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March 26, 2008

The Closing Flood Gates

"In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone."
--John Kenneth Galbraith
We all love specialists. Patients know exactly what they go to them for, they've seen the problem hundreds of times in a given month so they have a pretty good idea how to treat you, their offices have 42" plasma TVs not magazines, and they attract the cream of the med school crop so you know they're good. But who gets you to see them?

PCPs! They're the referral centers. The gatekeepers to the rest of health care industry. And soon they'll be in pretty dire straits. Just go to the AAFP policy page, and you get an idea of all the Federal advocacy issues they're involved with. People flock to where the money is, but in this case the monetary incentives set up for the specialty docs and against the primary docs may not actually be beneficial to our health.