There is no evidence that recertification makes better doctors. All evidence points to a process that merely enriches the boards that impose their wills upon us.Legal work takes money. That money is necessary to get past the numerous Motions to Dismiss attempting to throw out the numerous lawsuits recently filed against the ABMS member boards in order to proceed to discovery.
I was one of the first classes to not be "grandfathered". Those who came before me said "Everyone needs to recertify, except us, we're special." But don't worry, they said, it'll just be an open-book, take-home exam every 10 years.
Except then then changed it to a proctored test that I have to drive 2 hours to, taking a full day off work, leaving the night before, and paying an exorbitant amount to be suspected of being a criminal as I show 2 forms of ID, and sign multiple documents stating I am who I say I am, and am video taped while taking the test, and can only use the bathroom during this time with permission.
But that s all! That said. Except it wasn't. We also need you to do a few CMEs. Just a few. Ok 100, alright 200. Better make that 300.
But that's it! Nothing else. Except for these self-assessment exams. You just need to do one. Ok 2. Alright fine, 4. But that's it!
Oh, except for this self-improvement project. Yeah, we need you, over several months, to do an experiment on your patients. No IRB oversight needed. Just pick something, make a change and tell us how much better your clinic is for doing this, ok?
But that's it! Nothing else!
Oh, except the money. Pay each year or we list you as "not current" on your MoC. Pay us, pay us again, and keep on paying us. Lots and lots of money to keep up. And we promise not to add anything else. PROMISE! (fingers crossed behind back).
Have you done your part to help?
-Wes
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MOC - Another Bad Sick Game / Pathetic Reality Show that Nobody Wants
What's this game called? MOC® Catch and Release? A game in which patients and physicians lose all rights.
The ABMS medical specialty boards used to offer a certification for life. You got hooked and tagged, but you swam 'free' with personalized CME until you retired. Now the ABMS catches us -- the same dumb fish (over and over) year after year. Cutting off OUR heads, scraping out OUR guts and squeezing out OUR life blood. In this scenario patients suffer the same monotonous trickle-down fate.
MOC truly is a bad video game/sick reality TV show where you're baited, hooked, banged on the head and tossed in the MOC frying pan every year. But in this tragic, pointless game of MOC there is nothing to win. Reality is always dim and the pain has the spotlight. In fact MOC is forced down our gullets against our will. Reinforced by the industries the ABMS serves and also dupes.
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What gets me is that these heinous exploiters of the common good expect that we will just keep paying and playing this horrific game and spawning anew for them every year. For what? Just for their sick monopolistic self-dealing amusement and to keep paying their obscene executive pay checks! Buying their condos with chauffeurs, golden fish ponds, first class travel, padded payouts from piggy bank "research" foundations.
I'm sick of the conflicts of interest, the political shenanigans paid with OUR MOC money, and ties to the industry which pays the medical board executives for their positions of power. Look at all the wall Street investments on the tax filings, the luxury vacations and offshore hedge fund accounts with golden parachutes attached. The endless tax dodging.
We're sick of this. Burned out! Tested to death, fried in the MOC pan! No more MOC! No more golden parachutes for cheaters who sell out their colleagues! It's a sick game of self-dealing monopoly and needs to end now!
The ABMS is consumed with financial pathos. Executives at the 24 medical specialty boards (and Windy City umbrella) busy themselves creating and orchestrating complex confabulations to grow their empire of greed and feed their lust for political power. "They" consistently hire folks with cartel-like instinct and that strange alleged (anti-social) gene for telling pathological mistruths.
The kinds of misdeeds that everyone keeps talking about in the news elsewhere, but doesn't seem to draw the same kind of negative attention by the pundits and investigative journalists. For some reason they seem to get a free pass from the "free press" at the ABMS!
Or any investigation/reporter who get the whiff of corruption seems to get shut down somehow.
Hypocrisy and Propaganda in Action
A trust challenge from a money hungry trade association (ABIM/ABIMF) that has virtually lost all trust? Really?
https://abimfoundation.org/pressrelease/abim-foundation-launches-trust-practice-challenge
And the winners are:
https://abimfoundation.org/what-we-do/rebuilding-trust-in-health-care/trust-practice-challenge
But . . .
