Doctors everywhere are reeling from a systematic erosion of their once unchallenged sway over patient care. You all know the mine fields you now tread in treating patients. Even under what's left of traditional insurance plans, physician reimbursements have been squeezed to the point that doctors must rush ever more patients through their examining rooms to make ends meet. That's easier said than done, but doctors desperate enough to join a labor union should be willing to confront bean-counting HMO managers. Might I also suggest, as a member of your legislative committee, that you use every ounce of clout in the form of financial support of legislators sympathetic to doctors and to use your expertise to educate legislators so that laws may be enacted to prevent HMOs from encroaching on your territory and to hold liable HMOs which paralyze your ability to provide quality care for your patients.
Doctors have to become more and more strident in the defense of their profession.
You cannot afford to be apathetic for your own good and for the good of your patients. All was not peaches and cream when doctors ran the health care industry. Yet the new system, for all its efficiencies, is in danger of losing that measure of patient first accountability that only doctors, by training and by oath, are prepared to deliver. As much as I wish I had the solution for you, I'm just not exactly sure how to do it, the empowering, that is.