The Covert Rationing Blog

DrRich

DrRich (Richard N. Fogoros, MD) is a former professor of medicine who spent over 20 years as a full-time clinical cardiologist, medical researcher, teacher and author, as well as an occasional health care entrepreneur, amateur medical ethicist and, when absolutely unavoidable, patient. After two decades of this multi-faceted exploration of the American healthcare system, he devised the Grand Unification Theory of Healthcare. Finally, armed only with the Grand Unification Theory, in early 2000 DrRich left the practice of medicine altogether and began to make his living by consulting and writing.

In his consulting work, DrRich helps biotech companies to gain a practical understanding of the current behavior, and the likely future behavior, of the American healthcare system. The Grand Unification Theory has been instrumental in his ability to communicate such understanding. In other words, DrRich is being paid good money every day by corporate America to tell them stuff that’s available on his websites for free. (DrRich finds it common for captains of industry to pay consultants big bucks for information that is otherwise readily available to them, most often simply by asking any of their mid-level managers.)

DrRich’s writing endeavors have included the usual freelancing, maintaining the fine blog which you now behold and its associated website, writing textbooks in an arcane subspecialty of medicine, completing his book, Fixing American Healthcare - Wonkonians, Gekkonians and the Grand Unification Theory of Healthcare (look here for more information on Fixing American Healthcare), and producing a patient-oriented site on heart disease for About.com, part of the New York Times Company. DrRich runs all his websites very much in accordance with a major theme from the Grand Unification Theory, namely, that it is very difficult to practice covert healthcare rationing against sufficiently enlightened and sufficiently knowledgeable patients.

DrRich is not a revolutionary, nor even very political. He wants the American healthcare system to be reformed, and thinks he knows how it ought to be done, but cannot identify any agency - large or small, private or governmental - that has any real chance of leading the way. So DrRich is appealing to a higher authority, to the people for whom the healthcare system ostensibly exists in the first place. If individual Americans come to understand the underlying premises currently driving their healthcare system, they will immediately see what they need to do to protect themselves. And if enough American patients simply begin acting in their own enlightened self-interest, without any thought toward perpetrating healthcare reform, that very reform, Zen-like, will become inevitable. DrRich’s purpose in proclaiming the Grand Unification Theory of Healthcare, and in creating his website and this blog, is to take at least a small step toward stimulating that healing enlightenment.