Sick Care System: One Doctor’s Journey Through the Madness

Preface:

I'm writing this book out of the painful experience of surviving the healthcare system. To put it mildly, I often tell people that healthcare systems care for their physicians and non-physician providers about as tenderly as a pimp treats their sex workers.

A healthcare employee attorney once told me that working in healthcare is a lot like working for a mining company. At the time, I thought she meant both industries are just tough on their workforce. But later, it hit me: what she really meant is that both have to deal with casualties. And when those casualties happen, they don’t fix the system—they just replace the bodies..

We’re always talking about the looming physician shortage. You would think the healthcare systems would do everything it could to preserve and nurture the physicians it already has—these are human resources that are extremely time-consuming, costly, and difficult to replace. It takes a minimum of eleven years to create one doctor: four years of college, four years of medical school, and at least three years of residency. That’s if everything goes perfectly—no detours, no delays.

And yet, we lose over 300 physicians to suicide every single year. That’s the size of an entire medical school graduating class. Imagine this: every year, a plane full of freshly minted doctors crashes. Every single year. Year after year. And nothing changes. The system does nothing. Because the truth is, the healthcare system does not care.

Instead of fixing the system, healthcare just talks about resiliency. Before that, it was stress reduction. But really, it's all the same playbook: push the responsibility back onto physicians. Not the system. Never the system.