There is a undercurrent in medicine these days that will profoundly change the way medicine is practiced in this country in the future. That undercurrent takes advantage of the power of the populace of this country which is powerful enough to even oppose large medical corporations which seem to be firmly in control of our medicine these days. The undercurrent I am talking about is transparency in medicine. What I mean by transparency is charging a patient what the procedure really costs by cutting out the middlemen, price gougers and layers of bureaucracy. Large shareholder owned medical corporations do not want transparency. They want people to think that the reason they pay more for services in this country is because they have the best medicine in the world, but that is not true. While it is true we have many outstanding doctors in this country because of the size of our medical educational system that does not mean there is a trickle down effect to all the hospitals around the country. In the early 1980’s doctors still owned their own practices, but by 1985 large publicly help corporations started buying up hospitals and along with insurance companies starting to own a doctor’s practice. They did this by controlling who was or was not a preferred provider for their company and they did this by controlling insurance reimbursement. Now MDs are going out on their own again in small retail clinics where you pay a modest fee for your services. That is also what is happening in acupuncture. New clinics called community clinics have opened that charge $15-$40 per visit. They no longer are charging $70-$100 pr visit which only the top 10% of any community’s wage earning public could afford. The other 90% had to save up or visit less because they could not afford acupuncture as frequently as they needed to get relief.
TCCA is one of those clinics and it is unique because the money you pay for vvisits allows our massage therapists to practice at lower rental rates so they can build a business for themselves. It pays for the young acupuncturists who work there to learn how to run a clinic and it works for the public because now they can get the highest quality acupuncture in the state at rates they can afford!
