Editor’s Note: D-I-Y Career Repair
By Bob Keaveney Robert Posner and Herbert Parris have never met, but they have a lot in common. Internal medicine physicians who realized years ago that dealing with third-party payers is a sucker’s game, they both took matters into their own hands.
As a result, they are both now happier and wealthier than they would have been otherwise. And when I asked them to offer a bit of advice to their stuck-in-a-rut colleagues in primary care, each told me in his own way: Lose your fear, quitchyerbellyachin’, understand your market power, and make a plan.
“People get locked into this idea of ‘Well, this is it. Let me just ride this out for the next 15 years,’” Parris says. “But you don’t have to be afraid to explore the options. … Otherwise, [your dissatisfaction] will just transition to your patients, and then to your family, and then you’ll just be all-around miserable.”
Posner says he dropped insurance 11 years ago, after a large carrier refused to pay him for services until his patients filled out a customer-satisfaction survey that the plan had mailed to its members. “We had to have our staff on the phone for hours and hours, begging people to send in that survey,” he recalls. “So at that point I looked at myself in the mirror and said, ‘What are you doing, man? This is crazy.’” Continued...
