(You were racking up the visits and bills, and each little practitioner was going through all the proper motions & procedures for his or her own little pigeonhole - so everything was going perfectly, from the system's PoV.)
Now we have 10 minutes online consultations with random doctors we'll never see again. Last time I went to mine they refused a preventative blood check, the reason? "it's too expensive and you're healthy anyways". I went to a private lab and paid for it, it ended up costing less than 10 euros, meanwhile I pay 500+ a month for health insurance.
We have far more doctors per capita than we did in 1960.
Only partly. Where I'm living (SE Michigan), one of the two huge local hospitals is owned & operated by a major research university. The other one by a major Catholic non-profit.
My (older) family & friends have been on the receiving end of lots of "the system cares only about itself, and many of the individual doctors obviously feel the same" horrors at both of those hospitals.
And it's been that way for decades, minimum.
But I guarantee you PE is still involved in that health system to a major extent. Many if not most of the doctors are going to be employees of private groups that the University hospital contracts out to.
30 years ago, when there was vastly less PE in the medical field, those hospitals had the same problems. If Dr. Fubar was socially adroit with his fellow MD's, then it really didn't matter that he was a disaster for his patients.
I never said private equity was the cost of any bungled cases despite the fact that they surely are.
What I said you can blame private equity on is this
> A few generation ago you had family doctors who knew pretty much everything about you from your birth to their retirement (or death even). Even I had that as a kid, and I'm not 40 yet.
But to be fair. It's not just PE, it's consolidation in general, which can be lead by large non-profit hospital groups as well.
.. many of whom are NHS employees, since we don't train enough locally.
https://www.nhsconfed.org/articles/immigration-harming-nhs
"Recent NHS data shows that across all NHS staff in England (1.4 million), more than 17 per cent (264,815) are from overseas. Percentages for nurses are much higher – nearly 27 per cent of NHS nurses are from outside the UK (99,856 of the 372,605 nurses and health visitors recorded).
Further, the workforce plan is supported by the government, for example, having set a target to recruit between 51,000 and 57,000 international nurses by 2023/24"
There is no shortage of doctors. There is a shortage of consultants/GPs.
Blood tests are not for curiosity or entertainment.
Better catch diabetes or cholesterol when it's not a problem yet, when the symptoms are bad enough for you to notice by yourself you're already in deep shit.