&gt; And then the hospital starts making less money (losing money), research funding dries up, and we start using mercury to treat syphilis again. I&#x27;m only half-kidding. I say hospital because all the laws that have changed in healthcare have driven most doctors out of private practice into hospital positions. since 2004, hospital-employed doctors have gone from 11% to over 60%[1]. One major reason being that with the wave of medical reform, the overhead of running a practice has skyrocketed. &quot;Comfortable and enjoyable&quot; are rarely applicable when you only start paying off your $1m schooling debt at 30.<p>Sorry, I meant suggest taking less patients, in addition to charging enough to match what you were making before. Not just doctors&#x2F;hospitals making less money across the board. This will encourage more people to be doctors&#x2F;open hospitals in the long run to fill the demand (then bringing down the price again, until we&#x27;re at a nice equilibrium), which will bring down prices, and ensure that doctors take as many patients as is comfortable.<p>&gt; I&#x27;m not sure what else to say other than &quot;They aren&#x27;t&quot;. These are laws, not administrative suggestions. Hospitals expect&#x2F;need the same output regardless of the laws the government changes.<p>Is there no doctor&#x27;s lobby? If the law is wrong&#x2F;naive, there are measures you can take to make sure it&#x27;s changed.<p>&gt; I have a life-long condition. I don&#x27;t care when my doctor is typing because I&#x27;ve had it my whole life, it&#x27;s nothing more than maintenance, and I&#x27;ll see them again in 6 months. Imagine being told you have 6 months to live from someone half-sitting behind a computer.<p>Yes, that would be a very insensitive way to convey such information, but that&#x27;s also not the routine case, right? Also, I noted that it seems serviceable for the doctor to cut up the time (in a world where they could set their own billable hours, which could exist).<p>&gt; My father doesn&#x27;t eat lunch, using that time to catch up on notes. For as long as I remember, has left for work at 5am and gotten home at 8pm. He spends his Saturdays and Sundays working. And again, hospital employees don&#x27;t get to choose how many hours they bill.<p>I didn&#x27;t call into question how much current doctors work to catch up on notes -- from what the article said, and your personal experience that is a crazy amount of paperwork. If hospital employees don&#x27;t get to choose the amount they bill, then maybe someone should change the hospitals? Or come up with some other structure for serving patients.<p>My main point condensed:
The amount of paperwork doctors are buried under is insane, that much is clear. Doctors are some powerless group of victims -- surely there are some actions they can take to alleviate the problems, especially if what&#x27;s best for patients is what the care about.<p>I did not know about these problems so reading this article was informational for me, but I found it lacking in the &quot;what we&#x27;re going to do about it&quot; department.