Health care change starts in medical field

Everyone is talking about health care but little is being done to improve the quality of service. Popular trends of care such as the use of hospitalists in place of your own physician when admitted to the hospital, physician's assistants and nurse practitioners replacing MDs as health care providers have placed the best interest of the patients at risk. Gone are the days when one can talk with a physician directly unless you are at an appointment, or when you have your doctor treat you directly through any hospitalization.

A few practitioners still treat their own patients but the number is rapidly decreasing, and your care is passed from doctor to doctor.

Insurance has caught us up in a maze of complicated language established to confuse the novice and set the professionals scaling a mountain of paper work, which often gets misguided in the process.

Where does it end? Ultimately it comes back to you and me. Speak up! Challenge those things that you feel might not be best for your medical situation.

Find out who has the power to make changes and try to talk with them or at least write your concern. Start with your doctor, then your hospital of choice, and don't leave out the politicians.

Donna Aljets

Marion