Brian,
I would absolutely love to give them all the big heave but what I'm saying is that most docs can't see past their next chart and car payment. The big factory groups here would continue to PAR and doing their awful drive by visits. Meanwhile, many people will bitch about waiting an hour and half, the 5 minutes of time from the actual doc, frequently not their own doc, but not do anything about it. They really aren't willing to stepp up to the plate and support a different way of conducting business by having to actually do some of the paperwork themselves or having to pay a bit more for the much improved quality of care. Especially in primary care.
As long as there are large numbers of other providers who are willing to cut their "competitions" throats, then we are never going to break this strangle hold that these SOB's enjoy over us. And I am very concerned that we just don't have the money in reserve (funny I wonder how that happened?) to survive the change in our practice and patient profiles. But it sure would be glorious and man does Nancy want to do something like that.
We have an awful plan here in NY, called the Empire Plan. It is the plan the state offers at the lowest cost to their own employees. It is so bad that it is "significantly" below present day Medicare by a double digit percentage! No joke. It's PPO, so most of these folks certainly could continue with their doc when he or she drops out of network by just absorbing a few hundred dollars a year deductable and some co-insurance. But what do these bozos do instead??? They continue to bounce around from practice to practice and will continue to do so, until each and every doc in town no longer accepts this crumby plan. We have seen it before as they establish here, there is just no loyalty around here to be spoken of. Now many of the practices that they came from deserve little or no such loyalty; but we fully expect to loose almost all of these patients as we start to widthdraw from this plan as well. They will just move on to the next practice in town that still accepts their cumby plan.
And this plan won't let you just close down your panel. They insist that if your panel is open to any other plans, then you must remain open to their plan too. That's one that always bothered me more than most others. How can any private company be allowed to reach outside the boundaries of their own contract to observe how you are conducting business with another private company as a private contractor? Is that not a violation of freetrade? What we do with in one contract with one company is none of their danm business at some other company. How and why does the FTC not see this as an infringment upon the freemarket and as anti-competitve? Their just a bunch of big business hacks there I swear.
Good Night and Good Luck
Paul
