It makes me sick to think that I cannot practice medicine the way medicine is meant to be practiced: with care, quality and timeliness. Financially I feel deprived and it disgusts me that so much money goes to pay medical malpractice premiums and tails, and that our livelihoods are at risk as we are considered lottery tickets, by society, in general.
Most of the health care dollar goes to administrative costs for health insurance companies, with a large part going to the salaries and bonuses of their executives. That money should be meant for patient care. Little of the health care dollar even goes to pharmacies and hospitals, much less to the physicians. Doctors get far less of the healthcare dollar than do the executives of the insurance companies, yet without us they would be out of a job. Once we actually get reimbursed, we have our medical school loans and ever rising business costs to pay for with our ever decreasing earnings.
Now the current administration wants to decrease payments even further in order to “save” the health care system. We already know that a number of capable people are leaving our profession, or declining the arduous journey to become an American trained physician; not to mention the huge number of our friends (including me) who don’t want their own children following in our footsteps. How sad is it when we don't want our own progeny to follow us all because we are treated like thieves, or thugs, as children who cannot govern ourselves. This attitude in our society towards physicians is doing nothing but creating a loss of quality of well trained physicians.
There are close to 1 million physicians in the country and around 25 million people in the health care industry. They don’t treat or care (for) about the patients. Our patients suffer as physicians must see more patients every year just to make the same amount (or often less) money than last year; physician burnout is a well documented and a worrisome trend in our profession. This can affect our ability to properly formulate patient care. With the addition of paperwork and increased regulations put upon us by the state and federal governments, we have even less quality time for ourselves and our families. Not to mention the trauma of malpractice issues, that have taken the creativity out of patient care…resulting in the increase cost of healthcare.
In addition we need to deal with ugly politics of hospital administrators who can, just for unfriendly facial grimaces, suspend us and report us to the National Practitioner Data Bank, thus irrevocably ruining our careers, well before any investigation or fair hearing is called. We work our butts off to get top grades in college, to get into medical school, and then residency programs, where we often worked 100 or even 120 hours a week, for what? So should we give up nights, weekends, holidays, birthdays, anniversaries and even the birth of our own children to practice the vocation to which we were drawn upon? And even then, how are we treated? We are considered the vilest criminals, cheats and depraved practitioners with no sense of integrity or consciousness, only out to harm those we have struggled so long to serve. If we are so bad, so vile and so depraved, shouldn't we let our patients get treated by these lawmakers, advisors, politicians, and administrators who are trying to ‘save the health care system.
Quality of care suffers more when we spend less time checking our patients. This extra work is forced upon us when insurance companies like Medicare and Medicaid, constantly refuse to pay us in a timely fashion for our time and effort. And, when we do see patients, our clinical acumen is stifled as we must follow a cookbook approach to patient care. Yet what am I to do when 25% to 50% of my procedures, which are 'authorized' by insurance companies, are not compensated because, although authorized, they are not covered benefits. Insurance companies have no incentive to provide better care if it in turn we take good care of a patient, if good care may extend life expectancy.
It is time that we (physicians) stand up for our cause. We live in the land of the free and home of the brave. But we are passively giving up our noble lives as physicians, without liberty to practice as we should, and without the freedom to stop the government and the insurance companies from turning us in to hourly workers, but rather into the true professionals we believe we are. Perhaps we can show the country that we are worth more than a co-payment; that physicians are the real heroes for society; and that our profession is needed, our services are required, and our practice is a calling to be respected, not a trade that is to be negotiated to the lowest bidder.
I am inviting you to join my cause to ‘Save Future of Health Care’. We want our services to be adequately reimbursed, we want less paperwork, we want less money going into the hands of insurance companies and administration costs and we want medical malpractice reform, with caps on all damages, so that we can practice without the fear of needless and unwarranted lawsuits. We want the National Practitioner Data Bank reformed so entries are made after all administrative remedies have been executed, so due process is given to all physicians and that all entries are reviewed by an independent board of physicians without any ties to the accusing hospital, state, or local medical societies prior to submission. And we want proper compensation for services that pay us enough to manage our practices and allow us a living that compensates us for our years of study and training.
