Is there is a difference between Medical Care and Healthcare?
Answer: Yes, there is.
Medical Care
Medical Care is what Physicians and other Clinicians do every day with you in offices, labs, surgery centers, and hospitals. Checking blood sugar. Adding this medication on and stopping that medication. Heart bypass surgery. X-rays. MRI’s. All that constitutes Medical Care.
Medical Care brings us new procedures, new remedies, new medications, and surgeries we never dreamed possible. Not to mention the vaccinations that are constantly coming out to protect us from disease and cancer in the first place. And on top of that, we also have the incredible ability to prevent diseases like cancer when we never thought we could. So, getting the right Medical Care means everything to you. It used to be that your doctor knew everything about you. This was the foundation of Medical Care. Medical Care is a SERVICE practice.
Healthcare
Healthcare is a much broader idea of which Medical Care is only a subset and constitutes the remaining 80-90% of health outcomes. It incorporates other elements such as Social Determinants (the circumstances under which you are born, live, play, socialize, work and die), genetics, behaviors such as eating, smoking, exercise and drinking, and a myriad of other factors. All these issues may seem out of place in the context of a Primary Care practice but they matter more for Health outcomes
Healthcare is about administration costs, CEO salaries, insurance denials, and insurance premiums going up constantly. It means you’re not being able to get into your doctor’s office because administration says the doctor has to see more patients, so you wait three months for next appointment. It also means seeing your physician for only 6 minutes because she has to see more patients in order to make the top heavy administrators money. Healthcare is a FOR-PROFIT business.
