The Hypocritical and Lying CEOs of the Health Care Industry
In the article from the Health Affairs website called Physician Burnout Is A Public Health Crisis: A Message To Our Fellow Health Care CEOs you can read how the authors describe how “burnout among physicians is becoming a national health crisis” and that it “is directly attributable to loss of control over work, increased performance measurement (quality, cost, patient experience), the increasing complexity of medical care, the implementation of electronic health records (EHRs), and profound inefficiencies in the practice environment.”
All of which they directly imposed on us doctors!
What an absolute crock of sh%t this article was. Every one of these CEOs forced this crap down the throats of their employed doctors. Like drones, many physicians just took it but some of us fought back. Yes, I was one of them who did. I remember the medical director at my hospital in Maine screaming at me “what is wrong with quality?!” I told him the path this unproven concept would take us and immediately resigned from that stupid leadership committee I was on. And guess what? I was right.
Please, please, please don’t let these douchebag administrators off the hook.
“Leadership is needed to address the root causes of this problem and reposition the health care workforce for the future. The authors of this paper—the CEOs of our respective institutions—are committing to do just that.”
Committed, my ass. That is just “administralian” for “we just want to make more money and saying these words make us look good”.
DON’T BUY IT! I only pray that people go back and find their quotes where they caused this crisis by taking away our control, forcing bogus quality metrics on us, making us use broken EHRS and destroying our practice environment.
It is their fault. And it is our fault for following them like sheep. Now it is time for revenge by making them eat their words. Can we for once, as doctors, collectively fight back!
From the first “prior authorization ” request I have said the same thing. It is time we took medicine back collectively. Them that don’t like it can treat themselves. But we will never get enough doctors to stand with us. We are too passive.
There is a small rebel force, membership medicine doctors, AAPS, Surgery Center OK, Free Market Medical Association, and AtlasMD and many others are forgoing the admistrative bloat that consumes ‘mainstream’ healthcare today.
No, I do not believe we can fight back. It is too late. I speak to teachers, truck drivers, contractors, bankers, business owners, etc., and they all are experiencing the same burnout as us. And guess what? It is for the same reasons, over regulation and micromanagement by the government and their employers creating a work environment in which it is impossible to achieve good results. Unfortunately this micromanagement and over regulation is growing at an exponential rate. To make matters worse, we have students (medical, PA, and NP) rotate through our office, and their fund of knowledge, work ethic, and understanding of the problems we are discussing is pathetic. They are brought up in a system where this lunacy and mediocrity is taught as the norm and they simply do not know any better. To paraphrase the late Merle Haggard, we are rolling downhill like a snowball headed for hell, the good times are really over for good.
How do we understand the horrible mess everywhere, Jerry?
Perhaps it’s best understood by considering Max Weber’s writing on the Iron Cage of Bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy is merely the management equivalent of the assembly line in manufacture. I like the phrase, “lunacy and mediocrity is taught as the norm.” This stuff is being presented as though it had value and quality to it. And people don’t know where the enemy is. Is it government? Boards? Corporations? Yes, all of them. It is a nonsense culture of management freely bought into by our entire culture. The reason why fish don’t know what water is, because it’s everywhere.
Jerry, you’re right. It’s too late, I’m afraid. It’s the consensus that the Emperor’s New Clothing is marvelous. Decades of immersion in the educational system bureaucracy and the workplace bureaucracy and the government bureaucracy creates a culture which actively DESTROYS productivity. There’s no way out except the “Stop! Reset!” that Eastern Europe did in 1990 or so.
Arm yourself. Read up on Max Weber in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Wikipedia, everywhere you can. A hundred years ago, he described the Iron Cage of Bureaucracy. Now, the bars are so thick we can barely see between them.
I cannot agree more with what you say
I don’t have any of this in Direct Primary Care
I definitely agree.