A Mount Carmel Hospital doctor has been making the national news this month but for all of the wrong the reasons. While the motives surrounding how a doctor might over-prescribe Fentanyl has not been discovered, the press has been all over the hospital system, asking how this could happen. The local and national press have been asking the whodunit type tabloid click bait questions but there are ever bigger questions that nobody is asking and more important, nobody is connecting how what is going on at this hospital is actually just a symptom of a much bigger problem in our healthcare system across this country.
If we are truly going to have a debate about healthcare in this country then we need to actually look at what the real problems are and our elected officials have not been honest in explaining that to the public. If they would be honest, then we would all realize that none of their solutions work and that the only purpose of their rhetoric is to distract and divide us so the system stays the same. What are they distracting us from? They are distracting us from the fact that the power that doctors and the medical industrial complex have over healthcare system is one of the main problems with healthcare. It is what makes our healthcare so expensive and why our system is so broken and ironically makes up none of the national debate about what needs to be fixed. This episode kicks off with the Mount Carmel incident because at the core of the problems in our healthcare industry is the power that doctors have over hospitals and how greed plays a central role in their decision making…both the doctor and the hospital. It explains why they are able to get away with so much but also how it drops a huge financial burden on the system…i.e. me, you, tax payers, and our government.
While the press releases from hospitals across the country will lay out all of their plans to prevent abuses from happening and those programs might make us feel better but none of these solutions serve anything more than a band-aid for a bullet wound. The press is missing out on the real story and we are going to deliver it for you. To help explore this topic we welcome our regular healthcare correspondent Richard DeVine who served several years as the Chief Resource Officer and VP of Supply-Chain for the Mount Carmel hospital system as well as a healthcare supply-chain consultant with over 30 years of experience. If anybody will know the power of doctors and how their power affects the healthcare system it will be him.
So don’t miss out on this very special 20th episode of Gray Matters Radio airing Monday February 4, 2019 only on The Reporters Network.
