Before Elias Zerhouni became director of the National Institutes of Health, he was a senior hospital leader at Johns Hopkins, and he calculated how many clinical staff were involved in the care of their typical hospital patient—how many doctors, nurses, and so on. In 1970, he found, it was 2.5 full-time equivalents. By the end of the nineteen-nineties, it was more than fifteen. The number must be even larger today. Everyone has just a piece of patient care.
At one point, they looked you up and down, gave you some taps and made a diagnosis. Now you get sent off for blood tests and scans with more acronyms than an MBA class; someone needs to pay for all of the equipment and technicians.
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