This month has been a blur of travel and I was in Kansas last week… or was it two weeks ago? I had the chance to catch up with my friend Sharon Nelson when returning to Liberal, Kansas to speak. Sharon told me how to catch wild hogs. A lesson doctors can relate to with regard to Medicare.
Here’s how you do it.
First you put out a pile of corn in an area frequented by wild hogs. The hogs will visit frequently to eat. One day, you put up a length of fencing. All the while keeping the corn available. Later, you put up another length of fencing, running at right angles to the original length. Keep putting out the corn. Eventually, you encircle the corn with the fencing, and install a gate, but keeping the gate open.
Now the hogs will be a little skittish every-time an addition to the fencing is made, but with plentiful free corn, they’ll keep coming back. One day, while the hogs are feeding, you sneak up and shut the gate.
The hogs will go wild when they discover the gate is shut and they’re trapped. (I guess they’d go hog wild!). But eventually, they’ll settle down, and realize although they’re trapped, they still get to eat. But you don’t have to keep feeding them expensive corn, you can start to give them garbage. They might not like it as much as the corn, but they’ll still eat it. And they’ll still get fat off the garbage. But the hogs can’t wander off anymore because they’re still trapped inside the fence and they’ll eventually get used to the pen. And will eventually even forget how good the corn was as they get accustomed to eating garbage.
The question, I suppose, is what does Medicare feed physicians now? And is the gate locked tight, or can we go look for corn somewhere else?
Nobody moved the cheese. They moved the corn.
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