Doctors practicing as independent contractors need to be represented in every facet of the negotiating process by professional persons equally as skilled at developing and implementing contracts as are the professional staffs retained by managed care companies and HMOs. Passage of Representative Tom Campbell's Healthcare Coalition Act would help remove the inequity that now exists between corporate interests devoted to shareholder profit and physicians who want to practice the best medicine they know how. Physicians need an antitrust exemption to reach this goal. The Healthcare Coalition Act would be a big step in that direction without empowering only unions. In fact, Representative Campbell's bill allows non-union organizations to provide the same service, medical associations, for instance, because such associations would receive the same treatment for antitrust purposes as labor organizations already recognized under the National Labor Relations Act.
Health insurers are exempt from federal antitrust regulation.
Basically unrepresented, doctors end up with mean-spirited contracts whereby they can be fired for spending too much time with patients or for doing too many diagnostic tests even when the medical indications for so doing are there. Doctors have not been able to negotiate their way out of this mess. That's where professional negotiators come in. We know how. We can do it.