It is one thing for a physician to surrender to a hospital administration bent on destroying private practice for as far as the eye can see. Physicians typically have mortgages and bills to pay, kids in private school, etc. Physicians are not great with money, typically being short-sighted with finances. Fear takes over, and the next thing they know they are a hospital employee, a decision they will regret for the rest of their career in the vast majority of instances.
It is quite another thing for a physician to seek the job of the hatchet man. These physicians have such fear that they don’t want to just participate as employees, they want to get on the inside and be decision makers over those with whom they previously could not compete. They want power because they are consumed with fear….fear of what the free market would do to them if they were practicing on their own. These individuals are universally hated by the medical community and are perceived as evil doers by many. I think they are the wimp doctors…the sell-outs….the Vichy doctors, as I have called them for years…the collaborators. They use strong-arm tactics to bully private practice physicians and legitimize the scheming of their bosses the wonderful hospital administrators that are, of course, not wanting to make a profit.
In the mid ’90′s these jerks led the way for hospital physician organizations (HPO’s, or PHO’s). These organizations were a disaster and didn’t last. These fear-mongers along with the hospital administrators tried to capitalize on the fear that the Clinton health care plan if passed (and that was a certainty we were told) would destroy our private practices….. so why not surrender now while the getting is good? Every one of the physicians I know that became Vichy doctors were vilified and their reputations destroyed as sell-outs when none of this came about.
Now we face Obamacare. Once again, the fear mongers are at work. Once again there are physicians out there all too willing to participate in wielding the hatchet at the private practice physician hold-outs. Some of the Vichy doctors are small mousy men that kids used to beat up on the playground. Some of them are poster children for narcissistic personality disorder. They have abandoned their oath as physicians and have the morals and ethics of most congressmen. They are all collaborators and will, like their predecessors, find their reputations in the toilet, I predict, once the insanity of government medicine for all is outed as the denier and killer it is.
G. Keith Smith, M.D.
