Doctors Unionize to Resist the Medical Machine
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Re: Doctors Unionize to Resist the Medical Machine
#2All of this rings true from what I've heard my dad, a GP, complain about for years. It's hard for him to watch other doctors game the system to increase their earnings -- not only seeing more patients with unaccountably short sessions, but also up-coding their maladies and ordering unnecessary tests.
In addition to the pressure of seeing more patients per day, they have all this new administrative bullshit (ironically in the name of efficiency) preventing them from doing so. For example, doing charts went from dictation, to data entry in absurdly bad (understatement) EMR software on cheap, outdated hardware that they weren't properly trained to use. And oh yeah, you can have pay withheld if you fall behind on that, too.
It's just sad, and many older doctors don't even recommend the profession to young people at this point.
Re: Doctors Unionize to Resist the Medical Machine
#3For what it's worth, people have been calling the AMA a union by another name for several decades.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johngoodman/2014/09/03/the-docto...
They lobby, they control the supply of doctors, they restrict competition, and they even engage in price fixing:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/how-a-secret...
They shape a lot of medical legislation, for example killing the Affordable Care Act's "public option."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/us/politics/11health.html
This isn't a recent thing. The AMA was key in killing Truman's universal healthcare proposal starting in 1945.
Re: Doctors Unionize to Resist the Medical Machine
#4All of this rings true from what I've heard my dad, a GP, complain about for years. It's hard for him to watch other doctors game the system to increase their earnings -- not only seeing more patients with unaccountably short sessions, but also up-coding their maladies and ordering unnecessary tests. In addition to the pressure of seeing more patients per day, they have all this new administrative bullshit (ironicall…
My doctors usually spend less than 5 minutes talking to me and 10 minutes hunting and pecking at the computer. Some offices will have other staff do much of the data entry, but it doesn't seem to result in the doctor any spending more time with me.
Re: Doctors Unionize to Resist the Medical Machine
#5The more middle-men you have between the consumer and the provider - be it a product or a service - the more the middle-men will constantly fight for 1) higher prices, and 2) marginalizing both the service provider and the customer.
This applies to education (universities, private schools), healthcare (large hospitals, insurance companies), social services, food, electronics...
Re: Doctors Unionize to Resist the Medical Machine
#6One thing that I never understood about the US medical education is the requirement of the bachelor's degree (pre-med) before applying for most med schools. In my home country and many others, you can directly apply to med school. Now that the college costs are quite considerably expensive, four-additional year of college studies simply adds to the cost of becoming a doctor and therefore, the newly minted doctors expect to make a lot of money. This pre-med education requirement adds unnecessary, in my opinion, burden not only to wannabe-doctors, but also to the medical system (create scarcity of doctors to say the least).
Re: Doctors Unionize to Resist the Medical Machine
#7One thing that I never understood about the US medical education is the requirement of the bachelor's degree (pre-med) before applying for most med schools. In my home country and many others, you can directly apply to med school. Now that the college costs are quite considerably expensive, four-additional year of college studies simply adds to the cost of becoming a doctor and therefore, the newly minted doctors exp…
I actually prefer the US system in that it potentially provides doctors with a more well-rounded education.
Re: Doctors Unionize to Resist the Medical Machine
#8All of this rings true from what I've heard my dad, a GP, complain about for years. It's hard for him to watch other doctors game the system to increase their earnings -- not only seeing more patients with unaccountably short sessions, but also up-coding their maladies and ordering unnecessary tests. In addition to the pressure of seeing more patients per day, they have all this new administrative bullshit (ironicall…
Hell, I'm only in my second year of med school in the US, and I wouldn't recommend young people go into this profession.
Re: Doctors Unionize to Resist the Medical Machine
#9Doctors are already paid absurd salaries in the US and the barriers to entry already high. As much as we all hate dealing with insurance companies, when I lost my insurance and had to pay for things out of pocket, the difference between what they charged me and what they would have charged an insurance company was obscene. Insurance companies actually do a pretty good job of reducing the costs of medical care, although some of the same power and information asymmetries still exist (that is, I'm saying that doesn't necessarily make the insurance companies the good guys). But the consumer has no bargaining power on his own and he doesn't know enough to challenge or negotiate. And the entire regulatory structure puts all the power in the hands of the doctor, not the patient. I don't see this as being a good trend for consumers. I find this to be very worrying.
Edit: since this my "absurd salaries" remark seems like it might be the most controversial bit, I was thinking of I was referring more to information like this: http://www.motherjones.com/files/blog_physician_compensation...
That's because it sidesteps many issues like how hard it is to become a doctor by simply comparing the pay of American doctors to the pay of doctors in countries with national healthcare. By "absurd salaries" what I really should have said was that American doctors are paid significantly more than other countries.
Of course everyone, no matter what their job, thinks they work too hard for too little pay.
Re: Doctors Unionize to Resist the Medical Machine
#10All of this rings true from what I've heard my dad, a GP, complain about for years. It's hard for him to watch other doctors game the system to increase their earnings -- not only seeing more patients with unaccountably short sessions, but also up-coding their maladies and ordering unnecessary tests. In addition to the pressure of seeing more patients per day, they have all this new administrative bullshit (ironicall…
My doctors usually spend less than 5 minutes talking to me and 10 minutes hunting and pecking at the computer. Some offices will have other staff do much of the data entry, but it doesn't seem to result in the doctor any spending more time with me.
Precisely we just created an start-up with a product that helps doctors making the EHR much faster and intuitively so they can focus on the patients.