Doctor Admits 'Greed Subverts Healthcare'
"Dr. Terry Bennett, the controversial and opinionated Rochester physician who has traveled the world practicing medicine -- including a stint as physician to the Saudi royal family -- does not have high hopes that a fix can be found for the country's broken health care system.
The reason, he contends, is that the amount of money involved in the system brings out one of the more negative human attributes -- greed.
"Unless and until these extraordinary costs unique to the United States are squashed into manageability, there is too much greed and too little control of greed being exercised," said Bennett, a Harvard Medical School graduate, who operates a practice that bases its fees on the ability of his patients to pay. "It does not matter what politician suggests what plan --- Republican or Democratic, that plan will fail."
There are four primary reasons for Bennett's pessimism: the educational debt carried by new doctors; the practice of hospitals "owning" the physicians who are affiliated with them; extraordinarily high prescription drug costs; and the advent of health management organizations, which have assumed a middleman position between patients, health care providers, pharmaceutical companies and hospitals."