The title of Noam Scheiber’s January 9, 2016 New York Times piece on hospitalists, “Doctors Unionize to Resist the Medical Machine,” skirts the bigger issue for doctors, which has less to do with contracts, salaries and labor relations, and much more to do with the question, “Is health care just another business, and if so, can physicians be managed that way?”
I’m a silverback hospitalist, and when I started this job back in 1996, no one, including my colleagues or I, knew what a hospitalist was. In those two decades, my salary has doubled, the intensity of the work has tripled, and the job satisfaction has dropped by a third. I still enjoy my work, just less.
What Scheiber calls “the medical machine,” I refer to as “the system.” For me, the system includes the (excellent) hospital where I work, the 3.6-billion-dollar health care corporation that owns the hospital and signs my paycheck, the payers/insurers who are footing the bill, and various regulatory bodies.
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