The Healthcare Emperor is Naked!!

Yes, healthcare is "dressed" in altruism and good intentions and its practitioners are generally sincere. But as a society, we're not looking at the driving force of our healthcare. We see what we want to see. In his Forbes article, "American Healthcare: The Emperor is Naked," Roy Smythe, M.D. says that while we want to see health as the product of the American healthcare delivery system, in reality it is revenue.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/roysmythe/2014/04/28/american-healthcare-the-emperor-is-naked/ 

This trend is damaging the quality of care in America.  It's no secret that Americans are attracted to the latest and greatest. If there are two ways to treat a condition and one involves technology and the other doesn't, we're likely to choose the fancier method. We think we get what we pay for. But we also see patented medicines rushed to marked before being fully tested for safety. We see (too often in hindsight) that the risks of surgery may outweigh the benefit. We know behavior changes can be as effective but we lack discipline, so we opt for the gadget. We've all seen it, but perhaps we haven't pulled it all together.

The story of "The Emperor's New Clothes" is instructive. We've all seen that the emperor is naked and some of us are whispering about it. But the hero of the story isn't the adults who are standing around whispering. The hero is the little boy who stands up and shouts, "But he hasn't got anything on!!" 

Why do the adults whisper while the little boy shouts? They're intimidated by the power of the emperor. Revenue is a powerful force and in this case it's not a force for good, not as the driving force of healthcare. We want better outcomes to drive our delivery system. Improved outcomes can be in the form of dollars as well as quality of life. Do we have the courage to overcome our intimidation, to stand up and shout it out loud? Or will we let the power of revenue simply mow us down?

I'm a patient advocate and I'm here to help.