How the coronavirus is making America’s health care access problems even worse.
The coronavirus pandemic is creating yet another kind of health care crisis: America’s primary care practices are struggling financially as patient visits plummet, and patients themselves are missing out on vital routine care.
Doctors and other health care providers have seen a precipitous drop in the routine visits they depend on for revenue, and experts fear many offices will have to close. Meanwhile, patients with chronic conditions are facing hardships because they can’t see their regular physician to get routine care.
“That really creates a problem for those of us with chronic illnesses,” says Dania Palanker, an assistant research professor for the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown’s Health Policy Institute. “Is maintaining your health … urgent care? Not something we usually put in the box of ‘urgent,’ but if we don’t take care of it, it’s going to get urgent or emergent.”
Palanker knows this because she is a patient herself. I talked to her while she was driving to Philadelphia from the Washington, DC, area to get a nerve block treatment for her chronic pain caused by a rare autoimmune disorder. Her regular clinic had stopped all outpatient services because of Covid-19…
To read the entire article from Vox, https://www.vox.com/2020/4/27/21231528/coronavirus-covid-19-primary-care-doctors-crisis