Stephen Fillman: “What is the benefit of having boards in IM or being recertified at the present time? There are none! I have been a board-certified specialist in IM since 1979 and in the eyes of Aetna I am compensated not as a specialist but as a primary care provider at 105% of Medicare rather than the 115% a specialist receives. When did our specialty turn into primary care? We have been outdone by family practice and now we are thought of as equals. We can’t even find young internists to join our group because no one wants to see 25″“28 sick patients a day without adequate compensation. They can go into gastroenterology or cardiology and get rich.”
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{ 6 comments }
I’d never seen that before. Is the writer saying Aetna is paying different rates for the SAME service?
If the gastroenterologist performs a 99213 E+M service, it’s 115% of Medicare, but if a general internist performs a 99213 E+M service it’s 105% of Medicare?
The gastroenterologist may perform a consultative service which is paid more, but it’s a different billing code. Is the writer saying there are two different pay rates for the SAME service?
Ditto for OB/Gyn. It’s a speciality.
the same is true with the ACP – totally USELESS to boarded internists, & perhaps even detrimental. Today they sent out a blast email touting that primary care “provider” numbers have grown, thanks to IMG’s and physician assistants/NPs.
I don’t know which is worse – lumping foreign medical grads (ie. DOCTORS) in with NPs, or dumbing me down to a “provider”.
When our professional societies do this, primary care is truly doomed.
So now it’s insulting to be “equal” to family medicine? What does that mean? If internists want to get the word out that primary care is the foundation of good medicine and should be valued accordingly, it would seem counterproductive to undervalue other primary care providers. Just my take (and I’m an ER doctor.)
Oops, in my 10:12 comment I didn’t mean to say “provider.” I meant to say “doctor.” You see how I’ve been brainwashed?
Anyone got surveyed by ABIM about the proposal for a new “comprehensive provider” certification?
Being a certifying body…ABIM’s “solution” to every crisis is develop more certification exams.
Great skill at self-perpetuation [like parasites].
Continuing to divide and conquer the internists it supposedly “supports” thru prestigious “board certification” eats at the core of the profession [like a disease].
ABIM is like a parasitic disease that will kill its own host in implosion, before long.
Helpless internists go along and recertify and support the ABIM and all the peripherals of the assessment INDUSTRY anyway.
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