Opinions expressed in the article below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Healthcare Michigan, its publisher or staff.
By ALLAN DOBZYNIAK, MD
The motives driving the battle to control healthcare are suspect. Many physicians—likely the majority—do not buy into the public deception that has been attributed to them. In fact, a small contingent of progressive, “woke” physicians amplify this deception.
Most doctors are too busy with their own lives, families and professions to get involved with politics and leftist, “politically correct” healthcare thinking. They have become disinterested in the deteriorating professional organizations charged with guiding them through healthcare’s questionable evolution.
Physicians who try to participate in hospital decision-making—with few exceptions—are, in a single word: “excluded.” Unfortunately, they have conceded turf to physicians who can take the time and to hospital management bureaucracies operating in self-preservation mode. Often those who can take the time are not necessarily the most talented people, but are those with a political agenda dedicated to changing traditional medical professional objectives.
However, all is not lost if our clinicians understand the stakes and begin to redirect the profession back to patient care in ways that underscore trust and confidence in physicians and reinvigorate physician morale. Taxpayers, parents, donors, communities—all who are or will be patients—can have a significant impact if they could become informed. They need to become aware of what is really going on in a healthcare system increasingly influenced by nefarious motives. If they do not like what they see, this mess can begin change that is positive for patients and the besieged medical profession.
In the final tally, it is physicians who oversee this greatest of institutions: the profession of medicine. Only if physicians step up to the challenge will you and I receive care based on what is best for us. The window for redirection of the system is closing—it may already have. Physicians, patients and the profession will be the casualty with power and money the winners. If they cave in to short-term political pressures, they will have participated in the destruction of what they have inherited.