Organized Medicine's Rut

Jim Savage, the popular motivational lecturer from Zig Ziglar's organization, defines a rut as
"A grave with the ends kicked out".

Organized medicine has failed to respond to the externally induced revolution of managed care. It has, by its inaction, overseen the fundamental reinvention of its own profession, not to mention the service that it provides to its patients.

Today, over forty percent of physicians are employees of one sort or another. The practice of fee-for-service healing arts is a dying enterprise.

The average physician-patient contact time in the US is now about six minutes.

The journal "Medicine and Health" from Faulkner and Gray has noted that the American Medical Association has toned down its opposition to pro-managed care legislation over the past two years because so many of its members belong to managed care groups. In other words, now that managed care has all but taken over, medicine's national organization has decided to represent what it has allowed its profession to turn into!

When you type the address http//www.ama.org into the Internet, you don't get the American Medical Association. Surprised?

The official AMA catalogue, once a place to buy management books, stethoscopes, and embroidered golf shirts, now offers to its constituents the following self-help books:

Managing Managed Care in the Medical Practice
Capitation: The Physician's Guide
Physician Capitation Strategies
Take Charge of Your Medical Practice Before Someone Else Does It For You
Positioning Your Practice for the Managed Care Market
Griffith's Five Minute Medical Consult
Achieving Success With Worker's Compensation
Disability Evaluation
Leaving the Bedside: The Search for a Nonclinical Medical Career
How to Negotiate a Physician's Employment Contract
The Physician in Transition: Managing the Job Interview

How else can this be interpreted other than that the practice of medicine is now so saturated in third party intervention that it no longer sells books on excellence in medical practice, that it promotes career transition among its members, promotes the practice of worker's compenstion and disability(which used to be low-end duty), and teaches its membership how to be better employees. Apparently the governing body of the profession would like to see the doctor-patient contact time reduced to five minutes. Ten years ago this used to be a profession!

It is useless and potentially illegal for AIDA to comment on what organized medicine has arguably allowed to happen to the Standard of Care and the professional well-being of its constituents. We suspect that those persons visiting our site may already have made their own observations and developed their own opinions.

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