In a parallel twist, other physicians are responding to market demands like marketeers. The Pacific Fertility Center promises that if, after it makes two treatment attempts, a woman doesn't have a pregnancy that lasts at least 12 weeks, Pacific will refund 90 percent of the fee that covers its medical services. I wonder if my colleagues donated their services to Pacific, or charged only a nominal fee, for surely it would otherwise be difficult to make an independent judgment about this extremely complex problem. Even ethics has a price. Public deployment of malpractice histories and money-back medical guarantees is emblematic of the new consumerist face of medicine.
Advertisable outcomes matter most.
If the malpractice suit against you arrived after your weeks of struggle to save a very low birthweight baby, it is still on your record. If a double dose of hormones is necessary to effect ovulation, and it also happens to effect a hyperstimulation syndrome in your Pacific patient, well, that's not covered. Outcomes like suits and guarantees are conspicuous, but they are not the whole story. They oversimplify the complex, and reduce process and experience to a single metric. Yet many Massachusetts callers want to know everything they can about their own doctors before they visit again.