ABMS and ABU Spin on DOJ Letter

Board certification of US physicians continued on its path of deceptive and misleading propaganda following the Department of Justice's (DOJ) letter issued on behalf of a request by the National Board of Physicians and Surgeons (NBPAS) in its effort to thwart the monopoly practices of the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) and its 24 member boards. Despite that letter, the ongoing collusion between the member boards and the ABMS was particularly evident in the email circulated two days ago by the Executive Secretary of the American Board of Urology (ABU), Gerald H. Jordan, MD. The ABU's email attempts to spin the ABMS position as the same as what is stated in the DOJ letter by conflating initial lifetime ABMS Board Certification with the self-created separate time-limited Board certification market product (called Maintenance of Certification®):

The ABMS position that legislative interference which limits the use of physician certification is inappropriate is consistent with the position set forth in the DOJ letter. The ABMS and the ABU have always supported a fair and competitive marketplace for physician specialty certification and continue to do so, encouraging accurate comparison of our programs with other certification programs available.

ABMS agrees with the DOJ’s support of the right of patients and health systems to determine which certification programs best meet their expectations for providing information about high quality specialty care. The ABMS and ABU promote communications practices that allow the public to easily identify and compare the program standards used to certify that a physician has demonstrated, through training and assessment, that he or she in fact has demonstrated the knowledge, skill and judgment to practice in a medical specialty or subspecialty.

This continued deception of the ABMS and its member boards by conflating lifetime certification with time-limited "continuous" certification will not go unchallenged. I encourage all physicians adversely affect by their member boards complicit in this ruse to consider contributing to our ongoing legal challenge against the ABMS board certification monopoly.

-Wes