thanks for sharing Jimmie, and I admire your activism. I have written my senators and house rep only on the matter of the medicare cuts that recurs annually. Good job!
I've posted previously here that a nationwide strike by physicians, if everyone and I mean everyone participated, would bring ALL players to the table after approximately one hour of the strike. And by the end of the 4th or 5th hour of patients in the ICU dying and patients on the O.R. tables having bled to death, I think we would have whatever terms we wanted. An extremist view? Absolutely. Likely to happen? Not at all.
The biggest problem is that physicians by nature are too independent and with such varied viewpoints, this will never happen. But oh boy if it did....we would have whatever we wanted.
Can you imagine if Pres Obama's mother were in the hospital and physician's went on strike? He would come to the table ready to talk Tort Reform for the first time ever, the Medicare reimbursement debacle would be fixed, and the MU scam would come to a grinding halt along with all the P4P scams. We would have true fee for service and improved reimbursements. I think Congress would agree to have physicians paid whatever we wanted.
Again I ask: will this ever happen? Probably never. I honestly don't think our physician leadership (AMA/AOA) could ever agree on what terms we should get if we all went on strike. I may be wrong here, but I believe physicians are federally forbidden from unionizing. But what are they going to do? Throw us ALL in jail? Go ahead...that would get us the strike that would fix everything. However if there was a national strike, I think it would rock the foundations of medicine in this country to its core. And maybe just maybe we would stop being the afterthought in all of the national discussions, and the law makers would come to us FIRST rather than AFTER the law has been determined.
By the way, Happy Easter all. For all of us Christians (at the high risk of offending all of our non-Christian friends, sorry) and for the benefit of ALL human-beings Jesus allowed himself to be tortured and killed to pay for our sins in-advance of us committing them. then He rose from the dead to prove that not only was He the son-of-man but also through Him we shall have eternal life. For this I am most grateful. Enjoy the day with your families.
