Outside parties who trusted in them lost their shirts. While more than a dozen class action lawsuits have now been filed on their behalf, litigation is not usually the road to speedy redress. They have largely closed their eyes and declined to face down the problem. And they are the ones who could make a difference. The hobgoblin, for both doctors and hospitals, is their own inexplicable and unrealistic fear of being punished for defending their rights.
Blame rests as well in a lack of leadership from organized medical societies.
They continue to dish out nostrums whose ineffectiveness has been amply demonstrated over the years. Our anxiety heightened when Health One, a risk partnership involving 60 Long Island physicians ran out of funds. Since the Health One agreement contains no withhold clause, the League recommended against the settlement. After the NYS Attorney General made a sweetheart deal with the good people at Oxford, relieving them of paying interest on most of their overdue accounts, the funny business began in earnest. Doctors who complained were told the foul-up resulted from a computer glitch.