What Are They Even Saying?
As you know, I like to mock the nonsensical terms using by our government as well as our medical governing bodies when they try to explain their newest and most brilliant plans. In an articled called “AAFP Fights to Make Payment System Favorable for FPs“, it is just filled with wondrous and enlightening terms. To be clear, I am just going to highlight the terms and not talk about the article. Why? The title should tell you in itself that this article is meaningless as we have seen it over and over for decades. It will never happen. So, ignore trying to figure it out. The gold is in the words.
So, for a good laugh, try to define these terms or sayings or an acronyms. And remember, this is from ONE little article talking about payment:
- Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA)
- Medicare sustainable growth rate formula
- Episode groups
- Resource use measures
- Alternative payment models
- Composite performance score
- Merit-based incentive payment system
- Care management
- Coordination services
- Resource utilization
- Global and comprehensive
- Justification of clinical decisions
- Downstream costs
- Care team
- Task of coordination
- Resource measurement
- Stakeholder feedback
Wasn’t that fun? Good thing the AAFP is fighting for us because I have no idea what they are even saying anymore. Hell, they should have used MEDICAL ADMINISTRATORS as “code talkers” in World War II to prevent the Germans from figuring out our communications.
As my old pal George Orwell might stay, ” This is double plus good.”
I love your list. They are all “action” words or phrases and are suitable for use in a variety of situations. The same words/phrases would work in a political speech, a letter to the Editor, cussing out your Congressman, etc. This list is a useful tool which I promise I will use for good, not evil.
Thank you.
They do this because they want to make it sound like they are helping us. Oh, they are helping us alright, not onto the bus, but under it. I’m not even sure they understand what they are saying themselves, either AAFP or CMS.
The Navajo code talkers have a dignity, pride and courage that we physicians and our physician leaders should have but lost somewhere along the way.
I would not let Medical Administrators get within speaking distance of the Third Reich. The Navajo have been in uniform for the USA in every 20th Century war, almost to a man (AND woman.) They understand and believe in for-real freedom. But they have had to deal with the US Government’s trying to order their lives for several hundred years, and it’s not been swell. Obamacare’s grandparents are the BIA and the Indian Health Service.
Medical Administrators, however, would likely defect to the other side – THEY speak the same language as the Brownshirts. Look up “Lingua Tertii Imperii” by Viktor Klemperer – it’s a study on Nazi language and how they manipulated meaning.
A description says – He [Klemperer] passionately noted every new idiom that arose, from the Stammtisch (dinner-table) jokes to techno-jargon to advertising. The primary goal of Klemperer was to bear witness to the poisoning of the German language by the Nazis.” It translates nicely into Bureauspeak.