In the District of Columbia in 2006, only 50percentt of those with new diagnoses of H.I.V. saw a doctor for the problem within six months.
And, in certain cases, I, too, was disappointed that I wasn't a doctor; some of the problems these people face could be solved with modern medicine and technology.
"Doctors are part of the problem," Dr. Schmitt said.
In his new year message to doctors, Porter lamented "the perception in the media and elsewhere that doctors are part of the problem".
Last April, Dr. Carlson, the company's top doctor, discussed the problem of protruding wires with the lead safety panel.
The insurer said prices charged by doctors are part of the problem.
For parent-doctor communication, unavailability of doctors was the problem reported most often, followed by lack of parent participation during rounds, different attitudes of different doctors, and lack of staff continuity (Table 4).
Often, she added, someone who has just tested positive "can walk off that day and decide, 'I'm going to pretend that never happened.' " In 2006, only about half of Washington residents who had a new diagnosis of H.I.V. saw a doctor about the problem within six months.
The New York Department of Financial Services investigation that found that insurers are shifting to alternate methodologies to calculate reimbursements to out-of-network doctors also revealed the problem of patients receiving huge "surprise bills" from doctors, even when they believed that they were staying within their insurer's network.
The article points to the way this system has resulted in artificially high numbers of specialists and a shortage of primary-care doctors, but the problem goes deeper: this kind of pricing would obviously lead to the kinds of distortions Atul Gawande found in his celebrated New Yorker article this summer, on why America spends so much on health care.
