WELCOME TO THE MEDICALTUESDAY NETWORK
Physician, Business, Professional and Information Technology Communities Networking to Restore Accountability in HealthCare & Medical Practice
MedicalTuesday Introduction, 2002
When I was the editor of Sacramento Medicine, I wrote monthly editorials
as well as an anecdotal column called Hippocrates and His Kin, book
reviews on medical topics, and book reviews on any subject written by
physicians or nurses. During this time, I had the opportunity to network
with the journal editors of other county medical societies. There were
a number of insightful articles written about the problems confronting
health care which the physician authors determined could not be solved
by the medical profession alone–solutions they maintained would require
networking with the business and professional communities.
I also spent two years
on the editorial board of California Physician, my assumption being
that I would write similar articles for the state journal. However,
I was immediately informed that the employed staff preferred to write
the articles since it was less time consuming than making articles written
by doctors "correct." I was also asked by the staff at Sacramento
Medicine to cease writing articles on behalf of doctors working in a
free market environment, the contention being that I should assist them
in accepting the reality that Managed Care is here to stay.
Thus, it became apparent
that I would need a different venue to network with physicians. About
this time, one of my daughters (both have MBAs and do business networking)
who lives in London, and works in the Venture Capital arena, began missing
the dynamic interchange of silicon valley. It compelled her to develop
a business email list of 850 on her laptop. Thereafter, she partnered
with three associates to develop this network into 80,000 email addresses
in 80 cities, 40 countries, on 5 continents. I was impressed that she
could write a memo and, with a mouse click, send that business letter
to 80,000 business associates.
Why MedicalTuesday?
In the past, our medical societies met on Tuesday evenings which then
became known as "Medical Tuesdays." Since Monday and Friday
are busy days in any practice, that precludes evening meetings on those
days. Many doctors take a half day off on Wednesdays or Thursdays in
order to compensate for working the nights and weekends required to
cover their practice. Hence, that left Tuesdays for colleagueal and
professional meetings. In our community, the Medical Society met on
the third Tuesday of each month. Huge turn-outs occurred, filling
the largest meeting room at the convention center, to discuss the professional
and practice issues of the day. The Internal Medicine Society met on
the fourth Tuesdays to discuss their unique problems; the family physicians,
surgeons, pediatricians and obstetric-gynecologists also met on Tuesdays.
As Managed Care became
more assertive in telling doctors how to practice, the agenda at the
medical meetings changed and attendance dropped. Meetings were reduced
from monthly to quarterly. Patterns were broken. Doctors could no longer
rely on meeting times or the month meetings were scheduled. Gradually,
the professional meeting began to disappear. It was counter-productive
to the interests of Managed Care for doctors to assemble and discuss
issues since it increased resistance to compliance. On two occasions
in the past two years, the medical society, in a community of more than
3,000 physicians, had less than 30 attendees (1%). Effective physician
leadership disappeared. The once noble profession was gradually being
de-professionalized.
Top down health care reform
was not materializing. There were too many conflicting interests, not
only among the administrative controllers, but also in a hostile Congress,
which, in concert with our own organizations, began to restrict and
suffocate our profession. It became apparent that another approach was
required. More of our colleagues, such as Bob Cihac, MD, in his electronic
column, began contending that health care reform had to begin at the
grass roots level. We have the mechanism to directly reach unlimited
members of our profession, as well as the entire business/professional
community, without going through the rose-colored media.
MedicalTuesday E-Letter
We began writing
a biweekly MedicalTuesday Electronic Newsletter in April, 2002. We sent
it to those in our physician address book who we believed would still
be interested in returning their medical practice to the Medical MarketPlace.
The list expanded and essentially doubled every month. It went to Canada
and then overseas to the UK, Europe, Asia, S Africa and Australia. Some
of the most earnest responses were from physicians as well as the business
and professional communities in countries where socialized medicine
was ready to implode. Long emails encouraged us to continue our efforts
world wide in order to facilitate the return of private medical care
which would be more economical than government-controlled care. Privatization
was being tried in such bastions of socialized medicine as England and
Sweden. The United States remains the only country which still has a
relatively complete infrastructure of private care. We must guard this
before it’s too late; otherwise, it will become like our senior care.
For instance, when Medicare started in 1966, my father had excellent
Blue Cross and Blue Shield policies. A few years after the advent of
Medicare, he gave up his Blue Cross and Blue Shield and had only Medicare.
Now that Medicare in ready to implode under the burden of excess costs
and utilization brought on by being essentially free, our poor senior
citizens will be left without an effective system of private care. We
must preserve the infrastructure for the majority of our citizens before
it suffers a similar fate.
The father of government social insurance, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck,
observed how Napoleon III used state pensions to buy support for his
regime when he was Ambassador to Paris in 1861. "I have lived in
France long enough to know that the faithfulness of most of the French
to their government... is largely connected with the fact that most
of the French receive a state pension." According to Brink Lindsey’s
article in the journal Reason, the appeal of social insurance
for Bismarck was that it bred dependence on, and consequently allegiance
to, the state. Social insurance, whether social security, Medicare,
or single-payer medicine, was thus born of a contemptuous disregard
for liberal principles: What
mattered was not the well-being of the patient or workers, but the well-being
of the state.
MedicalTuesday Restored
Welcome to the MedicalTuesday network. MedicalTuesday
has an e-mail newsletter that is sent out on Tuesdays that is global in
its outlook as it compares the health care of the United States with
the world health community. We have demonstrated that quality as well
as access deteriorated in countries with national health plans.
The ideal and workable HealthPlan for the USA is evolving from
these MedicalTuesday electronic gatherings.
Your comments and feedback are greatly appreciated.
Del Meyer
Del Meyer, MD, CEO & Founder
DelMeyer@MedicalTuesday.net
