Health Care and Mansfield, Ohio

http://www.newsweek.com/id/195673

Interesting article on health care reform (by Mitt Romney by the way). For me, still too much government involvement...but definitely heading in the right direction. Government run health care is not the answer. I just spent two weeks at a government subsidized dental clinic in Mansfield and saw some really shady stuff going on there. Granted, the comparison between that Mansfield dental clinic is not completely applicable to health care reform, but it does show how government involvement breeds inefficiency and unethical treatment. For example...

The Mansfield clinic does not get paid by procedure, but by appointment. For each appointment they get paid $120 for people who don't have Medicaid but qualify for assistance. So the clinic does one procedure per appointment (even if it only takes ten minutes) and schedules multiple appointments for every patient regardless of their need. Someone who needs full mouth extractions could theoretically have 32 appointments to get it done. Sometimes, if they are feeling generous, they will take out two teeth per appointment.

If a patient walks in with swelling from a tooth borne infection they do an emergency exam and prescribe antibiotics and pain meds. This is true no matter how simple the extraction would be, after all, two appointments is better than one in Mansfield. At any private practice in America, the tooth would immediately be taken out. It is unethical and wrong to send the patient away without removing the source of infection.

When treatment planning for a new patient, not all options are explained to patients. Why? Because some procedures are not profitable to the clinic. Fillings and extractions are the most profitable. Everything else, including crowns (which Medicaid sometimes covers) are hardly discussed or recognized as a possibility.

The result of government subsidizing the Mansfield clinic: everyone, including people with means to pay or insured, gets inefficient and lower quality care. When government takes over health care, we ALL will go to a Mansfield-like clinic for procedures far more critical than fillings.