fleeing the Medical Field

Recomendado pela AMICOR Maria Inês Reinert Azambuja

Doctors are fleeing the medical field. Here's why.

The first day I started work as an attending physician in primary care medicine, I knew I had made a terrible mistake. This was not the heroic, selfless, service-oriented job or the romantic life “as seen on TV” I had imagined.

Riddled with heavy school debt, despite my best efforts to join debt relief programs, I had a frustrating job with nothing but red tape and hurdles to jump over. And I felt stuck. I was now $200K+ in the hole for this, so I felt financially committed.

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In my mind, I know there are always options, but after such a huge investment, it would feel like an abandonment of my younger self if I were to walk away from medicine now, a betrayal of my wasted youth.

So here I am, five years in, still contemplating whether I should stay or go.

In medical school, it is taught the “gold standard” of care, the medicine regimen we should strive toward to best help our patients. However, this is rarely attainable. There are many reasons for this: patient preference or personal beliefs, financial or other barriers to care, but often it simply isn’t covered by insurance.

It’s no wonder that morbidity and mortality rates are so much higher in this country than comparable developed countries.

There is little time for the practice of medicine — there’s only paperwork and red tape.

HMOs are ruining medicine.

A specific HMO — I will not identify it here, but its name has some relation to the color of the sky and a network — is the worst.

If you are a patient who needs a procedure, test, or referral, your primary care doctor’s office has to authorize everything. This means, even though that doctor ordered the test, once you schedule the procedure, you must call that doctor’s office back (yes, the one who ordered it), and they must then go through the process on the network website to approve the procedure.

Once it is approved, you can then go ahead, but if the insurance company does not think that this procedure is warranted, even with your doctor’s recommendation, it will be denied, and the process starts from square one.

This is such a heavy burden on doctors’ offices that many are contemplating dropping this network to alleviate the burde