companies should be regulated by a federal agency rather than state-to-state. If you can find a company in Idaho which has the policy you want and can afford, you should be able to buy it.

Presently doctors are penalized by Medicare and insurance companies if they reduce fees for a patient on hard times. That needs to change.

Ninety-nine percent of my medical colleagues are truly interested only in helping people feel better and live longer. I find the president’s accusation that physicians would perform surgery or test only to line their pockets offensive.

The present system has problems; it needs to be reformed. The president needs to slow down and listen to patients and those of us working in the trenches providing care to the common man. By all working together I am convinced we can lower that $78 office visit to $45, and preserve both the freedom of choice and the doctor-patient relationship that both physicians and patients cherish.