This is What We are Dealing With
“Networks are the name of the game right now. When you are able to direct patient traffic to an narrow network, you can usually create better rates and drive more volume to the more efficient providers.”
– J.B. Silvers, PhD, A Healthcare Finance Expert who is a professor at the Weatherhead School of Management and the School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University
This quote was found on the sidebar in an article about UnitedHealthcare dropping physicians in Medical Economics. This is reality. This is the reason behind the facade of quality indicators. They are looking to drop docs (a trend to continue) and direct patients to other physicians who are cheaper to them. This is what we are dealing with. The only way to fight back is to walk.
I am a 76 year old male, type 2 diabetic. My doc is an Internist. Our local hospital owned his practice. With no warning I get a letter stating his office was closing. Went to see him and he told me the hospital had terminated his contract. He was one of the best PCP’s I have encountered. Contend health care in our country, with insurance companies and hospital administrators leading the way, is going to hell. Have been going to this Doc over 30 years.
This is the way things are. The only way to fix it is for PCPs to go independent again and do more direct primary care.
I’m surprised that United Healthcare isn’t criticized more. They are the largest health plan in the country, make 5-6 billion a year with a CEO who makes more than 100 million annually. They have a history of huge fines for ripping off providers, consumers and even their own stockholders. I am embarrassed that they are based in my home state of Minnesota [at least they are currently freezing their asses off along with the rest of us].
As referenced last month Lance, the same mindset and mechanisms will be used to force all physicians to see Medicare/Medicaid “gubmint” dependents. The fascistic collaboration of insurers and government will continue to eradicate the individualism of physicians as well as patients.
On the up side, what a delicious joke on all the proponents of Obamacare which, still, has not produced a single additional doc.
Thank you, Pat, for a dictionary-correct reference to Fascism.
A vital element of the philosophy was a partnership between government and large industry, for the “betterment” of all citizens.
If you look at it in the context of a long-term strategy, rather than as a series of annoying events, you can see the behavior of the insurers and regulators as being intended to create a sort of a winnowing process, in which the slow promulgation of more and more burdensome and pointless requirements slowly pushes the less compliant and more independent physicians out of the system, leaving behind an increasingly passive group of collaborators, who will cower and comply as each new rule is introduced, ultimately, over a period of years, transforming a profession famous for its resistance to leadership (the saying was always that getting doctors to go along with something was like “herding cats”) into one that will ask “How high?” when some official says “Jump!”
The random whittling down of networks is simply another way to break the will of physicians, leaving those who are not “out in the cold” to wonder whether they’re next, and to begin trying to act in whatever way that they believe that the insurance companies want them to act, so that their heads will not be next on the block, and their families will not be the ones that go hungry (metaphorically now, but literally later, as the plan rolls out over the years).