When Doctors Sell Their Practices
Doctors are selling their practices! In some areas, it feels like no practices are doctor owned. It’s depressing. The days of private practice seem to be dying.
Big multispecialty groups are the future! Everyone works with the same Electronic Health Record. Efficiencies of scale allow us all to work smarter. No one gets lost in the system. Bigger is better! Aligned incentives!
Except…. What I’m seeing is not going so well.
The new owners simply cannot manage it all. It’s a mess. Patients don’t see the same “provider” twice. Facility fees drive up the cost of care. Doctor salaries start low and don’t get higher. The doctor is interchangeable. Turnover is high….and patients hate it!
Patients don’t want to pay for excellence. They want care cheap, perfect, and on-demand. They have attacked physicians with their politicians, crony corporatism, and malpractice lawyers. It is not excusing the abdication by physicians of their professional obligations to observe that patients are getting exactly what they deserve.
Every year at the AAFP meeting, we get to watch docs who’ve recently sold out their practices stand up and whine about how mean their new bosses are and how they want the AAFP to make them be nicer.
So much of this pain is self-inflicted.
When Physicians sell their practices to corporate interests, they are helping pound the final nails into the private practice coffins. Just don’t do it. Think about those coming after you.
Nobody is coming after you.