Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

LETTER TO THE EDITOR:

One of the driving factors for fewer family doctors

On Tuesday, Beverly Frase asked an important question in her letter to the editor: “Whatever happened to the ‘family doctor?’ ”

In the past five years, we have seen a sustained loss of primary-care physicians from our valley. Some have gone to restricted concierge practices, and others to spa medicine, focusing on Botox and collagen treatments. Unfortunately, many have left completely, moving out of state. The most cited reason was low insurance reimbursements.

Commercial insurance reimbursements in most locales tend to be 120 percent to 140 percent of the Medicare fee schedule. In Las Vegas, many commercial fee schedules run as low as 68 percent of Medicare.

Primary-care physicians have increasing problems of paying rent, malpractice premiums, staff and staying out of the red. It is for this reason that we are losing our primary-care physicians.

As a consequence, patients suffer from a lack of continuity of care, and move from specialist to specialist with no one overseeing the patient as a whole.

Las Vegas has among the lowest number of primary-care physicians per capita in the country. We cannot afford to lose the rest.

Insurance companies rarely think beyond next quarter’s profits and are not considering the consequences of a health care system without primary-care providers. A health care system without primary care leads to delayed diagnoses, poorly coordinated care and cost overruns.

Whatever happened to the family doctor? They are being driven out of practice by the insurance companies.

The writer, a gastroenterologist, is a past president of the Nevada State Medical Association.

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