Ask Lemmy

Doctor here in general practice.

This works well in principle. One of many problems here is healthcare need is not spread around uniformly. In your example you just consider number of people and number of providers. This is ok of you are just thinking of primary care (it works like this in many places). It breaks down when there are surges. What happens during flu season? What happens if there is a fire and 30 people need treatment for smoke inhalation. What happens when the doctor needs to take a vacation or gets COVID during flu season? There is redundancy built into a larger healthcare system which makes access more robust over a wider range of conditions.

Also, doctor's don't always want to work in all places.it can be harder to recruit doctors to some areas.

There are a whole host of issues here. I agree though that having a middlman take a large cut of money to "grease the system" does contribute to it's inefficiency. The healthcare system is broken on so many levels that any one change like this would be set up to fail. We need a major overhaul.

What you’re describing for healthcare would be direct primary care with a capitation pay model.

Traditional wisdom is that about 1% of a doctor’s patients need care per day, so a doctor with 2000 patients should see about 20 patients per day. This is about standard for your office-based, 20 minute appointment doctors. For direct primary care the number per day is lower: for example, if the doctor does 1 hour appointments, you’d be aiming to see about 8 patients per day, with a panel of about 800.

The doctor is likely going to expect to be paid about $400,000, possibly more if they have employees working for them.

I am sorry but this just sounds like today's society with nothing new added to it. You just said there won't be any middleman anymore. And just magiced away a lot of issues, which often are solved by the middleman.

The doctor's club would still need people to run the club. There needs to be someone your farmers can approach to find an available doctor. They can't just shout it into the wind.

Your farmers won't have the logistics to bring their food to the people. They won't know how much to bring where. They won't have the equipment to do so. And if you solve all of these issues they won't have enough time to farm anymore.

Universal healthcare isn't a new concept and doesn't require people to buy exclusive access.

And you still talk about compensation but based on your explaining money would be useless. Everyone has free access to these shared specialists.