Hos. Rules?

[DVT873]

I sympathize with your grandpa. But I wonder about the impact on us as patients. I have another concern/observation. As more and more of us go into Medicare we are going to get caught up in a system similar to the OEM/stealership model. Everything in medicine has to be coded to be submitted for payment. And that coding is every bit as fucked up as warranty coding is for truck repairs. In this case the government will be the OEM. And they are the sole determining factor on how much they will pay to fix you. Medical industry is maybe 10 years behind the vehicle industry in this area. Myself and many techs my age actively try to talk any young person out of going into this as a profession. Did this successfully myself a year ago. The young man is apprenticed as a commercial electrician and loving it.
GM currently pays .3 hrs diag on an electrical problem. They recently cut the time for putting a set of injectors and an injection pump into a Duramax by over half. And it was tight to start with. Almost all dealer automotive techs and about half of the HD techs are on flat rate. The dealers don't care because they pay the techs a percentage of what the manufacturer pays them. If it takes me three and a half hours to diag the electrical problem I get paid my .3. Whoopee.
Same thing is happening in medicine. The government sets the rates. Your doctor is allocated 15 minutes for an office call face-to-face with you and he has to fill out a form on that visit to get paid. Ever notice that he's usually pecking away at his computer and is only half focused on his conversation with you? There's plenty of money for the salesman, for the executives, and for the big shots at the OE's but when it comes time to pay somebody to actually fix the truck all of the sudden the cupboard is bare. So they throw money and parts at it and duct tape the CAC hoses on call it good and ship it. Anybody with even half the skill set that Rawze has is not going to be anywhere near a motor vehicle in a dealer setting unless they really really love it and really really like getting kicked in the nuts on a regular basis.
A C level tech doing fluid changes, brakes, shocks and struts will out earn the smartest guy in the shop because the smartest guy is going to get stuck with all the warranty nightmares. Is it any wonder there are fewer and fewer people who know what the f$%k they're doing? Every time techs start to regularly beat the flat rate, usually by taking shortcuts in the cleaning, inspection, and torquing steps the OE cuts the rate. It's a race to the bottom. Actually kind of like freight rates. The problem of technicians, mechanics hacks or whatever you want to call us is going to solve itself. There won't be any that know what their doing. We are about there now.