Although problems arise in medical reform, the way companies get the best doctors still prove how these specialists are considered hot commodities. Around the country, groups of doctors who practice what is called primary care generalists, internists and pediatricians are being purchased by physician management companies. These companies and the investors who are flocking to them believe that primary care physicians are the gold, the linchpin of health care reform says a member of an investment banking firm.
With this innovation in the health care system, the demand for these primary care physicians will certainly speed up while the country is already experiencing a drought of physicians by the thousands. The advanatage of growing managed care groups is that primary care doctors are asked to pose as gatekeepers of the medical industry thus enabling the medical system to cut down on costs such as the price of medicine, medical tests and professional consultation fees. Private sectors and both the state and federal government rely on companies specializing in managed care to minimize health care bills.
The expertise of the doctor groups purchased by managed care companies are marketed to hospitals and health maintenance groups while these establishments forward the services directly to patients or through their employers. Since the 1980s doctor management firms have been sprouting up and this has continued until the past few years. Among the professional investors who banked in doctor management firms are medical doctors, health insurance companies and risk-taking capitalists. Although most medical stocks had experienced a bear movement in the stock market, many of the publicly traded care management firms continue to see their stock prices rise.
There are many advantages in joining these care management groups for doctors. The physicians are entitled to a generous sum of several hundred thousand bucks upfront upon joining. They then receive an enticing long term agreement that ensures $100,000 per year in annual income which can have a tenure of 30 years, as well as security from financial setbacks that arise from health reform. The income of managed doctors are as good as the income of those who are not, and sometimes even better.
Tasks considered as headache roles like billing, patient marketing, payroll concerns, hiring of receptionists, lease of office space and copier, even malpractice insurance concerns are done by these management companies. Engaging physicians to work closer to eight hours per day instead of being on call at an uncertain number of hour is something that these firms also undertake. What many are afraid of is that in the company’s aim to thicken the bottom line, this can become a business oversight that leads to short changing the patients.
These doctors have to keep on with their craft even with their commercial overlord keeping a strong grasp in ensuring minimal cost and maintaining above average service. It requires great effort from the doctors to bear a boss that will be tasked to ensure that they won’t go beyond the budget allocation. Only in time can the efficacy of the physician management firms be tested especially in their pledge that doctors won’t have their patients piling up otherwise they hold back on proper cure and that earnings will not reduce the quality of care.
