California Concierge Medicine: A Courageous Healing Revolution

How do you get the attention of a bully?  You smack him hard enough to “ring his bell” and make him aware of just how evil he is acting.  It works every time, because he backs off and recognizes that he just met his match, and he cowers into the shadows, and the conqueror gets on with life at its best. Coming from a doctor, that prescription may not sound caring, but it is. Believe it or not, the tamed bully might just reach out of those shadows and join the party and become a friend and enjoy life alongside the conqueror, free from his mean spiritedness.

There’s a lot of talk about concierge medicine in social circles today, especially after covid, and it seems to be taking off. Concierge in the context of medicine means “gatekeeper,” or a steward who controls access to healing. He or she works for the patient; the “jobber” or “independent personal contractor” or employee of the patient. Compare this to a hotel, where the concierge is a dedicated employee of the landlord who handles luggage, makes reservations, and arranges tours. It’s a “go-to” person that travelers really appreciate, and a vital asset of a competitive hotel. I suspect they get tips also, if they love their job!

CASH IS KING. That is the motto of a concierge doctor. And that doctor recognizes that “health insurance” is a scam, the counterfeit or fake money representation of cash, doled out by an evil bureaucratic bully. This method of payment has no value, so why accept it as payment for services rendered? The concierge doctor knows it is foolish to do so. He or she has been around the block, recognizing that the holder of the health insurance card is potentially in debt; either overextended, overdrawn, or out of work.

As an old and wise California general surgeon, but still hell-bent on dealing with bullies, I am here to tell you that concierge doctors have got it going on, and I endorse them 100%. They are excellent and exceptional doctors. And because they love their work, you get very high-quality treatment and superb attention to detail. They are problem solvers of the highest order.  Those are the doctors that I would like to help me out with my illnesses.

As you know, Californians are extremely polarized and torn in their thinking and feelings about the healthcare insurance scam they face today.  Some love it, some despise it, yet most don’t know much about it because they don’t have to access it very much. But again, covid has changed things recently.    

Doctors are also divided.  But unlike patients, they face the health insurance scam every day in their pursuit of income so they can pay their bills and live fairly comfortably. Doctors, however, are also indentured servants and victims of their circumstances because they are all owned and regulated by the stingy and thieving government and monopoly – the so called “medical industrial complex,” or the bully. And that is our fault for believing mainstream media lies and voting accordingly. Yes, you and me, my fellow Californians, it’s our fault!  

Warning:  These circumstances are very dangerous for you the patient and I, the doctor.  We do not need government and monopolistic bureaucracy to provide medical care for Californians. We need the opposite. We need CASH FLOW. We need each other. Doctors need patients and patients need doctors. It’s time for common sense. It is time for high quality, low cost, highly caring medicine, readily available and affordable for all Californians.

Our modern day “bully” or “thug” run healthcare system has two divisions: outpatient doctors, also called primary care or family practice doctors (who work in clinics and offices outside the hospitals), and inpatient doctors, also called hospitalists (who work exclusively in the hospitals). The doctors in these two settings generally do not cross over as they did in the past before the bully got involved.

So, many doctors who treat patients in the outpatient setting have either dropped their hospital admitting privileges, and newer ones never obtain hospital admitting privileges in the first place. Why would they if they are working exclusively in the outpatient setting? Also, they can avoid the annual fee the hospital charges as a contractual obligation in promising to abide by the hospital’s by-laws, including accepting Medi-Cal and Medi-Care and Newsom-care (single payor) payment for services rendered. 

The Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations needs to get their cut of your hard-earned income as well. That means many unnecessary restrictions and regulations on the doctors they own and rule. Those doctors have all waivered their skill and judgment to the medical industrial complex, who is a thief, a killer, a liar, and a bully thug!

