VCs are already doing this. They have offered to buy both the oral surgery practice and the dental practice I use in town.
The care they provide turns worse and worse because the model you envision turns a professional (someone who should have a fiduciary responsibility to the patient’s best interest above their own) into an employee of a non-professional corporation. All of the pre-and postoperative care that you envision being done by less highly paid individuals in order to free up the surgeon to “generate profit” gets done cheaply and more slapdash resulting in worse and worse patient care. Either the oral surgeon fights back and attempts to maintain the physician patient relationship and gets fired from their own practice that they sold out (pretty common already with Derm and Optho) or they don’t and you get the actual medical version of the plastic surgery chop shops common in Miami. This ethical problem is why non-lawyers cannot own a legal practice and yet we failed to recognize the same destruction of the professional relationship when it comes to physicians.
Aspen dental is a franchise based venture capital funded organization that already does this.
This is where rationalists fall apart. Everything you say makes sense, but it doesn’t take into account the sociocultural aspects that make a physician patient relationship different than the value extractive relationship that you propose.
VCs are already doing this. They have offered to buy both the oral surgery practice and the dental practice I use in town.
The care they provide turns worse and worse because the model you envision turns a professional (someone who should have a fiduciary responsibility to the patient’s best interest above their own) into an employee of a non-professional corporation. All of the pre-and postoperative care that you envision being done by less highly paid individuals in order to free up the surgeon to “generate profit” gets done cheaply and more slapdash resulting in worse and worse patient care. Either the oral surgeon fights back and attempts to maintain the physician patient relationship and gets fired from their own practice that they sold out (pretty common already with Derm and Optho) or they don’t and you get the actual medical version of the plastic surgery chop shops common in Miami. This ethical problem is why non-lawyers cannot own a legal practice and yet we failed to recognize the same destruction of the professional relationship when it comes to physicians.
Aspen dental is a franchise based venture capital funded organization that already does this.
This is where rationalists fall apart. Everything you say makes sense, but it doesn’t take into account the sociocultural aspects that make a physician patient relationship different than the value extractive relationship that you propose.
Investors have offered to buy both, but why do you believe those investors were VCs? It seem very unlikely to me that they were.
Those kinds of VC-run business can also often have other problems. For example, Aspen Dental was sued for deceptive marketing.