Ambulatory Care

There are both advantages and disadvantages to increasing the number of physicians who limit their activities to narrower fields of practice. The advantages include the fact that because there are more specialists and there are more options for patients who actually need truly specialized care. As such, scheduling appointments and even time spent traveling to appointments is more manageable as specialists are considerably more accessible in the modern era, which was one of the goals of the Affordable Care Act (Hawkins and Grove, 2014, p. 90). The disadvantage, of course, is that there is now a specialist culture within health care. As such, patients have to pay to see a doctor twice before they can get what they need done. Most health insurance companies do not allow patients to simply go to a specialist without a referral from their primary care physician first. As such, the patient ends...
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