Link: http://blog.theentrepreneurschool.com/doctors-are-horrible-entrepreneurs-1054/comment-page-1#comment-464

Posting here a comment I left over at the Entrepreneur School Blog, where Jim Beach talks about the lack of business sense in doctors. If it sounds rant-ish, I apologize.

—

There are good reasons doctors make for bad business people (and entrepreneurs). The healthcare system is set up where the customer is an insurance company (1) and (2) practicing medicine has turned into a matter of treating symptoms rather than proactive care. In other words, the doctors expect *you* to call them when you have a problem because on the front-end (the preventative end) they largely have nothing to offer.

Case in point: medical students only take maybe a semester’s worth of nutrition. Insane when you consider that diet (and lifestyle) choices are certainly the most likely causes of people’s health maladies — so really, when it comes to having the proper tools to help patients avoid getting ill in the first place, doctor’s aren’t equipped. They are proactively/preventatively neutered.

I won’t get into the insurance company angle, but that has an impact, too. The customer has been utterly divorced from the healthcare system when you’ve got so many layers between you and your care:

you -> employer’s HR department -> [the insurance company bureaucracy] -> [hospital bureaucracy that negotiates reimbursement amounts] -> doctors who code procedures and provide you care

Simply cutting out the employer side would immediately get the consumer more plugged in as you’d have 10s of thousands of more individuals interested in getting better rates/plans from insurers than the lackadaisical corporate HR departments. I digress.

And there’s a (3) here, too. That’s that the doctor’s go to school for longer than any other profession, which makes them prone to dogmatism/procedure instead of being creative or driven to trial/error and problem-solving.

All things considered, it’s a disaster of a system. It’s no surprise it’s only getting worse. The only surprise (to me) is that so few people are talking about these core, simple problems that are making for such a disastrous healthcare system.