Posted: March 2, 2026
For Medical Corporations, Time is Also Money
The first and most important duty of any doctor treating a patient is diagnosis. A doctor cannot select the proper tests and treatments if she doesn't know what could be wrong with her patient. And a doctor cannot know that unless he takes the time to listen--really listen--to the patient. To do that right, your doctor must take the time it takes to get the details of what is going on with you.
To anyone over the age of thirty, it is obvious that the practice of medicine has changed radically in their lifetimes. Some of the change is good: treatments and testing have progressed amazingly. Medical tests and scans are much more accurate now than they were even ten years ago. Modern medicine routinely cures illness today that in prior years would have invariably have been fatal.
But all of the tests and modern treatments available to doctors now mean nothing if they are not ordered and given. And they will not be ordered or given if your doctor doesn't take the time to listen to you carefully to determine that they are necessary.
The problem is time. Doctors bill you and your insurance company for the time the spend with you and the treatments they provide. Insurance companies will only pay a small amount for a consultation with a doctor. Politicians keep reducing the amount that Medicaid and Medicare will pay for consultations. And nowadays corporations own most doctors' medical practices. The doctor works for a corporation that pays the doctor based on the income he makes for the corporation. Since the amount that insurance companies and the government will pay for a doctor to consult with you is fixed, the only way for the corporation to make a profit is to require the doctor to see more and more patients a day.
Patient care gets sacrified to corporate profit. When doctors have to see 25-30 patients a day (and this is not unusual) it can be impossible for the doctor to actually spend any time with any individual patient. Just doing the math: in an 8 hour day there are 640 minutes. If the doctor takes an hour lunch break and two fifteen minute breaks, that leaves just 550 minutes he has to listen to 30 patients, write notes for those patients, order tests and medications for those patients, and give directions to his staff.
A doctor who doesn't listen to your symptoms of chest pain isn't going to try to find out what is causing your chest pain. A doctor who doesn't examine your child carefully is going to miss symptoms of meningitis. A nurse who rushes through getting your information in an emergency department isn't going to write down what needs to go into your records.
Worse, every doctor or nurse who sees you, or your child or your family after that is going to rely on that bad exam, and that incomplete record, and you will never get the help you need.
Nobody who has been to a doctor's office or emergency room in the last 10 years can possibly miss what's going on. You wait longer to see a doctor, you're treated like a number and hustled into a tiny room to wait even longer, and when the doctor sees you now he doesn't have time to actually talk to you. The actual time you spend with the doctor is five minutes, or less.
I don't care how good the doctor is, or thinks he is, that isn't good medicine.
In an increasing number of the cases that we are handling in Texas and Arkansas, we're seeing what happens when doctors and hospital corporations try to make more and more money by seeing more and more patients in less and less time. Did you know that in emergency rooms and big corporate doctors' office, they actually plan that each doctor will see 25 to 30 patients in eight hours. That's their plan. Doing the math shows what happens next: there are 480 minutes in 8 hours. 480 minutes divided by 30 patients means 16 minutes per patient--but only if the doctor never takes a break to eat lunch, make a phone call to his family or friends and never has to use the restroom. And even if the doctor does none of these things that every other human being does, he still can't spend 16 minutes with you if he ever takes any time to dictate or writes notes into the records about the exams he does, or if he ever takes time to look at your prior medical records. If a doctor takes just an hour and a half of breaks in an eight hour day, and spends just an hour and a half dictating records and reviewing prior records on his patients, that means that he now has less than ten minutes to spend with any patient, no matter how serious their complaints.
That's crazy, but that is the way medicine for profit works these days. Doctors and corporations get a set amount for seeing a patient. To make more money, they see more patients in the same amount of time, until you end up with doctors and hospitals who are all about the money and care very little about the patients they see so briefly.
