Thursday, January 6, 2011

Questions Defying Answers

There are some things in life that bother me a lot when I cannot understand.  When laws and regulations are counterproductive and unjust, where to go?
 
  • I cannot understand why regulators and lawyers in the US have put in place a peer review process that is very clearly lacking in the equivalent of an impartial jury. 
  • Why competitiors and those who may have an interest in eliminating a physician are given so much unbalanced power and have the final word, in effect?
  • Why is the process so highly judicial that a physician may be targeted but have no financial means to protect himself/herself and, therefore, easily removed from practice?
  • I cannot understand why such a process, that is therefore open to corruption, is left untouched
  • I cannot understand why the American Medical Association, the American College of Surgeons, etc, etc, have been so soft in this while seeing their own members being victimized
  • I cannot understand why the outcome of an inherently corrupt and unfair process has to be reported to the National Practitioners Data Bank as if it were a fair outcome?  Isn't that defaming by definition, even though the goal was to protect patients?
  • I cannot understand why a physician has less rights in defending her/his career than a criminal does in defending himself/herself
  • I cannot understand why there is absolutely no mandate that an educational peer review process exist, while punitive panels are set up to sentence to death good physicians' careers.
 
There is something wrong with this picture.  Physicians in the US are under the mercy of the politics and the whims and conscience of their colleagues.  Patients are not safer in such an environment.  Since the results of those execution tribunals (peer review committees) are so devastating, the select favorites will never be subjected to them, while the solo, the foreign graduate, the newcomer, the young (essentially the vulnerable), will more likely be the target.  And the victim may even be the better doctor than the ones who are judging.  Too bad that physicians do not have representation that stands strong on issues like those.  The American medical Association is just too soft on that issue.