By Sarah Maslin @ NYTimes.com

Apparently, his dispute with the hospital was about accusations of sexual harrassment against him and he felt treated unfairly. So it is not really proof of what I am going to address next, but it served to raise the whole topic for me.

I mentioned there are "unconvenient truths" about our health care system upthread. In particular, I think there is a lot of anger brewing.  Before Trump and the new Congress was inaugurated, in my own interactions with the health care system, and in a lot of the things I read, I sensed a lot of dissatisfaction by providers, that the system was being stretched to the breaking point under Obamacare. Providers know patients like it, they very much like that more people are covered for preventive care, and that the whole pre-existing thing was solved, they would not like to see those things done away with, but they were still were very much dissatisfied with the whole situation! They desperately wanted to see improvement,  especially as the boomers age and access many more services, not go backwards.

I especially heard and read a lot about the insurance companies squeezing them and playing other games, having to cut costs, not having enough staff to handle everything (hospitals and docs and nurses all), the drug companies and investors with their huge profit motives. Then there is a serious staffing problem and cost cutting  in most hospitals, especially that nurses are overloaded.

In NYC, Manhattan specifically, it is common to see specialty docs opting out totally, not accepting any insurance at all, and just going to out-of-pocket patients. They will give you a claim form for you to file for your insurance to try to get money back from them, but they will not do the insurance thing anymore. In my own personal experience, not all of these docs are money grubbing assholes, but very fine caring doctors who are just fed up with it all. They still very much like helping people regardless of income, but just "mad as hell and can't take it anymore" having to deal with lots of insurance companies and, aging themselves, want to practice and help whoever they can rather that quitting totally.

Another alternative I see happening over the same problem is huge doctor conglomerates, like Advantage Care Physicians (36 office locations, 29 medical specialties, 400 primary care and specialist physicians) where they have basically gone over to a salaried system just so someone else handles all the paperwork and negotiate with the insurance companies, and they can just practice medicine. Unfortunately for patients, though, while the docs are happy to have all the crap handled by their bosses, these big medical bureaucracies are for profit, and they also do the squeeze thing. And they can be the worst kind of nightmare bureaucracies, where you can get into Kafka like experiences if something like a prescription goes wrong because of a software glitch or human error typing in the wrong code. You cannot reach a human being with medical knowledge, the doctors are protected from such phone calls. They got rules and a system to make money, and will not tolerate anything else.

I once had a small type of problem like this and when I finally saw my doctor, I complained to him that the phone system and the email system was a huge runaround and no one but him could have solved it but I was not allowed to reach him, but just deal with idiots that didn't understand.  This was his solution: if anything like this happens again, just stop by in person and have them call me out and I will fix it! So ironic. We have phones and email but in person is best. Unfortunately, it's not like the big clinic is right down the block, you're talking half a day lost.

MY POINT ABOUT ALL OF THIS: like I told Obey on another recent thread, I THINK SINGLE PAYER IS COMING SOONER THAN A LOT OF PEOPLE THINK. When you see conservatives say this too,some warn that it is coming if what they consider a good repeal isn't enacted, that is why, I think: they get the situation more than their colleagues, they get that there is still need for radical change. We all know plenty of individual doctors are Republicans on other issues, they talk to such providers that are their constituents, they know they are still unhappy with the system. Their solution is unrealistic, like market forces and health savings accounts, but they get that the system is at a breaking point, that both providers and patients will eventually demand single payer if things don't change soon.