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CNN Live Today

Simply Medicine, Cash-only Practice for Vermont

Aired July 19, 2002 - 11:21   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: Remember the olden days, the days before insurance forms and managed care? When you felt sick you went to the doctor, right, plain and simple. Well now a doctor in Vermont has gone back to simply medicine.

CNN's Bill Delaney got a personal look at this practice with a purpose.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DR. LISA GRIGG, OSTEOPATHIC PHYSICIAN: Simply Medicine -- this is Dr. Grigg.

BILL DELANEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): And it is that simple.

GRIGG: Hey, Phyllis (ph).

DELANEY: The first-name basis, cash-only medical practice of Dr. Lisa Grigg, Wallingford, Vermont.

GRIGG: Hey, Holly (ph).

DELANEY: Two years ago, fed up with big-time medicine ...

GRIGG: Deep breath again.

DELANEY: ... she downsized, personalized big time.

GRIGG: Big medicine doesn't work. Big businesses controlling big medicine and business and medicine necessarily have different goals and when your goal as a physician is to make a bottom line rather than take care of the patient, then you've compromised your professional ethics.

DELANEY: No appointments, no insurance.

GRIGG: And your left ear never hurt you, huh?

DELANEY: Seven-year old Trisha Burden (ph) woke up with an earache. Self-employed uninsured Julie Burden estimated care at a typical practice at about $100. Ten minutes or so at Dr. Grigg's ...

JULIE BURDEN, UNINSURED MOTHER: And with medicine $28. So and you can't do that anywhere else.

DELANEY (voice over): With a Radio Shack digital timer, visits are clocked.

(on camera): Got the most pressure on it, then it'll hurt.

(voice over): I decided to have her look at my bad left knee. I've been trying to get that thing looked at in Boston.

(on camera): Just last week I called for an appointment, couldn't get one until September. I walked into Dr. Grigg's office and I'm getting the most thorough look at this knee that I've had in the year and a half of problems with it.

(voice over): Fifteen minutes, $40 of Dr. Grigg's time, and she figured out the problem, recommended a way to tape me up and some medicine.

(on camera): Dr. Grigg's dream is to create what she calls a safety net, a network of doctors who share her approach and ideals. But there is a cost to all this. Since she started Simply Medicine, her income's gotten more basic too, down about 80 percent.

(voice over): To keep going, she's applying for tax-exempt status.

GRIGG: We'd like to expand our ability to take care of people with no money and no insurance.

DELANEY (on camera): Why set a goal?

GRIGG: Because I'm an idealist. The only solution I found out to being a burned-out physician is to turn around and embrace your ideals.

DELANEY (voice over): In the ever more impersonal, impossibly expensive world of American medicine, a little oasis of change, where you sometimes even leave with change.

Bill Delaney, CNN, Wallingford, Vermont.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HARRIS: Wow, I sure do wish her luck.

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