Doctors’ Lounge
on the priorities in our practice, the services
available to patients, the quality of the care
they receive, and the philosophy of the care
to be provided with little or no input from
the physicians empowered by law to provide
that care.
If you want to see an administrator or
manager sweat, suggest a meeting of the
physicians who practice without one of
them present, and discussing an agenda
developed by the physicians, not by the
managers. The single biggest fear of the
current system would be a physician
organization to discuss grievances, address
patient quality issues of real concern, and
once again place control of actual medical
practice back into the hands of those who
provide day to day care of patients. LM
Note: Dr. Griffin practices Obstetrics and
Gynecology with Women’s Care Physicians
of Louisville.
Letter to the Editor
Edgar A. Lopez MD. FACS
P
hysicians: Independent professional
practitioners or employees controlled
by health care’s big players?
In the New York Times issue of February
14, 2014, an article written by Elizabeth
Rosenthal and titled, “Apprehensive, many
Doctors shift to Jobs with salaries,” the following information caught my attention:
Today, accordingly to the AMA Statistics,
in the USA:
60% of Family Doctors and Pediatricians
are employees.
50% of General Surgeons are employees.
25% of Surgical specialists including ENT,
Ophthalmologists and others are employees.
In 2007 24% of Cardiologists were employed; it jumped to 35% in 2012.
Local Hospitals in the State of New Jersey
bought, just recently, 22 private Cardiology
practices.
These statistics reflect the rapid demise of
the concept of the Private Delivery of Medical Care that has fallen in this country into
the tentacles of the Private Health Insurance
Companies that continue to siphon off, in
a macabre way, the tax money that is supposed to be used for Health Care. Instead
the funding of Private Health Care in the
USA , the richest industrialized country in
the world, is all about profiteering and the
Wall Street dance of the stock market as it
relates to escalating health care costs for
everybody.
In the mean time, The Affordable Care
Act has only brought more sophistication
to the Profiteering Process of the Private
Health Insurance Companies while still
more than 45,000 citizens a year die because
of lack of Heath Insurance. Believe you me
these victims are hard working middle
class citizens; they are not the immigrants
( documented or otherwise) , they are not
the Veterans of War, they are not from the
top 1% , they are not from below the poverty
line, they are hard working individuals, low
level executives and college graduates, adjunct Professors, low level employees of the
same Private Health Insurance Companies,
etc. who carry exorbitant deductibles in
the newly baptized Platinum, Gold, Silver,
Bronze plans that, in my opinion, rather
than precious metals names should be called
“chatarra” ( which in Spanish means: scrap
metal).
The concept of Incremental Health Care
Reform sponsored traditionally and continuously by serious institutions like the AMA
and the American College of Surgeons is
another clear manifestation of a non-viable,
non-sustainable system for funding and delivery of Health Care. It just doesn’t work
and the price for the ones left behind the
affordability wagon is: death, debt, despair
and mental illness plaguing the streets.
When you have an acute catastrophic illness and you are, for whatever reason, underinsured or even worse uninsured ( don’t
know which one is worst) there is absolutely
no time to wait for incremental shenanigans.
My dear colleagues, the only viable solution to save the Private Practice of Medical
Care ( Funding and Delivery) in this country and at the same time serve Everybody In
and Nobody Out is a Single Payer System
based on the bill introduced in the US Congress on repeated occasions thru the years
by Rep. John Conyers: HR-676. We can call
it also: Improved-Expanded Medicare for
All , from birth to death and without the
participation of the Private Health Insurance Industry. That bill will save at least 400
billion dollars a year, to begin with.
HR 676 is properly explained in the Web.
Just Google HR676 and read the bill. Everybody’s back is covered including the low
level employees of the Private Health Insurance Companies.
I want to respectfully invite the Current
President of the GLMS and the President
Elect to a publi