Medical News

Pa. Senate Majority Whip Jeffrey E. Piccola makes the case for caps.

Lawsuits against physicians, frivolous or not, would not be filed unless one doctor is willing to testify against another doctor, under oath, for money.

We have given the insurance companies some of the tort reform that they have asked for. Now it is time for the insurers to do their fair share.

If third party payers are unwilling to work with physicians, argues C. Richard Schott, M.D., they will have to deal with, and be responsible for, the resultant deterioration in quality and the disruption of access to care that surely will result, not from physician initiated job actions, but from existing market forces, resulting in the inability of a decreasing number of the physicians remaining in this region to meet the medical needs of their subscribers.

Pending legislation would dangerously expand nurses' scope of practice, argues Pennsylvania Medical Society President Donald H. Smith, M.D. Solutions for the issues that the legislation purports to address are found in proposed regulations, which provide prescriptive authority for CRNPs.

Whenever nonprofit health care entities convert to for-profit or merge with other nonprofits, these public investments, and the benefits they bring to a community, are jeopardized. The role of the Commonwealth must be to insist on scrupulous review and community input in every case.

New evaluation and management guidelines have provoked considerable anger in physicians, and for good reason, according to PA Society of Internal Medicine President-Elect Thomas Brandecker, M.D.

Physician empowerment can be better achieved, Richard Baron, M.D., writes, by focusing on the medical profession inself rather than by responding to external forces.

Medical decision-making must stay in the hands of the physicians, writes Paul J. Fink, M.D., and, hopefully, the era of a fiscally driven, quasi-profession will pass and we can get back to the practice of the profession of medicine.

For academic medical centers to survive and thrive, they must adopt a certain stance toward their clinical researchers. Institutions must make clear policy commitments to endowments, to student mentoring, to clinical care and to salaries, or risk the fall of academic medicine.