MOC is only the tiniest part of this but it is a great place to start. We all share similar views on this and yet I still don’t get to see any real data one way or the other. I keep hearing it is out there but cyberspace, many media sources today and government offices all have one thing in common, there is a great deal of “ghost data” that they all site but no one ever gets to see it, count it, measure it or test its methods of collection for validity.
I would love to help write a definitive “shot across the bow” but I need hard number to do that. The fact that the AMA only really represents a percentage – in the teens – of all physicians says nothing about those other persons beliefs, wants and desires other than not to be a part of that machine. It does not even say why they are not.
Has there ever been a survey of AOA members to assess their opinions on the activity of the AOA? Has there ever been a survey of physicians nationwide to assess the populations stand. I have never seen the results in writing.
The only organization that has tackled this at any level has been the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons AAPS and though I know differently than what the Google search engine yields up at first glance, the AAPS is not characterized very well by the opposition and in many cases the opposition uses some very unprofessional rhetoric to “cast doubt” upon the AAPS credibility.
We need a solid letter (a petition would be much more effective and a class action even more so) formulated in brief with some hard facts and compelling data that does not merely shoot across the bow but firmly places a full barrage broadside into the Juggernaut that set sail this October. Then we need several thousand signatures for it to carry any weight at all. Ideally it should have 1 million or more signatures because that would get headlines in a heartbeat. The larger the segment of physician signers the better but we will also need other professions to support this position and lap persons as well.
Framed in this way our support of the average persons ability to get access to healthcare, keep their physician along with many other providers they might need and not have to pay for a host of fees and services that they will never use, can be seen clearly.
We do not need to rebuild our economy by inventing new jobs that do nothing but drain the pockets of the people who work. The insurance bureaucracy we see now being promulgated is exactly this debacle, invented for the profit of a few major cop orate structures that will survive the inevitable condensation of the market and closing out of smaller businesses.
We need to fill the jobs that need to be done here at home, manufacturing, services that help others to rise above their own poverty level by working for it and by learning the skills sets that this country needs, rebuilding our bridges, highways, and public buildings along with maintaining heirloom properties, salvaging our national heritage centers, protecting our open spaces and preventing the pollution and rape of our natural resources, all of which needs to be built here at home.
The government has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they cannot organize, plan, launch or maintain a business. Add to that fact that they designed an especially complicated business by the passage of their law as it was designed it to be. There is great profit in burying fees in complexity. They did not even look at how that kind of business is already running in our own country. They paid unknown corporations to try to develop tools that already exist and have fine tuned to support what they wanted done. Rather than use the experts in existence with a success record, they paid for a complete reinvention of the wheel that was not even Beta- tested before its launch. In computer terminology, that is a suicide decision.
These things need numbers that can show the scale of the disaster we are entering into. The predictive value of what we have in public domain right now is useless because there is no reality in its foundation of if there is we do not have ready access to the numbers.
IBM, Apple, Amazon, Google, NEC, SAP and a host of other big data corporations and business intelligence companies all have long and deep track records of learning how to work, process and capture data and generate successful businesses that produce for the average person as well as make jobs, support a healthy middle class and even allow room for reasonable profits to pay management and senior management very handsomely.
Where is the real data? Data is a very different kind of natural resource, but no less a natural resource than so many others, make no mistakes about that. It is as important as water, oil, and pork bellies. All of this when left in the hands of Wall Street and the individuals in office that live to bleed the system and grow wealthier by the second on everyone else hardships, have created the monster we are now facing. It all comes from moving away from our constitution and away from our bill of rights. Corporations are not a person and never will be.
There are many in our leadership at all levels who would willingly sacrifice all our resources of any kind, for power and money (as if they were different). It is they that we have let stay in office, we that have let them run our organizations and we that have allowed this to pass, by not doing anything.
What can we DO? Present real data that WE gather and show the methods by which it was obtained. Use validated scientific measures to underscore the farce we are being made to swallow and make them face the numbers in public.
The public will take them down, if we but dare to DO what we have been trained to DO, gather information and document our observations. Process that data, draw conclusion sets and propose alternative solutions to the problems that will of necessity begin to appear in the data.
Sincerely yours in service to the professions and the patients we serve,
Charles J Smutny III, DO, FAAO
IP4PI - Independent Physicians for Patient independence 