I did my residency at Boston University, where I’m proud to say had one of the few house staff physician unions. There is no question in my mind that if we were allowed to, physicians should unionize.
Health Care Renewal has more in response to the layoffs happening at Merck:
The union members (largely clerical, administrative and skilled labor) have ensured job security for themselves, while science professionals with PhD’s, MD’s and other advanced degrees and expertise are subject to being laid off or outsourced.
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- Nighthawks, dayhawks, and the demise of the American radiologist
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- "Good doctors are the ones who don’t take insurance"
- The "right" to health care
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Are you the boss, or an employee? Are you a man or a mouse?
I am a small business owner, and I am the boss. Our MD owned group practice has revenues of $10 million. We employee 80 people, only 3 of which are non-owner associate physicians and all of whom aspire to become owners/partners, not union members.
Unionization is an act of protectionism that easily replaced cogs in the machine use to try to secure more favorable employment terms. If labor becomes excessively expensive in market terms because of unionization, fewer union employees are hired. Outsourcing, insourcing, mechanization, and global competition have effectively negated the issue of unionization in many industries. It is a myth that you have any “job security” if the company goes bankrupt.
Conclusion: unions increase unemployment and render the employer uncompetitive
Now antitrust is another matter. This is, in my opinion, the problem. The monopoly of government price fixing for Medicare/Medicaid services and the follow-the-leader coercive oligopoly of private insurance companies is unconstitutional. It is time it is recognized as such.
Physicians should unite in an effort to regain each physician’s ability to independently set prices for their services. Anything less should be regarded as an illegal and noncompetitive act, counter to the principles upon which the United States of America was founded.
When I was a third year resident, CIR came to our hospital. As a result, we got a 5000 dollar raise across the board (turned out we were making the lowest third year salary among every hospital in New York) as well as meals (we were getting NONE) and an educational stipend (previously NONE). The union worked.
The insurance industry has so many more resources than doctors, however, that even if every MD got together and gave money, we STILL couldnt compete with their deep pockets. So there’s probably no point.
“The insurance industry has so many more resources than doctors, however, that even if every MD got together and gave money, we STILL couldnt compete with their deep pockets. So there’s probably no point.”
IF mindless negative blather like this is all you can muster, you deserve your fate.
You should come here and look at a local hospital where all their nurses went union about 20 years ago.
At the time, it all started, we had 2 fairly competitive hospitals and both were expanding and doing good things. The end result is that the hospital across town recruited the best nurses from the hospital going union and gave all their nurses a big raise. Guess what hospital is thriving today? It sure as heck is not the one with the union nurses in it. That hospiatl is so far down on most peoples list (and doctors’s) that they will soon be closing. They are known to have the worst and most lazy nursing staff of any hospital around.
The other hospital has continued its growth and recently just opened a new 11 story addition and attracts patients and doctors from many hundreds of miles away. Better stay away from a union if you really want to succeed.
I haven’t read anything that convinces me that unions wouldn’t help improve the profession for many physicians – although it will take some changes to the typical model of unions, particularly in the ability to hire/fire employees. However, the strength in numbers can help leverage better pay and benefits that are DESERVED, rather than the continued exploitation of the market’s most skilled members.
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