Fed-Up American Doctors: The Newest Overseas Migrants

Gretchen Bosacker, M.D., hasn’t been asked for opioids or benzodiazepines (medicines like Xanax or Ativan) in six months. A family medicine physician, she takes a full hour for lunch every day. Her office staff tsk-tsks if she doesn’t take her morning break, and a hot cup of tea arrives when she needs it.

She does paperwork during protected time carved out during her work day. A nurse runs through the litany of preventive health questions before the patient sees her, so she already knows the answers to things like “When was your last Pap smear?”

She fills out a patient’s chart. It’s a fall on outstretched hand.

FOOSH. Pain over scaphoid [bone].

X-ray.

Splint.

And her note’s done. She hasn’t asked about runny nose, chest pain, skin changes, or psychiatric symptoms, googled a diagnosis code, or documented the patient’s family history of diabetes. She hasn’t phoned an insurance company to beg for coverage. She hasn’t taken any work home.

Is she in a fancy concierge practice? A doctor to celebrities? Did she find the DeLorean and go back to 1950?

Hardly. She works in a government-run clinic.

In New Zealand.

Like an open fracture, the corporate takeover of medicine has been a painful, hobbling wound to many American physicians. They rail against a wide array of factors in private forums online and…