Get cheap health care and solve the doctor shortage in one amazing tip that ALSO provides new employment opportunities for struggling actors looking to make their big break!

Background:

Health care is expensive—but it could be cheaper, if labor were cheaper (apparently somewhere between half and two-thirds of costs go to salaries).

The issue:

Unfortunately, doctors and nurses will probably remain relatively expensive—but what if we can recruit cheap labor to do some of the tasks that normally require a highly-trained medical professional?

Specifically, if we look at doctors as having two primarily qualifications:

Medical competence
Ability to interact with patients

…we can then delegate the “ability to interact with patients” task to a group of people who are charismatic* but poorly-paid: struggling actors.

(* Or at least capable of pretending to be.)

Proposal:

Under this proposal, all the patient interaction is done by actors—the doctor just writes up some general instructions, and the non-medically-trained actors carry them out. The organizational chart for this plan is shown in Figure 1.

doctor-fanout — ***Fig 1:*** *By delegating the patient-interaction tasks to barely-trained personnel (at right), the relatively expensive doctor (at left) can manage a much larger patient load.*

Now, actors can focus on dealing with patients, and doctors can focus on the diagnostics.

As a bonus, each actor could be fitted with a wireless camera, allowing the doctors to monitor multiple actors at the same time, and switch around between patients by simply pressing a button on a computer (Figure 2).

doctor-computer — ***Fig 2:*** An officially-licensed doctor can monitor multiple actors at once. This also prevents the doctor from having to waste time by actually walking around from room to room. As an added bonus, the remote doctor could even be in a foreign country with extremely low salaries. Since this remote doctor would be happy to undercut the high local wages, it would drive health care costs down even further!

PROS: Doctors can now focus on medical diagnoses, rather than having to worry about their patient-interaction skills. Provides employment opportunities for struggling actors.

CONS: None! Presumably the American Medical Association will endorse this idea any day now.