What good is power if you don’t abuse it? The insurance companies definitely exercise their power over both the physicians and patients. Jerking around the patients is especially outrageous because we are the ones paying premiums to the insurance companies. We are paying for the abuse. The doctors are kind of stuck in the middle. They want to get paid for their services and the patients expect the insurance to pay the doctors. Jump through the hoops doctors! Pay your premiums and accept the abuse patients! The insurance industry has an agenda and it is not patient friendly. One could almost say they want us dead after they have fleeced us.
The practice of medicine has been destroyed by the insurance industry. The cost of establishing a practice today is astronomical. The process of becoming empaneled on an insurance company's list of providers is equally onerous and difficult and time consuming. It literally forces graduating residents to join a hospital associated practices or a large group practice that may or may not be owned by an outside entity. You are not your own boss to say the least. The insurance company invented these metrics under the misguided notion that they would improve patient health. I don't believe that it has. They incentivized doctors to do colorectal screening, pap smears, mammograms, administer flu shots, pneumococcal vaccines, shingles vaccines, run PSA's and HbA1c's and any number of metrics and let's not forget depression, oh, God forbid. All of these screenings take time out of a 15 minute visit for an established patient leaving almost no time to address the real issue. People generally come to see a doctor because they don't feel well. The idea of screening and all the other bullshit is just wasted energy IMO. A doctor-patient relationship is supposed to by a symbiosis. I help you and, in turn, you help me. There is just too much information on the TV, on your cell phones and elsewhere to let you know that it may be prudent to get a colonoscopy, a mammogram and so forth. I don't believe that a doctor has to continually ask his patient if he has had one. If I were giving our $100 dollar checks the first Tuesday of every month I wouldn't have to say it twice. There would be people lined up outside my door to receive them. Is not ones health more valuable than $100? It is incumbent on patients to participate in the doctor patient relationship and ask for their screening. Doctors should not be incentivized to ask, they should be actually taking a history of the present illness and trying to figure what is going on. I started in the business in 1979 and there were none of these screening metrics that were mandated yet somehow we took care of the patients and I don't remember that people were worse off because we didn't routinely screen. I would like to see doctors disassociate with the hospital and from captured practices and become autonomous again and actually begin to think for themselves instead of being incentivized to follow algorithms. IMO, medicine has been dumbed down like almost everything else.
What good is power if you don’t abuse it? The insurance companies definitely exercise their power over both the physicians and patients. Jerking around the patients is especially outrageous because we are the ones paying premiums to the insurance companies. We are paying for the abuse. The doctors are kind of stuck in the middle. They want to get paid for their services and the patients expect the insurance to pay the doctors. Jump through the hoops doctors! Pay your premiums and accept the abuse patients! The insurance industry has an agenda and it is not patient friendly. One could almost say they want us dead after they have fleeced us.
Looks like Ethics is 'gone with the wind'....grrrrrrrrrr
The practice of medicine has been destroyed by the insurance industry. The cost of establishing a practice today is astronomical. The process of becoming empaneled on an insurance company's list of providers is equally onerous and difficult and time consuming. It literally forces graduating residents to join a hospital associated practices or a large group practice that may or may not be owned by an outside entity. You are not your own boss to say the least. The insurance company invented these metrics under the misguided notion that they would improve patient health. I don't believe that it has. They incentivized doctors to do colorectal screening, pap smears, mammograms, administer flu shots, pneumococcal vaccines, shingles vaccines, run PSA's and HbA1c's and any number of metrics and let's not forget depression, oh, God forbid. All of these screenings take time out of a 15 minute visit for an established patient leaving almost no time to address the real issue. People generally come to see a doctor because they don't feel well. The idea of screening and all the other bullshit is just wasted energy IMO. A doctor-patient relationship is supposed to by a symbiosis. I help you and, in turn, you help me. There is just too much information on the TV, on your cell phones and elsewhere to let you know that it may be prudent to get a colonoscopy, a mammogram and so forth. I don't believe that a doctor has to continually ask his patient if he has had one. If I were giving our $100 dollar checks the first Tuesday of every month I wouldn't have to say it twice. There would be people lined up outside my door to receive them. Is not ones health more valuable than $100? It is incumbent on patients to participate in the doctor patient relationship and ask for their screening. Doctors should not be incentivized to ask, they should be actually taking a history of the present illness and trying to figure what is going on. I started in the business in 1979 and there were none of these screening metrics that were mandated yet somehow we took care of the patients and I don't remember that people were worse off because we didn't routinely screen. I would like to see doctors disassociate with the hospital and from captured practices and become autonomous again and actually begin to think for themselves instead of being incentivized to follow algorithms. IMO, medicine has been dumbed down like almost everything else.