Opinion
Lawmakers should consider toll insurers take on the quality of care
LETTER — Posted May 28, 2007
Regarding "Lawmakers challenge who sits on medical boards" (Article, April 23/30): While lawmakers consider who sits on state medical boards, lawmakers also should look at the destructive intrusion into medical care exerted by the insurance companies. Medicine is not a profession that can be made more efficient easily.
Medicine deals with people. People express themselves differently, slowly sometimes, cryptically sometimes. Doctors need time to spend with patients. Lawmakers should consider this when they see how the time that doctors are able to spend with patients has been degraded. Nurses now take blood pressures, other vital signs, and the history or chief complaint. The physician has little time to spend with the patient, for mutual acquaintanceship, for truly understanding a patient's situation. Technology is overutilized, taking the place of a personal and special doctor-patient relationship.
The insurance companies have taken away our time and our professional conduct. They take money, as profit, out of the medical care system, thus shortchanging patients. Even the most conscientious of doctors needs to make a living, needs to pay his staff, needs to cover his bills. It is time both the medical profession and state lawmakers diminish the power of insurance companies, demand that they become more efficient and less greedy, and expose the serious erosion of the quality of the practice of medicine due to this abuse by business.
Lynn E. Miller, MD, Brewster, N.Y.
Note: This item originally appeared at http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2007/05/28/edlt0528.htm.