The winners/participants appear to have been setup in advance. Perhaps coaxed to "take the trust challenge". The winners were all ABMS MOC Multi-specialty Portfolio Partners (or ed. financial partners in International Programs associated with the ABMS/ACGME/ABIM)
https://mocportfolioprogram.org/about-us/portfolio-program-sponsors/
Healthcare is so fucked in this country, a bunch of rich Dr's complaining about $200/month in fees. Not much sympathy will be found.
Aaaah, the ABIM representative finally speaks. We have been expecting you and your wilfully ignorant comment does not disappoint. As you are all too aware, the cost is a fraction of the harm caused by your monopolistic ABMS garbage.
Patient and physician rights/relationship are the cornerstone of healthcare. MOC is a predatory corporate invention sitting on that keystone destroying physicians and patients rights/autonomous relationship. The "quality assurance" / "educational testing cartel" is limiting access to doctors and aiding in the corporate/political agenda to ration healthcare. As a result (long story made short) physicians have been rendered politically impotent, a muted voice. A deficit of time and a surfeit of doctors experiencing burn-out have created a severe problem. All of this ABMS MOCery of forcing "MOC's nouveau snake oil" down the throats of physicians has come at the expense of doctors. MOC is paid for by doctors, insouciant at first, now with greater insight and resistance. Patients pay with less access to health. MOC is a hinge pin for a system of educational corruption and in fact is a corporate Ponzi scheme. Corporate medicine and tech have gained, put themselves in the driver's seat -- not the patient and their physician. A corporate mono-culture has been created with only a few logos and owners left standing controlling the medical industrial complex. Data-driven tech companies have sprouted with new sources of earnings and on and on. Patients, physicians and their data are big targets and sources of profit. Corporations/insurers/hospitals/group practices have consolidated/merged and turned into jolly greenback-seeking giants. They are reaping the domestic and global profits, not "rich internal medicine/primary care doctors" who often don't even get cost of living adjustments from their employers.). Who are the ones in charge of the flow of healthcare and the dissemination of information today and why? In other words who is controlling the corporate show. Physicians are low on the totem pole as they are being controlled/manipulated more and more. Massive increases in healthcare profits for the corporate elites. Control of labor with less corporate risk (less capital expenditure on the patient) and the the resultant limited services/medical supplies/medications/treatments is the reality on the ground and what we are seeing. Many can't get into see doctors, but instead are routed to low level providers or What do we want as patients? (We are all patients.) What do we want as a society? What is our responsibility if we see a severe decline. Where are the basics that we thought we could take for granted. Access to a physician when there are fewer and fewer available. (Especially in the neglected zones of rural America.) Images and pictures/corporate propaganda fill our reality with what we frustratingly know is lacking.
Callous remarks only tell us of the ignorance that is out there about the causes of our decline as a civilization. We all need to wake up and support each other and reign in those who have gotten out of control with their greed and desire for control.
Sounds like an ABIM hack/possibly an ACP governor to me. (Or one of their proxies.) Probably thought this popular Google healthcare blog would be less traceable.
I believe the operational phrase for the demise of healthcare, then, does not start with and "f" but with an "m". Healtcare is so "MOCked" in this country.
Rich, Rich Baron is that you? It is Rich or another ABMS troll who claimed that we many physicians who have fallen victim to the ABMS MOC scam are "..a bunch of rich Dr's complaining about $200/month in fees." What revealing psychology. No attempt to justify the MOC/initial certification scam is made because the truth is that none exists. Thus the fraudster when caught by the scruff of his neck whines his default justification that his "rich" victims could afford the theft and the proceeds are instead stolen "fees." The only "sympathy" will be in the hands of the jurors to bestow in the multiplying class action lawsuits against the ABMS. One of the reasons that "Healthcare is so f$cked in this country" is the enormous magnitude of the ABMS fraud, not the relative and hard-earned affluence of its victims.
To the above braying jackass who wrote
"Healthcare is so fucked in this country, a bunch of rich Dr's complaining about $200/month in fees. Not much sympathy will be found."
I would GLADLY pay 200.00 a month if the ABIM would LEAVE ME ALONE. the anonymous ABIM shills desperately try to portray doctors who oppose MOC as greedy and venal, when the ABIM is the distilled essence of venality! The ABIM DINA (doctors in name only) inventors of MOC (Cassell, Nora, Chaudry) who profit massively off MOC don't even participate in MOC, because they know how bullshit their certification truly is. Now there is a bunch of "rich doctors" you can condemn!
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