The problem isn’t doctors so much as the system, in short. Today, the typical medical appointment is fifteen minutes long, which is not enough time for patients with a complex condition to go over symptoms and ask questions, or for a doctor to coach a patient through lifestyle changes. The short appointments have a history: rising costs in the 1970s were the catalyst for “managed care”—basically, our current system, in which insurance companies like Aetna and UnitedHealthcare negotiate with networks of doctors to determine how much care patients get, whom we can see, for how long, and at what
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