-
Follow
Following
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Potpourri a smorgasbord of topics
When any big business gets involved in employing doctors, whether a hospital or Walmart, it creates an unfair advantage for them over private practice physicians in the community, who can’t compete with the combination of resources creating much lower overhead by a big business relative to a small business due to pooling of staff, shared office spaces and equipment, discounted health insurance rates for larger number of covered lives, etc., in addition there are incentives for using the services of the place of employment for ancillary, specialty, pharmaceutical, inpatient and outpatient referrals. These referrals are incentivized by bonuses for ‘productivity’ or feelings of obligation for continued employment. There may be fear of termination if a certain quota is not reached, either real or inferred. Somehow these businesses are immune or have created barely legal ways to get around the anti stark and kick back laws in regard to referring more than a certain percentage of clientele to a business that you have ownership in or compensating someone to give you their supposedly unsolicited business. They are probably considered as one entity and as such they are doing business with themselves… I don’t know how they get around the bureaucratic red tape, but this is my best educated guess. I do know that I prefer my autonomy and ability to use free enterprise, I won’t compromise my standards or give lower quality of care even though the economic incentives are of such that you have to choose between the two in order to compete or go out of business or be bought out by a hospital or other big business. It’s patient’s healthcare that will suffer as their lives are pushed through service like an assembly line… And these physicians will be owned by the corporate entity, losing even more control over a profession already compromised, compounding the ongoing war we are already battling with healthcare insurance companies to compensate us fairly and stop the unsustainable financial squeeze and ever increasing administrative burden placed on primary care physicians. We ride the proverbial rollercoaster…
Potpourri 
Recent Comments