National Physicians Alliance

[Nico47]

Hello everyone. 🙂

I attended a National Physicians Alliance meeting last week and left VERY impressed. Now I'm starting this thread to share what I found.

The NPA organization was created in response to the deteriorating patient-physician relationship, the fact that we leave much of the decision-making about our salaries and hours, insurance costs, and standards of care to non-physicians (i.e. lawyers, corporations), and to create a community among doctors who really meant it when they said they entered this field to help others.

As it is relatively new, the NPA is looking for new members (I was told the first year is free 👍) and is starting out with a small number of important issues it wants to tackle. The area of focus right now is trying to protect our privacy and stop our prescription writing records from being sold to pharmaceutical companies. Already their work is getting attention from the public.

So, anyone else out there interested in making a positive change?

p.s. There's a really cool video that does a much better job than I can to capture the spirit of what the NPA is all about here: http://npalliance.org/dvd/

 

[sirus_virus]

Hello everyone. 🙂

I attended a National Physicians Alliance meeting last week and left VERY impressed. Now I'm starting this thread to share what I found.

The NPA organization was created in response to the deteriorating patient-physician relationship, the fact that we leave much of the decision-making about our salaries and hours, insurance costs, and standards of care to non-physicians (i.e. lawyers, corporations), and to create a community among doctors who really meant it when they said they entered this field to help others.

As it is relatively new, the NPA is looking for new members (I was told the first year is free 👍) and is starting out with a small number of important issues it wants to tackle. The area of focus right now is trying to protect our privacy and stop our prescription writing records from being sold to pharmaceutical companies. Already their work is getting attention from the public.

So, anyone else out there interested in making a positive change?

p.s. There's a really cool video that does a much better job than I can to capture the spirit of what the NPA is all about here: http://npalliance.org/dvd/

Enough said. Sign me up. In fact, I don't need that free first year thing. Now I hope these guys are serious about business, and we will not end up with that AMA circus type association.

 

[Nico47]

Anyone else care about the future of medicine?

 

[Miami_med]

I care a great deal, though by reading the ideals proposed by the website that you posted, I am pretty sure I disagree with most of the "core values" espoused by the organization.

I am waiting for a physician's organization to come along that actually stands up for physicians and their interests. By throwing in all of this stuff about saving the environment, cultural diversity, government aid, etc..., they are simply taking all of the advocacy points that a million other organizations that I don't agree with espouse and using them to dilute any real benefit that such an alliance would create for physicians. Just like the AMA, which gets bogged down in its attempts to set social policy, this organization would fail to make life any better for those who actually want to be doctors instead of politicians.

Not an attack on you personally. Don't mistake not caring and not being interested in a particular organization.

 

[sirus_virus]

I am a bit disapponted I did not see the word 'STRIKE' on your website. Wuz up with that?

 

[Nico47]

No offense taken! In fact I want to talk more about these issues with other people to see what their ideas are, and what their experiences have been.

The NPA is really young and could use this sort of input to mold itself after.
I recently joined it because it was the brightest hope I could see for making a difference.

To be honest, I really can't say much about AMSA or the AMA. My parents instilled in me the lesson that I should just 'hit the books' until I had my degree and then see what changes could be made. So, I really wasn't the most social/political (whatever you want to call it) activist person in med school.

All I know now is that the field of medicine in general is not what it should be. We're getting closer to adopting "the 50 y/o customer with X insurance presents with . . ." each day, and I'm tired of our community of competent, educated people letting others call the shots about our careers.

Maybe we can start discussing in this thread what we can do as new physicians about the various calamities affecting our field today. First, I'd like to know what's keeping people up at night. –Besides that annoying pager!

 

[dutchman]

You hit the nail right on the head. For as long as doctors remain excluded from the decision making process, doctors will continue to be on the recieving end of these crappy healthcare policies. The time for physicians to take a tough stance and fight for control over the profession is now. Physicians are pretty much loosing every battle they fight(trial lawyers, medicare/medicaid, insurance companies and HMOs), mainly because physicians are fighting with no backbone. You mix compassion with cowardice and you will get what physicians are getting today. There needs to be a change in tone.

 

[Miami_med]

I think that the problem is that the physician advocacy organizations don't actually advocate for physicians. They are all quasi-socialist political organizations that use their connections to MDs in order to promote everything from soda reduction in high school to carbon emissions reduction. We already have a million parent organizations, an EPA, a continent of carbon crusaders across the pond, and a million other organizations doing these things. Secondly, the majority of physicians consistently vote with the party that generally opposes these things, which means that the political ideaology of the representatives and the physicians doesn't sync.

I am an idealist, but I am also practical. I both understand that most things would be better off without huge amounts of government intervention and see that most people seem to disagree with me at this point in time. Regardless, there is no organization that actually says, "I am going to focus on maintaining your autonomy, your income, and your rights." If there was a physician organization that operated with the tenacity of the AARP or NRA, there wouldn't be some of these problems. My god, no one has even managed to pass truly meaningful malpractice reform within a system that everyone sees as broken and highly frivolous. No one has even had the insight to make a public campaign explaining how lawsuits drive up prices.

 

[sirus_virus]

I think that the problem is that the physician advocacy organizations don't actually advocate for physicians. They are all quasi-socialist political organizations that use their connections to MDs in order to promote everything from soda reduction in high school to carbon emissions reduction. We already have a million parent organizations, an EPA, a continent of carbon crusaders across the pond, and a million other organizations doing these things. Secondly, the majority of physicians consistently vote with the party that generally opposes these things, which means that the political ideaology of the representatives and the physicians doesn't sync.

I am an idealist, but I am also practical. I both understand that most things would be better off without huge amounts of government intervention and see that most people seem to disagree with me at this point in time. Regardless, there is no organization that actually says, "I am going to focus on maintaining your autonomy, your income, and your rights." If there was a physician organization that operated with the tenacity of the AARP or NRA, there wouldn't be some of these problems. My god, no one has even managed to pass truly meaningful malpractice reform within a system that everyone sees as broken and highly frivolous. No one has even had the insight to make a public campaign explaining how lawsuits drive up prices.

good post.

 

[Whodathunkit]

The time for physicians to take a tough stance and fight for control over the profession is now...There needs to be a change in tone.