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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We hold doctors on such high pedestals in this country.  My best friend is chief surgeon, and the stories he tells about his docs are truly shocking.  He says it is extremely common to have to reprimand his docs who try to get info on their patients' insurance first to see if they'll get a good payment from them.  If they have something crappy like medicaid or some other terrible insurance, my friend says docs will initially diagnose a patient with something else that is very closely related to what they know the person has. That way they can avoid having to do surgery on the patient and pass the buck to someone else later who'll get stuck with the patient with crappy insurance.  My friend has to routinely make sure that when he is on duty that his docs treat everyone who comes in like they have the same exact insurance so these shenanigans don't go on, but the point here is that how often do things like this go on elsewhere where they don't have chiefs who do ethical jobs who look the other way.  How many scummy docs are out there looking to soak as much money as they can out of the system and refuse their services for someone who needs it if they know that the patient's insurance will pay lower rates. [/quote]
Doctors are scummy especially when it comes to money. I had a family member dying of pancreatic cancer and had been signed into hospice. She had been in the hospital for 3 weeks at this point. Once you’re signed into hospice the hospital medical treatment stops and you are just made comfortable until you die. She had great insurance and her bill was already topping 250k so everything was on the insurance company at this point. I watched a cavalcade of various doctors come in and start doing exams while she was waiting to be transported to the hospice facility. You better believe they billed for these services even though she had been placed under hospice care at that point and they had no right or reason to examine her. It was like they knew it would be guaranteed money. Disgusting. [/quote]

I’m a doctor. I’m sorry that you had this experience. I had a terrible experience with end of life care for one of my parents, too, which was further complicated by the pandemic. It is extremely stressful.

There might be, however, confusion about physician billing in the hospital. I am at a university hospital and am paid a salary. I do not get paid for seeing an individual patient. I also do not know what insurance the patient has nor have I ever checked. So, I’m not sure why the doctors were in seeing your relative, but at least at a big teaching hospital we aren’t paid for individual patient visits. I am just required to take care of the patients who are there during the time-frame that I am on service, and it doesn’t impact my salary.

I know that some doctors are jerks, but it’s been rough for us since the pandemic. It was stressful going in during the spring of 2020, and I was terrified that I would bring COVID home and kill my family.  We never got to WFH, which was really hard when the kids were home from school for months. A lot of my co-workers, nurses, etc have quit or retired since the pandemic, and we are now chronically short staffed. Our bonuses were cut and our salaries frozen even though we were working more under crazy conditions. And I make about 200K/year (though I’m in the Baltimore area), which is embarrassingly low according to most posters on this board.

A lot of us think that the “medical industrial complex” is in the process of imploding. My hospital-based colleagues think we need a single-payer system - the current insurance company mess is untenable. But the doctors have continued to show up in person through the pandemic (unlike those who get to WFH), and the last 2.5 years have been a pretty bad trip.  Which is not to say that we are altruistic - maybe just stupid or stubborn or scared of change? Honestly, I feel really stupid for not jumping to biotech/pharma like a lot of my former colleagues. But then I wonder who will take care of people if we all get fed up leave. And what was the point of all that training? I’m good at my job - I should use my skills. It’s just been a bad 2.5 years for doctors, nurses, laboratory workers, and other staff. We are all burned out.[/quote]

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