The Doctor, the Patient, and Everything in Between
Prognosis: Misconception
Bloomberg
4.1 • 838 Ratings
🗓️ 16 January 2020
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Independent doctors are a vanishing breed. Hospitals have spent decades scooping up physician groups to build large, powerful health-care systems. The rationale was to increase efficiency and save money but often the opposite occurred. In fact, lots of evidence shows that consolidation in health care has driven prices higher. And both physicians and patients increasingly feel that big health systems and insurance companies have too much sway over what happens in the exam room. A few years ago, a group of doctors in Charlotte, North Carolina, decided they’d had enough. They split from the big hospital system that owned their practice to strike out on their own. They’re betting that they can be more competitive, and serve their patients better, independent of their former owners. In this episode of Prognosis, we tell the story of how one doctors’ group bucked the trend toward more concentrated health-care markets, and what it might mean for the future of the U.S. health-care system.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers. |
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| 0:23.3 | Follow the Big Take podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. |
| 0:36.9 | For a lot of companies in the business of providing health care these days, it seems bigger is always better. |
| 0:43.3 | For decades, the industry has been consolidating. |
| 0:46.3 | Health insurance companies have merged into big conglomerates that also own doctor and pharmacy businesses. |
| 0:53.3 | Hospitals have glommed together into big regional systems. |
| 0:57.1 | They've gobbled up physician groups too, |
| 0:59.3 | so there's a good chance your local doctor works for a giant health system. |
| 1:04.3 | In 2018, more doctors worked as salaried employees than as owners of their own practices, |
| 1:10.2 | according to a survey from the American |
| 1:11.9 | Medical Association. That's never happened before. Welcome to Prognosis, Bloomberg's |
| 1:20.1 | podcast about the future of health care. I'm your host, Michelle Faye Cortez. For both patients |
| 1:26.5 | and their doctors, what happens in the exam room is increasingly influenced |
| 1:31.0 | by big bureaucracies they don't understand and they can't control. |
| 1:35.9 | This has left a lot of patients unsatisfied and a lot of physicians burned out. |
| 1:41.3 | But some doctors have said enough. |
| 1:43.9 | Here's Bloomberg News health reporter John Tauzy, |
| 1:46.4 | with the story of one group of doctors in North Carolina, who took a different path. |
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