Quote:
Originally Posted by DonovanTrent
Regarding doctors, if it were more financially attractive to be a GP than a specialist, you'd see more GPs than specialists. GPs would be far more valuable in regards to lowcost and/or pro-bono than specialists. Bring your kids to "free knee clinic day"? eh.
I like the original post that started this thread. Unfortunately, it requires Americans in general to become responsible for their own actions. That blows it right out of the realm of the possible.
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I live in a populated area in a new house on a sub-divided lot that is across the street from an apartment complex that is primarily Latino. Not low-income folks, but they are not comfortably in the middle class, either.
There is a low-cost pediatric clinic in there that is ran by a nurse practitioner. She shares her space in one of the apartments with a Latino officer that runs a police substation out of one of the apartments. It is only open one day a week (Tuesdays) for a few hours.
She does things based on the ability of the parent(s) to pay. The suggested donation is $35 but some patients give as little as a dollar or two. The medications that are dispensed are provided by other clinics. The money raised just about pays the cost of the part time nurse/admin person and the lady that runs it may make $10 a week on a good week.
The apartment complex donated the space recently served her with an eviction notice. It made no sense because the police sub-station is staying there and they are not expanding. It made no sense. It also wasn't because it was a burden to the community. My house faces the street that patients (or anybody entering that complex) has to go down. I didn't even know about this place until I originally read a "good deed" article in the local paper.
About 8 weeks after I first that there was a clinic, I heard that she got eviction papers. I started pleading with the business community to donate space to this clinic. There is a ton of under utilized commercial space in my city. I also got local activists involved in the hunt. The pitch was to donate space that cannot be rented to this clinic and enjoy the tax write off.
Nobody stepped up. There is still a ton of empty office spaces.
Until things like that change, there is not much hope. There are medical professionals out there that want to help. The problem is that they need help themselves in order to offer this help.
This was a nurse practitioner that was doing this. The cost of becoming an NP or even a PA is a lot cheaper than becoming a doctor. You do not even need a GP to pull off these clinics. Sure, they're needed for more complex cases, but some of the NP's/PA's seem to know more about health than some doctors.
I went off an a tangent and apologize for that. I am super tired and just got riled up while thinking about what happened in my own neighborhood.