Here's a nice present for your faithful service to the DemocRat Party.
The title of this piece is "A Doctor's Declaration of Independence: It's time to defy health-care mandates issued by bureaucrats not in the healing profession." I'm quite sure there were any number of columns like this written in Saskatchewan back 1962. That was when the doctors actually went on strike to defeat Tommy "Not Dead Enough" Douglas's government seizure of the medical profession, usually called "medicare". That strike lasted three weeks.In addition to the burden of mandated electronic-record entry, doctors also face board recertification in the various medical specialties that has become time-consuming, expensive, imposing and a convenient method for our specialty societies and boards to make money.
Meanwhile, our Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements have significantly declined, let alone kept up with inflation. In orthopedic surgery, for example, Medicare reimbursement for a total knee replacement decreased by about 68% between 1992 and 2010, based on the value of 1992 dollars. How can this be? Don't doctors have control over what they charge for their services? For the most part, no. Our medical documentation is pored over and insurers and government then determine the appropriate level of reimbursement.
I don't know about other physicians but I am tired—tired of the mandates, tired of outside interference, tired of anything that unnecessarily interferes with the way I practice medicine. No other profession would put up with this kind of scrutiny and coercion from outside forces. The legal profession would not. The labor unions would not. We as physicians continue to plod along and take care of our patients while those on the outside continue to intrude and interfere with the practice of medicine.
You get to be a data-entry clerk making less money than a truck driver. Very Soviet Union, da?
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