Monday, April 6, 2015

I Am Not the Only One Who Believe This

Twenty five years ago the medical insurance industry was plotting how to take over the Medical Industry in America. They wanted to make every physician a participating doctor and  to be able to totally control what physicians were paid. One of the first things the insurance industry did in their scheme to control medicine was to stop referring to physicians as 'doctors' and started to refer to them as HEATH CARE PROVIDERS. Why? Because you pay a health care provider less than you pay a doctor. When insurance companies wanted to pay even less to doctors, they then started to refer to physicians in their ads on TV to 'PRESCRIBERS'  again because a 'prescriber of medicines' can be paid less than a doctor and patients can now feel free to belittle their 'prescriber' which is something that they would never do to their doctor.

If you don't think that this was part of the 'big plan' of the Medical Insurance Industry and Big Pharm...You are fooling yourself.
At least the physician who wrote this article fully understands the message of today's insurance companies. Remember how I recently told you that a large medical office associated with a local hospital no longer referred to us as 'PATIENTS' but now calls us 'CUSTOMERS?'  WHY? 
Because you treat a 'PATIENT' with dignity and respect and a person of value where a 'CUSTOMER' is merely someone that you want to sell something to.
This is shameful!!!!
Please read what this PHYSICIAN says even though you have already heard it before from me.

(This letter to the editor appeared in today's edition of The New York Times)

The Language of Medicine

To the Editor: 
“Facing Early Death, on Their Terms” (front page, March 29), about adolescents having a say in their own end-of-life planning, is poignant and powerful. There is arguably nothing more intimate and profound than how we are cared for and how we care for others in the hours of our mortal need.
So when you repeatedly use the term “provider” to describe those professionals in the caring arts — and yes, on our best days, the healing arts — it becomes an eloquently sad commentary on the state of medical care.
Language is so powerful that it not only reflects what and how we think of things, but it also directs what and how we think of things. The term “provider” for clinical caregivers, like the term “client” for patients, depersonalizes and commodifies that which is neither and so very much more.
The more we use these commercial terms to refer to intimate and personal care, the more that care becomes commercial and impersonal. Such is the power of language.
BARRY L. FARKAS
McKeesport, Pa.
The writer is a geriatrician and family physician.
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