Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/04/06/medical-professionals-and-heal.html
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Medical professionals and Healthcare providers are getting their pay cut while dealing with COVID-19
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It just keeps on coming, doesn’t it.
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Murica, once again showing where its true priorities are.
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Trickle-down Economics defeated once again by Trickle-up poverty
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Because you want to demoralize the very professionals that are getting every human being through this f’ing mess.
Please make it stop!
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I should put this here:
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And we’ll be seeing a 40% increase in our premiums next year to cover their reduced pay.
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You know you could just nationalize all the private hospitals and institute universal health care. It won’t be perfect but how could it get any worse?
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Thing is this isn’t just an America thing. Here in Canada many doctors are fee for service (self employed small businesses who bill per patient) and have fixed business expenses (running an office, paying assistants). How much, changes from specialty to specialty, but non emergency and elective procedures are a large part of many physicians income. Many people are taking large income hits during this pandemic.
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My wife is an ob/gyn physician. She’s been doing a lot more remote work lately. She tells me insurance will pay for video visits but not phone visits. Never mind that there’s little if any actual medical benefit to the video portion and all of her video visits so far have started 30 minutes late due to patient tech not working and IT having to get involved. Good times.
Piling on to that is the socio-economic inequity present in the system that only pays for medical care for those wealthy enough to have reliable high speed Internet and devices new enough to support the software.
My wife works for a large public safety-net hospital so you can imagine the impact of a system not compensating care for the poor on a place that cares for a lot of poor people.
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But are those medics working for hospitals or just in a private clinic?
The reduced (or non-existent) work from a private clinic is the same as from other business.
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That’s nowhere near the same thing.
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I understand it’s hard for them to strike, since people would die, but a possible labor action here could be for them to just stop filing the paperwork to bill patients until their corporate overlords come to the table.
Or, you know, these articles about this could just include the names and addresses of all executives in these companies, and the broader community could deal with the problem, while the doctors deal with the pandemic.
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Here we don’t quite have private clinics, although they do sort of run in a similar way. Physicians still bill the government at preset rates for various types of patient interaction, but referrals come through the system (patients dont just go straight to a specialist). The way most specialties work is that a group of physicians will rotate covering inpatients at the hospital. They then take patients who have been discharged and need continued care, or new patients referred from other doctors (for example family physicians) for specialty treatment at their offices. They may also run clinics that could be physically in the hospital or at their own office. Many specialties spend only a fraction of their time on inpatients at the hospital, the rest is a balance of these other activities.
So when the medical system shuffles resources to deal with the pandemic, many of these patient paths evaporate and with them the “business”.
So yes it is similar to other businesses. That was what I was attempting to convey. Doctors are also small businesses and seeing a big hit during the pandemic.
One concern around this is that these potential patients aren’t just gone. They are avoiding treatment and potentially getting sicker.
Granted, the coronavirus stimulus bill did provide $100 for hospitals and healthcare providers, but it seems that none of that is trickling down to the people on the front lines keeping us alive.
The fodder for yet another question that Trump and his creatures will tap dance around or respond to with “We’re looking at that.”
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My main response was to the comments implying that it is a problem specific to American healthcare. (I’ll spare you my many many critiques of American healthcare). Many people are taking hits through various mechanisms.
Even if they how isn’t the same the end effect is that many in healthcare are taking hits to their income.
My wife has similar challenges. Trying to support her low income, homeless, and elderly patients with video calls is problematic to say the least. Here in BC they thankfully support payment for phone calls, but even phone acess can be a barrier for some.
Thankfully the magnitude of the problem is far lower than in a private system, but inequality can still rears its ugly head under these circumstances.
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