In either case, these doctors are grumpy, resentful, bitter, burned out, and trapped. People have a false sense of the problems doctors face and consider them impersonal and non-trustable price gougers nowadays.  Hospitalists and the hospitals they work in are even  more suspect than outpatient doctors. That’s the impression folks have, especially post-covid.

Fact: It is the bully who is selling you this bill of goods, pitting you against your doctors as they pilfer and pocket your hard-earned money and literally kill you by rationing “healthcare”, and at the same time drive doctors into miserable exile. Those doctors do not love their jobs. The government run healthcare system and fake news takes care of your health alright, they take it away from you and the doctor. Then they blame the doctors! And I am blaming you, because you have either been voting wrong or avoiding your responsibility to vote altogether! So how do we fix it?

Concierge doctors are thinking of you, and how to get you prompt, top notch, affordable, safe, and caring medical treatment. They have begun to take advantage of a novel wonderful stimulus that allows them to do the job they love, called CASH. What they do is perfectly legal and highly ethical.  It’s a winner.  

In exchange, they deny the chintzy reimbursement of the bully third party single payor and rely on their own reputation, skill, and judgment instead of continuing as an indentured servant who depends on the reputation of the medical industrial complex. Put this into the context of your own job being a patient. Wouldn’t you do the same? Wouldn’t that make you start trusting your doctors again? Wouldn’t that put a smile on the face of your doctors again? Would you not agree that simple common sense is almost miraculous?

The problem with concierge medicine is that it becomes a very real and serious source of bias between outpatient doctors and hospitalists, and patients. Here is why: When an outpatient doctor has a patient that gets sick enough to need admission to the hospital, they must abandon that patient to the hospitalists. Hospitals are equipped to do surgery, provide anesthesia for those surgeries, intensive care units to support the very sick, along with critical care hospitalists and ventilators and monitoring, and nursing floors with nurses to take care of you when you are sick enough to require admission. Think back about covid.  Bias, envy, prejudice and hopelessness are the results.

Concierge medicine is what I would call “dump and run” medicine.  In earlier years, the family practitioner (primary care physician) would admit the patient and arrange for the proper consultants to come to the hospital and help get his or her patient well and then discharged for follow-up back in the office. The family doc is the “captain of the ship.” The patient says… “That’s my doctor”!  That’s good and caring medicine, start to finish.   You can imagine the attitudes of all the doctors and the patients in that amazing environment.  If you can’t, let me tell you, it is wonderful, personal relationship, and it’s within our reach, right now!

In my opinion, concierge doctors are leaders. They are successfully taking on the bully, but the bully hasn’t had his bell rung quite yet. Why don’t the rest of us patients and doctors take the cue and reach out to all the concierge doctors here in California and let them know that we need them to help us in the most important medical REVOLUTION in the history of California. Let them know that now you know what they and we are up against, and that we want all our California doctors and  patients to experience affordable, satisfying, caring and safe medical and surgical treatments again, without prejudice.  

Show them this article and see if they will get on board. And then let’s ring the bell of the bully and establish cash-based business between the only people who matter, namely the doctor and the patient! We need to be free of the suffocating bondage of the medical industrial complex and create an environment where “If you like your doctor, then pay your doctor, and you can keep your doctor”!  Give those doctors a raise, a nice big raise. That’s love friends. That will heal us and free us up to deal with the other major pressing problems in our society we face, a lot stronger than we are now.

Let me be frank with you if you remain afraid and doubtful about what I am saying above – It’s as if you are in a tunnel and “seeing the light” at the end of that tunnel. The question is whether that light is sunshine, or the light of a freight train coming at you full steam ahead. Time to get off our butts and charge ahead in unity and ring the bell of that train with relentless, overpowering inertia and conquer it!  

November 5, 2024, is rapidly approaching. Let us not have regrets. Spread the news. Let’s all fix medicine! Let’s get supercharged by our concierge docs and as a family, ring the bell of this pipsqueak goliath-like medical industrial complex with fearless and courageous expectation of a huge victory!