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Patient-centered medical homes are a long-term investment
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"Many industry experts believe medical homes are a vital step in creating a better-performing healthcare system."
A quote from the linked article:
"The value of PCMH lies in primary care physicians managing patients' overall care, which is personalized and coordinated. It is designed to facilitate medical management of the whole person rather than a specific health condition, thereby achieving better health outcomes..."
Sounds a lot like hope and change...how's that worked out for you?
Just like the ACO, the PCMH is wordsmithing. News to a lot of the statists out there, but primary care physicians were doing just fine, thank you, providing personalized and coordinated care under a fee for service medicine system for many years.
Many of these demonstration projects, you will note, involved Medicaid patients...who are not the same patient population that makes up a private medical practice. Yet, we are to believe that application of a system for the entire population is supposed to be more beneficial.
The statists pushing the PCMH are overtly hostile to private, fee for service medicine. That much is clear. A necessary element of the PCMH is to destroy fee for service medicine and replace it with a "system" that will "share responsibility" for patient care.
In fact, such a system will (and has, in the real world) drive up costs as the necessary bureacracy the PCMH entails has to be paid for.
Just as you note in your story, many industry experts "believe" in the PCMH. Hope and change isn't, as we've come to see, a very good way to run a country, and belief is not a good reason to upend private medical care and destroy fee for service medicine.