Do You Want to Learn How Corporations are Destroying Healthcare?
I joke around about the Better Call Paul Medical Clinics but this article is a great primer on how bad things have gotten when we let corporations and VC money start buying everything. Groups are fighting this and we have talked about them before. You want to read the article, however, just to see how corrupt and politically skewed the AMA is. Here are a few highlights:
- The American Medical Association has been considering a resolution to seek a federal ban on the corporate practice of medicine at its interim House of Delegates meeting that concludes on Tuesday. The resolution, submitted by Florida emergency physician Vicki Norton, who helped compile a 70-page white paper on corporate medicine statutes recently released by the grassroots physician group Take Medicine Back, was almost shelved entirely after it mysteriously landed on a list of resolutions “not for consideration” at the meeting Saturday morning. But a physician unaffiliated with the reformers appealed the decision on behalf of an AMA subcommittee with a brief but passionate speech on the urgency of reversing the profession’s annexation by Wall Street investment firms.
- The AMA’s influence, however, has been in decline since the 1970s. Today, just 11 percent of licensed physicians are members—and those members are, as The New Yorker recently detailed in a feature about an unlikely campaign by young physicians and medical students to convince the association to endorse a single-payer system, much more left-leaning than they once were. One barometer of the group’s erosion in lobbying muscle is the fact that Medicare reimbursement rates have fallen in inflation-adjusted terms 21 percent since 2001, even as health care expenditures have nearly doubled over the same period.
There’s much more in the article so give it a read and share it. And a shout out to Maureen Tkacik and Mitch Li who continue this great fight.
When I retired from medicine, I advised the AAFP I was retiring. They responded with a congratulatory letter and asked me to pay something like $917.00 to be “listed” as a retired Diplomate. I wrote a letter back saying to go “efff-off” as my clinic paid for membership over close to 30 years and I should be able to retire with no fees. I did use the “real” expletive in my letter. Wonder if the idiots changed the policy. They’re a worthless group.
Agreed
Thinking about it, when I was hospital-based, private independent group, before the big corporate takeovers, yes, there were some insurances we didn’t accept. Medicare and Medicaid, you really had to accept for hospital credentialing. But some of the crappy private plans, you know the usual suspects, we would not accept their contracts. But we set our rates against the best payers. So a patient with a private plan we did not accept, they would be on the hook for the best payer rate, or depending on insurance, the difference between what the best payer paid, and whatever the non-accepted plan paid. If they paid at all, but that was a matter between the patient and the patient’s insurance. What we didn’t do was charge some astronomical rate like you see nowadays, to trap an uninsured or under insured patient. I guess that thought either didn’t occur to us, or we would have been repelled by the unethical practice. It sure occurred to these private equity plans though.
That white paper is an interesting read. The “No Surprises Act”, addressing the surprise billing problem.
Turns out the surprise billing was their business model. The “No Surprises Act” bankrupted Envision.
Can’t say I’m a particular fan of Single Payor, but I can see it coming. There is a “BURN IT ALL TO THE GROUND” mentality that will give us Single Payor.
Don’t forget our friends at AAFP who promote Optum, One Medical/Amazon et al as great career paths, and who now have a venture-capital president elect.