Hi SnowDO,
I certain agree with Bert, absolutely nothing that you have to apologize for. This board runs hot and cold, busy and slow, I greatly doubt any one is specifically avoiding you or the topic. I, personally, have been very busy recently.
Having said that, I have mixed feelings about your viewpoint. Is the practice of medicine difficult, and worse than it was generations ago? In many many ways, absolutely.
Can we/should we/could we have done anything about it? I do not have a clue.
Medicine is so diverse, different specialties, different practice models, different eras of physicians, I am not sure anyone could say, with absolute unanimity, "We want…"
Well okay, we are could agree we want more money, better hours, less regulation, and less interference with our practice. But I doubt we would be of unanimous opinion on the details.
How do you divide the pie between specialists and primary care? Between procedures and office visits? Between hospital and outpatient?
In my years of practice (I am 64), I have seen two "primary care is not paid enough, specialists are paid too much" movements. Both of these basically led to divides among physicians, and the end result was cutting specialist reimbursement.
The idea of a work stoppage is interesting. For a physician in private practice, I think it would be more or less shooting yourself in the foot. Also, I could imagine attorneys gleefully looking at bad outcomes because the patient could not be seen by their usual provider.
Employed physician striking, you use the example of ER docs, might have less personal liability, but I am really not sure what 10% of ER docs striking would accomplish.
This is a serious question. Let us saying, hypothetically, that all emergency room providers would agree not to work, or not to see non life threatening situations (itself a somewhat challenging concept), until certain demands were met. What would those demands be?
I am not writing this to be argumentative, I am interested in your thoughts.
Thanks.
Gene
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