The Two Tier Medical System, Coming Soon

I’m not only not a doctor, I don’t play one on television. However, I've survived being run over by a car, survived a war, beat cancer and fought heat disease to a standstill. I’m also old and everything that was fun in my youth is starting to ache. So I consider myself something of an expert on medical care.

I've grown increasingly uneasy as this Obamacare roll out mess continues. Looking into the future, I shudder, and see a two tier medical system in our future.

The wealthy will be fine. The wealthy will find the new medical tourist locations where they can go for critical care. Our neighbors in Canada wait months for treatment to diagnose and treat cancer. The wealthy Canadians fly to the United States and get treatment immediately. The poor stay and many get treatment too late to save their lives. Like Canada, the wealthy in the United States will find those new medical facilities, set up outside the United States, where they can get treatment quickly. I see Mexico, Bermuda, Belize and The Marquesas Islands as possible new sites for state of the art medical facilities operating on a cash only basis. Like most ideas developed around big government, the truly wealthy will avoid the distasteful parts.

The rest of us will become adept at working within and around the new system, involving endless hours filling out forms, waiting in lines and talking with bureaucrats who have the final say in life and death decisions. It will be justified in the interest of equality. It will be equal, equally bad care, with a decline in the average life span of citizens.

 In this new age of big government control over our lives, it will become very important to “know someone” in government, in case a family member become seriously ill. Since there will be fewer medical doctors, fewer facilities and increased usage, rationing will become normal, though it will be described in more sanitary language. The elderly are in trouble. Their earning years behind them, they now become a burden since they require additional care, but contribute less money to the system. It will not be rationing that kills these folks, it will be “essential basic care criteria” eliminating them from the expensive treatments such as chemotherapy. Those with addictions are going to get some real life experience in living with the results of earlier decisions. Addicts, as a rule, do not work, and therefore have a very low priority. Likewise, the severely disabled are a burden, who consume more medical care than the money they contribute can justify. Their “essential basic care criteria” will be considerably lower than the 25 year recent college graduate.

While the wealthy enjoy their stay on beautiful islands with a light, warm breeze blowing in the open windows of their private medical suite, equipped with the latest medical equipment, operated by skilled specialists, the poor will find a new reality.

With fewer doctors we will see an increase in the number of procedures performed by RN’s, LVN’s, medical assistants and Pharmacists. Simple operations now requiring a doctor will be performed by “licensed medical surgical specialists.” These specialists will not have completed medical school or residency; however, they will have been shown several times by a real doctor how to perform the surgery. If something goes wrong, there will be doctors on staff, within the hospital, who can be called to the surgical suite to assist. It may take them a few minutes to get to the suite, but doctors will be stretched thin, and it will be an understandable situation.

Instead of a yearly medical checkup with a doctor, you will be able to order a bar code, on line, to ship your blood to a licensed lab. Taking blood should not be hard to learn by the average person. Once a bar code is issued, it is attached to the blood sample tube and shipped to the lab. The lab will process the information and ship the patient a printout suggesting any necessary treatments. The entire process should not take more than two to three weeks, depending on the current backlog. If the blood sample tube is lost, a person can go on line fill out the “lost tube form 384.e3” and get a replacement bar code.

Emergency medical treatment will, by necessity, be centralized within counties. In a county the size of Orange, we will probably get a center. The Emergency Center will be located in Santa Ana. Each ER room will be within one hour of an accident, if traffic is not too heavy.

Our big government friends have been trying to copy Europe for fifty years. They are getting closer. In Europe the rich do very well in most aspects of their lives. In Europe the poor make do until things get too bad, then they riot. After the riot, they go back to making do.

I see a two tier system that will do more to divide us than any issue in our history. God help us.