There are some doctors at teaching hospitals who specialize in diagnosing rare diseases and don't take insurance for this reason.
Oh, you grossly underestimate what people are capable of. At least in China there are many reported cases of such horrible patients. Maybe US being a developed country have fewer these people, but definitely not zero.
Probably there are other professions in which one gets better service if one has an inside connection, but this situation really speaks ill of how medicine is practiced.
Having a doc in the family is a mixed blessing at best. You can get priority treatment, and the benefit of your family members full attention. On the flip side, all the docs I know that aren’t fools or morons don’t treat their own family for anything more serious than a scrape. You’re biased, you don’t want the guilt of an error, and you don’t want to be the bearer of bad news. I frequently ask my wife not to ask me about her mother’s health developments; I’d rather tell comforting lies than be a source of sour truth.
Being a VIP in a medical center due to your relatives gets you more ass kissing, not better care. People don’t want to step on toes, or give the impression that useful care is being withheld. And if your relative is a worse doc than the one you’re seeing? No one is going to overrule your family member to your face.
Personally, all I ever want from a patient is a clear timeline of events, their best attempt to articulate what they felt, a list of scripts, and old medical records (especially imaging.) The patient that can give me that has made the task of helping them 1000x easier.
I wish that were so, but disease is not confined to the reasonable, the rational, the kind, the respectful, or the grateful. On the contrary, the stress of disease and it’s associated burdens (social, financial, psychological, etc) tends to diminish those qualities in even the best of us.
Harvard did a huge study on malpractice suits a while back. They found that most medical errors that caused the death of a loved one did not result in suits, and most suits did not originate from medical errors. That is to say, the good or ill you do a patient isn’t the reason they sue.
Having to slip the doc and the anaethetist a red envelope and hoping it's the enough that they'll take proper care of you is not a good system to live under.
I’d never heard of this before.
https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/the-red-envelope-capita...
Clearly healthcare can be free to the recipients while doctors still get a good salary.
The only thing I can say in their defense is that at least docs in those countries don’t generally take on massive, private, un-dischargeable debt in order to do the job. In the US we treat the medical workforce as a public good, though they have to take on all the risk of entering that workforce through private financing.
The side effect of all this, honestly, is that doctors stop learning how to turn off 7-minute-mode. When it comes to very serious problems, it pays to go to a practice that doesn’t accept insurance at all, because they never got into the bad habit to begin with.