MD Whistleblower

Whistleblower Grand Rounds Submissions! Whistleblower will be hosting Grand Rounds on February 23rd.  All submissions are welcome. Here are some tips to maximize your chances of acceptance, which will guarantee that your blog posting will receive worldwide exposure. Send your posts to MKirschMD@gmail.com Write Grand Rounds in the subject line. Include the URL of the post in the email message. If you do not receive an email confirmation, then I did not receive it. Remember, brevity is the soul of wit.  If you are torn between 2 of your masterpieces, please send me the shorter one. Please include a sentence in the email expressing the point of your post.  This is your opportunity to  wield your razor sharp wit. DEADLINE for submission is Sunday, February 21st at noon.  Earlier submissions are preferred. Please send your stuff at your earliest convenience. In other words, now is not too soon. Now, on to this week's Whistleblower. How many times have we all been issued th

As detailed in Part I , FFS or Salaried Medicine, I was a salaried gastroenterologist for 10 years. I resigned, but not in search of the fee-for-service (FFS) cornucopia. The multispecialty group (MSG) that employed me had been purchased by one of Cleveland's medical behemoths a few years before I signed on. After happily practicing gastroenterology (GI) for several years, the corporate owner emerged from the background and forcefully exercised its ownership rights. The business edicts they issued conflicted with our professional mission to advocate and care for live human patients. For example, the community hospital that we had served for half a century was now verboten. This meant that our elderly patients who lived near this hospital, and had been treated there for their whole lives, now had to be hospitalized downtown, if they wanted us to be their physicians. You get the idea. While I acknowledge that these decisions promoted the corporation’s health, they jeopardized our p

I am qualified to opine on physician compensation formulas, because I’ve spent hard time on both sides of the payment seesaw. For the first 10 years of my career, I was on salary. We were told, however, that we could earn productivity ‘bonuses’, but these rewards were trivial. An ‘employee of the month’ parking spot near the entrance would have been worth more, especially during the frigid Cleveland winters. After 10 years, I moved over to the dark side , where I was paid for each service I provided. In Part I this week, I present pros and cons of salaried medicine. I suspect that I've overlooked some of the advantages and drawbacks of paycheck medicine, so  I hope that readers will correct my errors and omissions. Good Stuff About Paying Gastroenterologists a Salary Lowers health care costs by underpaying specialty physicians Eliminates financial conflicts of interests. The colonoscope is not a capitalist tool. Reduces unnecessary medical procedures as gastro docs would rathe

One day a hare saw a tortoise walking slowly along and began to laugh and mock him. The aftershocks from the political earthquake that just occurred in Massachusetts will extend to the first Tuesday this November. Democrats are dazed and reeling from what should have been their easiest electoral victory in the nation. Martha Coakley, their candidate, was 30 points ahead in the race only weeks ago. Look up the word complacency in the dictionary and you may see her photograph alongside the definition. [For younger Whistleblower readers, a dictionary is a large volume that fossilized folks like myself still consult for word definitions and correct spellings.] The hare challenged the tortoise to a race and the tortoise accepted. They agreed on a route and started off the race. After Coakley prevailed in the primary election by 19 points on December 8 th , she vanished. I guess she felt entitled to a Senate seat that Democrats controlled for nearly 6 decades. While she was AWOL, Scott

Could this man increase organ donation? Photo Credit Choose the best answer. To stimulate organ donation, we should provide organ donors with: Cold, hard cash Upgrades to business class on any flight within the continental United States for 1 year College tuition discounts for up to 3 children Income tax relief First row Bruce Springsteen concert tickets A certificate of appreciation There is a reason that we don’t ask families of kidnapped victims what our policy should be with regard to hostage negotiations. Any family in this situation, including mine, would favor paying the ransom. While this would serve an individual family’s interest, it would conflict with the public’s interest as it would encourage more kidnappings. Thus, the greater good would be compromised. Similarly, families seeking an organ for a loved one are not the proper source of policy recommendations for organ procurement. Understandably, they want an organ at any cost. Certainly, if my child ne

American Red Cross Doctors Without Borders Mercy Corps Photo Credit

Whistleblower readers know my views on the medical liability system. I have devoted more posts to tort reform than to any other issue. Readers, whose blood pressures are adequately controlled, are invited to review those posts on this blog under the Legal Quality category. (I was tempted to name the category Legal Abuse, but wanted to keep the category names consistent.) I review many legal blogs, most of which are ideological rants against physicians that express steadfast fidelity to the current system. If the medical community were as united and focused as the trial lawyers are, our future would be more sanguine. Gerald Oginsky is a plaintiff’s attorney who sues physicians. I have never met him and he has never sued me. Gerry left a comment on one of my Legal Quality posts, which demonstrated fairness and reasonableness. This lured me to his blog, where these same two qualities are evident. For this week’s Whistleblower, I am sharing a recent posting from Gerry’s blog . While