All of us know of stories in our hometown of beloved family doctors (private primary healthcare providers) who can no longer financially survive and are having to close their doors and join up with these mammoth healthcare conglomerates. Like the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, these conglomerates are right at the doctor’s door offering to buy up his or her practice. (No longer working for themselves, they would be working for – and paid by – Big Healthcare).
We owe it to our children and our grandchildren to reverse this trend, so that they can continue to have what we all remember having ourselves – a congenial, kindly family physician who you could always turn to whenever the children had a flu bug or any and all ailments; leaning on their wisdom when it became necessary to choose a surgeon or an oncologist.
Enclosed is my humble effort. He may not ever see my letter. I don’t have a direct line to the President, but some of you do.
Recently, I had an occasion to discuss this with my own iconic family doctor, Dr. Jill Ciccarelli. She loves her family practice, loves caring for all of her patients and has for many, many years. Her own daughter may want to follow her into the practice but Big Healthcare Conglomerates tempt the young doctors away with a lot of money. Dr. Ciccarelli put it this way in our discussion, “I don’t need a lot of money.” My next question to her was, “What can be done to help all family doctors?” her reply was as follows: “My practice has been helped by the fact that we have a lot of Mennonites in our community and they pay in cash (they don’t use insurance). I am then able to charge what I have always charged.” She went on to explain that inceasingly, however, she has to beg the insurance companies to get the same rates. She explained to me that the Big Health Conglomerates have the power to say to the insurance companies, “We have all these patients and unless you pay us such and such a price per patient, we are going to send our business to other insurance companies.” So it’s the big players who are getting the big prices, and they are doing so on the back of the little players (private primary care physicians).
It seemed to be a providential, inspirational moment when she looked me in the eye and said that. Think it out and talk it out around your Christmas holiday table.
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