THE WORST IS YET TO COME ..

Jerome Kassirer, in a current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, expressed the fear that:

market-driven care is likely to alienate physicians, undermine patients' trusts of physicians' motives, cripple academic medical centers, [and] handicap the research establishment ... On the one hand, doctors are expected to provide a wide range of services, recommend the best treatments, and improve patients' quality of life. On the other, to keep expenses to a minimum they must limit the use of services, increase efficiency, shorten the time spent with each patient, and use specialists sparingly!