Doctors Losing Battle Against Giant Insurers

Few complain that doctors make too much money.

Virtually everyone recognizes that given the huge investment of time, money, energy, and intellect that goes into acquiring a medical diploma and the prerequisite experience to practice medicine, doctors earn their pay.

Theirs is an extremely grueling and harrowing call to duty that not many of us are willing to accept. And so down through the years, doctors have earned our esteem and admiration.

But now doctors are losing our confidence.

They are breaching our trust by giving up their independence.

They are selling out to insurance companies whose sole justification for existence is to make a profit from pain and suffering.

More and more, the doctors are going to work for giant impersonal corporations owned by thousands of faceless shareholders. They are handing over to boards of directors and executives with eyes only for bottom lines and bonuses vital decisions on who gets what measure of care when.

“Increasingly the focus of medical care is to reduce costs, to do only the minimum possible for patients, to wring money out of the system for a new set of corporate providers,” writes Chicago Tribune columnist Joan Beck.

Instead of practicing quality care, doctors practice pinching pennies. And they are scared, angry, and ashamed.

There are two main reasons for all this:

Explosive growth of managed care as one answer to the cost control debate driving health care reform.

And a life-or-death struggle between private practitioners and insurance giants.

The battle for control has raged behind the scenes as comprehensive health care reform took center stage nationally and in the states of this region.

It is a contest which a handful of giants are winning by outspending everyone else to buy up America’s health care systems.

“The whole idea of a corporate takeover is expressed in the explosive growth of managed care systems or socalled health maintenance organizations (HMOs),” says state Sen. John Moyer.

“Insurance companies are rushing around with billions of dollars buying up doctors and hospitals and taking over control of the whole practice of medicine,” declares the physician/ lawmaker from Spokane.

State Health Services Commissioner Don Brennan recently told The Spokesman-Review, “What we increasingly have is corporate and insurance-run medicine.

“You have fee schedules set by insurance companies that sign up the doctors they choose to do business with. They put increasingly onerous controls on the practice, which both doctors and patients hate.”

Recognizing this, House Speaker Newt Gingrich has called for an unprecedented congressional investigation of the managed care industry.

Doctors still able to evade the spreading tenacles of for-profit insurance giants applaude the move by Gingrich to focus public attention on their losing battle.

Like their patients, doctors, too, want qualified and compassionate professionals to make vital patient-care decisions - not an insurance clerk in Tuscaloosa.

Relating the industrialization of American medicine to the newly enacted rewrite of this state’s 1993 health care reform act by Washington lawmakers, Moyer said, “These two developments go together.

“On one side, there are people pulling together huge collections of lives and lobbying for managed care systems,” said the physician/legislator. “And on the other side, some doctors are getting together to set up their own health care companies in hopes of preserving traditional private practices.

“Underlying these developments are the issues of accessibility and affordability,” he said.

“Even though the (2-year-old health care reform) act hasn’t been implemented yet,” said Moyer, “the system has responded with improvements in access and costs and even reductions in premiums.”

And will these improvements continue?

“If we get to a balance of private care and managed care,” Moyer said, “the answer is, yes. But if we lose quality, we lose out.”

xxxx