Immigrant patients are often bewildered when they need to seek health care in the U.S., and that care usually comes from physicians who are unsympathetic to their plight.
The current Medicare operation—reimbursing medical goods and services to a growing number of people without basing the reimbursement benefit on the actual cost of the services—is unsustainable, but there are some possible remedies.
Invention of the stethoscope in 1816 changed the patient-physician relationship. Technology, widely used in medicine today, is not a substitute for the physician’s human understanding of the patient’s life.