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.

IF mindless negative blather like this is all you can muster, you deserve your fate.

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.

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.