Is That Kid Healthy?

I couldn't help but read this blog today about kids and there health problems in todays world.  I was just expecting another boring blog on how kids are becoming obese and we need to stop feeding them fast food, but I was wrong. A Doctor who writes occasionally for the Health Care Blog, had some very intriguing things to say.  Im sure almost everyone had heard a parent complain about childhood obesity, and to be quite honest it can get a little boring after a while.  However Dr. Lawrence Rosen changes that by taking us through a little day in the life of her pediatric practice.  He gives us some interesting insight on how the health of children has dramatically changed over the past few years.  To the surprise of Dr. Rosen, he helped a child who come to his annual check up, and found that he was actually a perfectly healthy little boy.  Dr. Rosen was a little surprised by this because it had been the only child he had seen all week that was actually healthy.  Dr. Rosen is so used to helping children who are sick that this threw him off guard.  There are a few things that I found alarming in this blog that Dr. Rosen wrote. First that of all the kids he saw during the week only one was healthy, so what does that say about the current health situation with them.  Second, was that Dr. Rosen actually gets paid more by coding in to the insurance companies that the child was sick, and providing them certain care for what ever they were sick for.  Why are these insurance companies paying more to doctors for sick kids than healthy kids?

It's true, sick kids seem like they are popping up more frequently.  Pediatricians like Dr. Rosen are seeing this pattern of sick children more and more often.  So why is this?  It could be for many reason.  Children seem to have no immune system any more.  There bodies cant fight off the simple cold or flu that it used to.  We as a society have grown to listen to the media, and are so aware of all the germs and viruses there are out in the world that we need a defense system for everything.  We have pills that fight colds, pills that prevent colds, pills that prevent for everything.  We use hand sanitizer for every little thing, and we push this onto our kids.  So naturally when they go into an environment such as a school playground, they are bound to get sick from something.  Im not saying that the generation before didnt get sick, but I believe that because society was not aware of all the germs and viruses around us our immune system was more prone to fighting them back and was not caught by surprise like the immune systems of todays children.

So how is it that Doctors like Dr. Rosen gets paid more for a patient visit regardless if the child is healthy?  A doctors visit to a pediatrician isnt like seeing a specialist.  The doctor should get paid evenly across the board, regardless if the child was in for a check up, or if the child had a cold. Dr. Rosen said he wasn't complaining that he would get paid more because more children were sick, nor would most people who were in his shoes, but he did find it strange that insurance companies paid him more by entering a certain code basically stating that the child was sick.  This certainly does not say much about our insurance companies, but it makes one wonder that if all doctors are reporting that if in fact a child was truly ill, or if he was adding the sick code for the insurance companies just to get paid more.