Help Please...need Info For A Paper

[exia80]

i AM WRITING A PAPER ON THE MILITARY AND I CAN'T FIND WHAT THE TRENDS ARE IN MILITARY MEDICINE...

anyone have any insight??? i can't find this info anywhere....i looked for like 5 hours....sigh...the stupid thing si due tommorow


please help

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[thenavysurgeon]

what sort of 'trends' are you interested?

i can tell you from expierence that 'trends' in mil med mirror the trends in our chrnically undermanned and woefully underfunded military.

mil med is not an operational priority....look at its shrinking annual budget, if you disagree with me. always follow the $$.

good, board certified and well trained docs are leaving in droves. the people that remain have grown comfortable in a working environment that tolerates near-incompetency, shift-worker mentality and non-creative thinking. the techs and nurses I work with could never hold a job down in the civilian world, with few exceptions.

mil med residency training is producing very few competent docs. there is simply not enough pathology to train good docs. residency programs rely heavily on the civilian sector to train docs...at great expense. why are the military residency programs still sucking dollars from the budget? they ought to be dissolved and absorbed into the civilian sector.

anything else...

overall, the trend is downward, into the dirt.

 

[exia80]

yea i was thinking something along the lines of:

decreased funding
deploying many docs 2 iraq
adn hireing more civilian docs to decrease costs


and i am trying to find more trends...the decreasing $$ thing i didnt think about but that i sa good one.

thanks

 

[thenavysurgeon]

unfortunately, civilian docs do NOT decrease costs. they are extremely expensive. military docs are cheap, as we're paid about 4/10 of what the civilian sector does...especially in my field.

my prediction is that military medicine is in such a bad way, its almost unsalvable, and will not exist in 20 years. the civilian sector will deal with it, and likely will do it more cheaply.

mark my words.

thenavysurgeon

 

[militarymd]

unfortunately, civilian docs do NOT decrease costs. they are extremely expensive. military docs are cheap, as we're paid about 4/10 of what the civilian sector does...especially in my field.

my prediction is that military medicine is in such a bad way, its almost unsalvable, and will not exist in 20 years. the civilian sector will deal with it, and likely will do it more cheaply.

mark my words.

thenavysurgeon

I'll put in my 2 cents on the cost of civilian MDs. They do appear expensive on the face of it, but I believe that the cost is not nearly as high as keeping an active duty MD.

The civilian contractors do not have a pension plan and do not have benefits, so their cost is their salary only.

The active duty MDs on the otherhand are paid less, but once they retire, they continue to draw pay from the same pool of money used to pay active duty MDs. Their benefits continue along with the benefits to their families, so as active duty MDs retire, the successive cost of replacing him/her with another active duty MD goes up...until the retiree dies....which as we know is taking longer and longer.

So, the military wants active duty MDs to remain on active duty until 19.9 years then get out....they don't want you to retire for financial reasons. Although your W-2 says you have a pension plan, the government does not actually put any money into a "pension plan".....a retiree's pay comes from the yearly personnel fiscal budget.......It is completely *****ic how they run the finances....

So, contractors are not as expensive as they appear.

 

[thenavysurgeon]

i agree with your reasoning...i actually was thinking about the lack of true pension issue when i was doing my taxes this past year...what a pisser.

i think you'd agree that military budgeteers are not as far sighted as you are, x-mmd. a contractor is expensive on an annual basis, and commands are extremely reluctant to hire them.

we've got a radiology contractor that rolls in at 10 am, is out by 3 pm, does not do IR, makes protein shakes and listens to motown and soul in his office all day, is unavailable for consultation at any hour of the day, and parks his yellow H2 in the ER patient parking lot...the guy is a pain in the ass. Maybe its a good thing the Navy does not hire more contractors...hmm.

 

[militarymd]

You are right. There are some serious looming issues.....I wonder how it is going to all work out.

 

[bobbyseal]

I just finished rotating through as a clerk.

This was an interesting thing I found.

The dept didn't want people to do lap appy's because they're more expensive than open appy's. However, those who had open appy's tended to stay longer in the hospital, thus negating the difference of cost based on hospital stay.

Since the surg dept only cares about cost of an operation, they could care less how long a hospital stay is. Thus, they'er supposed to only do open appy's unless it's equivocal or in a woman.

Left hand doesn't know what right hand is doing...