Appeal Filed in Physicians' Ongoing Lawsuit Against ABIM

"ABIM has created a lucrative new revenue source by forcing internists to buy MOC. The new MOC revenue has not been used in the interests of the internist community, but to serve the economic interests of ABIM management, including overly generous compensation, ABIM’s lavish pension plan, and purchase of a $2.3 million condominium used by ABIM management."

- From the Brief of Plaintiffs-Appellants filed yesterday

It was almost six years ago the story of ABIM's $2.3 million condominium was told. It was a tale of corruption, greed, and the laundering of physician testing fees to create the ABIM Foundation using the smokescreen of repeated physician testing called Maintenance of Certification (MOC®) as a mark of a physician's "professionalism." Working physicians, however, knew better. They felt first-hand the financial and emotional toll this ever-changing program caused. MOC® was always about the money, but most physicians were too afraid to speak up lest they lose their jobs. Today MOC® remains a story of adhesion contracts to force payments to the numerous conflicted interests of the medical publishing, credentialing, device, pharmaceutical, and hospital supply line industries in exchange for the physician data it generates.

The irony of Richard Baron, MD, President and CEO of the ABIM and ABIM Foundation discussing disinformation on Fox News from the comfort of his own home is lost on few US physicians. So is the irony that the insurance industry is poised to make a windfall on the unaffordable insurance law they helped author.

These conflicts have come at a very stiff price for many United States physicians, nurses, and medical technicians who toil on the front lines without sufficient personal protective equipment (PPE) today. MOC® and the data entry it required fed Group Purchase Organizations and the insurance industry the data they needed to squeeze the suppliers of materials and the suppliers of care. As Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD, DPhil explained in his recent New Yorker article, its all a game of assuring a sizable profit margins for these the little-known supply line organizations who receive kickbacks in return for their efforts:

“Hospitals typically don’t order masks as individual buyers,” he told me. He spoke deliberately, with the slightest Texan drawl. Instead, they negotiate contracts as members of a Group Purchasing Organization—representing hundreds or thousands of hospitals—and, as Bowen explained, the G.P.O. always “chooses the cheapest bid.”

Yesterday the Brief of Plaintiffs-Appellants was filed in the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals against the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) regarding MOC®. In that Brief, the physician plaintiffs argue that the earlier District Court erred in dismissing (1) the anti-trust tying claims with prejudice, (2) the monopolization claims, (3) the racketeering claims, and (4) the unjust enrichment claims made by the plaintiffs concerning MOC. The details of the clearly-written 78-page brief argue why.

As health care workers struggle to cope with our current US supply line shortcomings, the US physician MOC® story takes on new meaning. Now more than ever, US physicians deserve their day in court concerning the exploitation they have endured because of MOC®.

If this case finally proceeds to discovery, we might just find the real truth about MOC® after all.

-Wes

P.S.: Working physicians are encouraged to contribute the the GoFundMe page supporting the physician plaintiffs in this ongoing case.