The truest words I’ve ever heard about the American health care system came from a doctor who had been practicing for more than 20 years. He said the way that health care is practiced in this country is cruel. He talked about situations where people came in after a catastrophic event and found out they had a prior disease and had to declare bankruptcy in order to pay for their increasing costs.
More and more, young people are skipping out on primary health care and only go to the doctor when something is wrong. Only half of Millennials go to the doctor once a year for a check-up. This ultimately means that what could have been prevented months before can now become an expensive and debilitating health condition. This is why more people should see primary care doctors.
Chronic diseases account for 70 percent of all deaths in the United States. The majority of these diseases, like heart disease, are preventable illnesses. If the health problems alone were not horrible, the cost of these illnesses can lead to debilitating financial costs — chronic diesease treatment accounts for 75 percent of all the health care costs in the U.S.
The majority of all these diseases are preventable and can be detected by going to the first line of defense in healthcare: primary care or family practice physicians.
By continuously going to your primary doctor, you can more easily detect any irregularities that may have come up recently compared to a situation where a patient only comes in every 10 years.
Having a primary care doctor and regularly seeing them also allows patients to build a medical history that could be useful if a patient needs to see any specialists. This medical history allows doctors to coordinate their care with a primary care physician in order to determine the best way to approach their patient’s treatment plan. With a complete medical history, the doctors can all have better access to details about the patient’s health which they can then use to coordinate a patient’s care based off of their prior medical experiences.
I don’t particularly enjoy going to the doctor’s office, but having an annual check-up by a primary care physician allows people to build up a strong medical history that can eventually lead to the prevention of the most deadly diseases.
Maybe spending an hour or two in an appointment once a year is not such a bad thing.
npatwari@umail.iu.edu
