hamster care

n. high-volume health care in which patients are not given specialized attention. Also hamster health care. Subjects: English, Health, Medical, Jargon

Comments? | Cites | Permalink | Tell a Friend

Citations: 1999 Federal News Service (July 14) “National Press Club Newsmaker Luncheon With Dr. David Lawrence, CEO, Kaiser Permanente”: Ian Morrison…has coined a phrase. I think it’s going to appear in “Modern Health Care,” actually. He calls it “hamster care,” where people are just churning like mad to keep up with the demand. 2000 Richard Smith British Medical Journal (Dec. 23) “Hamster health care: time to stop running faster and redesign health care”: Perhaps the purest examples of hamster care are in Canada and Germany. In these countries there is a fixed budget for all services provided by doctors and a standardised schedule of fixed fees. Doctors try to earn their target income by providing more and more services. But as the number of services provided by all doctors rises and exceeds set total budgets, so the fee for each service goes down. Like frantic hamsters the doctors run ever faster—but to no avail. 2004 Nancy Luna @ Santa Ana, Calif. Orange County Register (California) (Jan. 12): “The average doctor is seeing thousands of patients a year to survive, and the result is hamster care, or treadmill medicine,” said Dr. Jack Lewin, chief executive officer of the California Medical Association. 2004 Arthur Caplan Witchita Eagle (Kan.) (July 7) “Good health care should not be only for wealthy”: One might wonder why it is necessary to pay a bounty to get a doctor to call you back. The answer is that under the watchful eye of managed care and insurance companies, the quality of care has gotten so awful that doctors refer to it as “hamster care.” Only those patients who pay more are going to get treated by the “concierge” doctors who get off the daily treadmill and practice good medicine.

Posted 22 Jul 04 | Permalink | Tell a Friend