Imagine, arriving to your condominium in your own BMW 7-Series chauffeur-driven town car that's available at your disposal...
... and being greeted at the door by your own personal doorman:
... and having a helpful Congierge lady that can help service your every need while in Philadelphia:
Then, after a hard day at work directing meetings or traveling to Washington, you can return home and cook dinner in a nice kitchen with somewhat dated amenities:
After that, you can take a nice shower in the Master Bath:
...while your guests use the second. slightly less glamorous second bathroom:
No doubt you'll have a relaxing stay in Philadelphia - all on the backs of your own colleagues board certification and Maintenance of Certification testing fees!
See what you can have when you Choose Wisely®?
-Wes
Please excuse my French, but these bastards need to be STOPPED! They are sucking us dry and to make matters worse, they are our own colleagues! They have no shame. These quislings like Richard Baron, MD, need to be called-out at every opportunity and publicly ridiculed. All of us also need to stand up and speak out loudly and without fear. That is the only thing that bullies respond to.
ReplyDeleteDavid W. Allison, MD
Agree with Dr. Allison. Enough already!
ReplyDeleteI think it's time to get a legal fund together. We should find a law firm that is familiar with RICO and see what our chances of success are.
ReplyDeleteThere is a lawsuit underway. The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons is suing ABMS under the anti-trust statutes.
ReplyDeleteTo donate, go to: http://americanhealthlegalfoundation.org
No question that the ABIM under the tutelage of Richard Baron has outdone itself. However, “DIck’s Dacha” is merely symptomatic of a far more pernicious disease. The Affordable Care Act represents perhaps the largest and most intrusive pork barrel project in human history. The ABMS and its subsidiaries, including the ABIM, lobbied hard to obtain name mention along with regulatory authority within the ACA. They are part of an exclusive club allowed to enact overbearing and self serving edicts over the majority of physicians in the U.S., to the point where it’s becoming almost impossible to practice, not to mention fomenting a precipitous decline in morale. The only response to date has been overriding anger and frustration among clinicians. The failure of the medical community to mount an ‘equal and opposite’ response is multifactorial. One problem is that the average physician is too busy, barely keeping his or her head above water to get involved. Forced regulatory and insurance compliance issues, especially the onerous and nonsensical EHR tasks have compounded the problem. Additionally, medical organizations that purport to represent physicians have either rolled over and died, or become ACA sycophants. Sermo rants aside, there remains a chilling inaction, which I believe is a manifestation of individual and collective FEAR among physicians. Individual fears of third party payer deselection, being labeled ‘disruptive’, or even losing hospital privileges. Collective bargaining and unionization remain a pipe dream, hampered by legal and moral concerns along with the quaint notion of professionalism, which by the way cannot exist without autonomy. And if we actually did huff and puff, doctors could be further marginalized by government decree, by opening the floodgates to IMG’s, to the point that only Ken Jennings would be able to locate those countries on a map.
ReplyDeleteSo what can be done about it? Thoreau wrote, in Civil Disobedience, of “the right to refuse allegence to, and to resist the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable”. With the ACA and its tentacle organizations (including the ABIM), we have arrived at that point. I certainly don’t have all the answers, but a personal observation of my own this weekend might point in a general direction. While making hospital rounds this weekend, I stopped in the cafeteria for a fresh cup of coffee.
Arriving at my first nursing station, I was informed that hospital staff could no longer have any beverage in their possession anywhere except in the nurses lounge. My later research indicated that this was an OSHA regulation that reared its ugly head at my hospital because of a recent JCAHO inspection. Dreamed up, no doubt, by some third decile government cretin likely to have been sipping on a latte in their work place. In response to the benign admonishment, I smiled and thanked the nurse for informing me of the new rule. And I proceeded to sit there and continue drinking my coffee. And I continued to do the same on every floor I visited that morning. One of my nurse colleague/friends in the ICU also refused to submit to this insanity as well.We were damned if we were going to throw out a perfectly good cup of coffee to submit to this nonsense. My realization was that I engaged in a minor act of civil disobedience while remaining in my comfort zone. I would propose that physicians be informally organized in such a way that we could begin to engage in low level ACA noncompliance actions, which might embolden us to confront this disasterous assault on American physicians and their patients. Alternatively, just enjoy the decline.
These photos need to be plastered at the entrance of every clinic, to show where the money goes in the "board certification" of physicians. It's totally sickening. I hope the bastards feel the heat, every physician needs to stop feeding the beast $ and continue the civil disobedience in a more powerful way.
ReplyDeleteWes,
ReplyDeleteCan we not convince our Government that ABIM leadership are Bible-believing Americans who strongly support the US Constitution?
This will NOT be tolerated.
http://video.foxnews.com/v/4563639376001/white-house-shifting-focus-to-domestic-extremists/?#sp=show-clips
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAAR8v_F2bA
L