What if healthcare workers made more house calls?

Would we be healthier if professional health care workers made more housecalls?

Why is that all other while collar professionals (lawyers, CPA's, bankers, etc.) are perfectly willing to leave their offices and come to their client's homes or places of business, but we are forced to meet our doctors, physician assistants and the like mostly in their offices alone?

How can the medical professional truly treat the "whole" person without seeing the very day-to-day environments in which they live? It's a fair question, I believe.

Imagine if your doctor could see that what is continuously making you sick is the fact that your home has not been dusted for ten years? Or, he can see that you live next door to a factory spewing out high levels of potentially cacrinogenic particulates. Or, the visiting nurse notices that you have 100 cats living in your house and that may be contributing to your kids' asthma. The list is endless.

Our healthcare system is geared to looking at tactical causes and effects and then presecribing tactical -- read "pharmaceutical" -- solutions to a specific problem. It is not particularly clever at looking at the whole picture of human health and wellness because it only sees its "customers" in a clinical setting. In short, it can not treat the whole person unless it understands the whole picture. But there is a simple answer. And, it won't cost that much. In fact, in the end it will save our healthcare system billions as we should all be that much healthier. Even if the end result is a 10 percent reduction in healthcare cost, the savings would be significant.

Part of pro-active, preventive treatment efforts should include physician assistants, nurses and the like -- if not physicians themselves -- making annual home visits. I don't know one person who likes visiting the doctor's office. It's inconvenient. It's often a cattle call. We wait endlessly and are given 15 minutes or less to visit with someone who is supposed to quickly ascertain our health or lack thereof. It's ridiculous. How much healthier might our society be if the medical profession brought healthcare to the people versus the other way around.

Sure, you'd still need to go to the doctor's office for obvious reasons. But, if you could choose to have a health care worker come to you for routine "maintenance" of your health care, what might the end result be?

Like most Americans I think that we need more common sense approaches to solving our health care system. Throwing more money at it has not reduced the numbers of uninsured. My senior thesis is colleage in the late 80s focused on ideas for insuring the nation's 30 million uninsured at that time. 20+ years later, 50 million are uninsured. So, we've had plenty of time to consider this issue and make creative changes. Yet, here we are -- no better than where we were two decades ago.