Medical Care Oppression

I know most people think physicians have a pleasant professional life, but that is not true. The current atmosphere in the medical world is not a happy world. Most physicians do not advise there children to go into medical fields, and that is a tragedy. A practicing physician, around 40 years of age, should believe that practicing medicine is the best thing to do, and that nothing else would be better.

Doctors today feel oppressed, and Medicare is the major offender. Medicare tells doctors how much time to spend with patients; what they should write in the hospital and in their own private charts; who they can admit to the hospital; how much they will be paid for their labor; and all these directives are done with the constant threat of large fines and imprisonment if these "rules" are not followed. All of these rules apply even though the government promised that there was a "prohibition against any Federal interference" in the first paragraph of the original Medicare law.

Medicare has forced "Professionalism" out of medicine. It cannot pay for all the promises made to the people, and it continues to decrease reimbursement, and increase rules. Fifteen years ago, most doctors believed that they were being paid a reasonable wage for the work they were doing. Today, I and most other doctors believe we are not much more than controlled servants. We work hard for our wages, with difficult patients, taking risks that are not adequately reimbursed. Many services we deliver are "covered" under the "global" coverage of indentured servitude. Global coverage is a method that Medicare uses to force physicians into patient care situations that extract free work from physicians. It is all too common.

I have begun to wonder about the response of people that are forced into a system that they believe has no integrity. I think that doctors believe that Medicare has no integrity or honesty in its dealings with physicians. It continues to unilaterally cheat the providers with its many rules and restrictions. That cannot but encourage behavior in doctors which will not be helpful to patients.

I am searching the business literature for studies on this topic(how people behave in an environment that they believe is unjust), but have not found much yet. I intend to write about it later. How does someone behave when forced to work under a system that one believes has no justice? Why is it the malpractice rates keep going up, but reimbursement keeps decreasing? Are we doing something that is dangerous, but not worth much? I believe this system is not healthy or nurturing to the profession of medicine, and the social consequences have yet to be examined.

More to follow.

Dr. Weaver