The Status Quo Likes The Obama Plan
On NPR’s All Things Considered today host Robert Siegel interviewed AMA President Dr. James Rohack. [link to audio]
At the end Mr. Seigel brought up Atul Gawande’s article in The New Yorker, The Cost Conundrum, about the hyperexpensive health care in the McAllen, Texas area, wondering what the AMA was doing to address the runaway costs of over prescribing tests and procedures.
Dr. Rohack immediately brought out the “defensive medicine/malpractice” defense, which Mr. Siegel countered by pointing out that Texas had already enacted “tort reform” which caps “pain and suffering” at $250K. The doctor mumbled something about how the AMA has groups studying the problem.
Just so readers know, the AMA only encompasses 30% of doctors, and those tend to be doctors with stock tickers in their offices. [I was paid to install the satellite antennae for those tickers, so I’m not just being snarky. It is one way of spotting medical office buildings in Southern California.]
2 comments
… or, before about 10 years ago, they could have been trading in graded rare coins and/or precious metals; coin dealers had satellite antennas on their roofs for a while, too, before the Web, to hook up to the biggest coin-trading board. (Yes, that board was my client for a number of years, and eventually I implemented most of the Web version of their exchange.) And yes, some docs trade in those things instead of or in addition to stocks.
Some of those same “conservatives,” including at least one doc I met, used to claim that we should pay schoolteachers less so that only the most dedicated individuals would choose to work as teachers. I wonder why they didn’t apply the same principle to doctors.
If doctors would police instead of reflexively protecting their own, they would have a major malpractice problem.
The big cases in Florida are all rather obvious, i.e. they amputated the wrong foot or removed the wrong kidney. I haven’t seen or heard about a case where someone is sued because they didn’t order some other test.
The law suits about testing usually involve the labs doing the tests, not the doctors, and the doctors are often plaintiffs in those suits [which may be a CYA move, but still].
The piece notes that the Texas Medical Association and some others don’t agree with the AMA position, so they are really representing less that 30% of doctors.