Sometimes you just have to go visiting . . .
Dr. Paul B. Visconti’s intent was to beat me about the neck and shoulders over my column about health care reform.
We chatted. I think it lasted more than an hour. What I learned is our politics could not be more different, yet we could speak easily with each other.
He was a physician in Denver for 45 years, most of them spent in pathology at the old Mercy Hospital across from City Park on East 17th Avenue.
Now, he is 69, retired and reacquainting himself with English literature, his passion as an undergraduate but one he realized would not hold his bank account in good stead upon graduation.
So he decided he would follow in his father’s footsteps and go to medical school.
Visconti is a soft-spoken man who wanted to defend his chosen profession amid the voices of those showing up at town- hall meetings on reform.
We went back and forth on reform’s merits before Visconti admitted he has not read the reform legislation and hasn’t a clue how it would all shake out.
So we talked about our experiences with health care.
He loved medicine.
He never made the fortune most of us believe physicians make. He simply worked, taking the odd kidney, pancreas or breast tissue, studying it and determining its level of cancer cells.
“Instead of a whole body, I worked with parts, with pieces,” Visconti said. “It was a very specialized work that challenged me.”
He had wanted to be a generalist like his father. Pathology just called to him.
He insists he has no idea what “reform” is. The word itself, he says, is “like apple pie and motherhood. What does it really mean?”
All he knows is that the medicine he practiced — treating patients and telling them how to get well — is not in need of reform.
Of how things and procedures are priced, he knows nothing, Visconti said. Indeed, it was a primary reason he got out.
There was a time when he refused to treat uninsured patients, telling himself not to bother since the government would never reimburse him for the work he performed.
“You get a brake job that costs $475. You don’t have insurance for that,” he said. “It is no different with health care. We were simply trying to cover our costs.”
There is simply not enough information out there for Americans to make a rational choice on reform, he says. The president needs to define terms.
What is he reforming, exactly? Is it insurance reform or treatment reform?
Visconti is on Medicare now. He learned early, he said, that it would not fully cover his and his wife’s medical needs. It is why he bought supplemental coverage at a cost that even he acknowledges has forced him to radically change his lifestyle.
It is why he got out of medicine four years ago. He had tired of the “nonsense of billing government and insurance companies, neither of which reimbursed my costs.”
“People go into medicine really wanting to help people. You start out starry-eyed but are quickly bombarded with all this nonsense. I finally told myself that this is not what I signed up to do.”
He keeps his license in Arizona current. He envisions one day treating the poor on an Indian reservation in the state.
“After 45 years of reading medical texts,” Visconti said, “I am getting caught up on all the things I missed — English, religion, literature.
“Am I glad I got out now, given everything that has happened?” Visconti thinks about it awhile.
“Yes,” he said.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
