Why Are Doctors Unionizing?

Medical residents and fellows at Mass General Brigham just voted overwhelmingly to form a union. Apparently these new physicians aren’t going to put up with the low pay and tough working conditions that their predecessors went through.
Unionization is happening all over the place. But what does it mean for patient care, hospital finances, physician training, and relationships between trainee and supervising physicians?
TOPICS
(1:10) Unions for medical residents and fellows
(8:25) Doctors and their drug abuse
(11:30) Should doctors Unite?
(14:10) Can physicians going on strike be good for patient care?
(17:30) Are doctors ready to unite?
(18:31) Should doctors be unified?
Dive deeper into this episode and read our report, Doctor Unions and Their Impact on Healthcare. www.caretalkpo...
ABOUT CARETALK
CareTalk is a weekly podcast that provides an incisive, no B.S. view of the US healthcare industry. Join co-hosts John Driscoll (President U.S. Healthcare and EVP, Walgreens Boots Alliance) and David Williams (President, Health Business Group) as they debate the latest in US healthcare news, business and policy.
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What did you think of this episode? Sound off in the comments!

[@kaylakinker7823]

Residents are basically indentured servants. We live in the hospital. We are working more hours per week than we are off for things like sleep, bathing, exercise, eating, etc. Hospitals get paid 100-140k per year from CMS per resident and resident physicians earn the hospital and additional 150-300k per year through the services they provide yet they make only 50-70k per year. If you work 80+ hours a week, you do not have time to clean, cook, wash clothing, etc but you do not have the financial means to support a family or pay for services. Nurses make 3x more than residents per hour.why should less qualified providers like NPs
and PAs make 3-4x what the residents make? All of this contributes to poor mental health and resident suicide because the debt makes it seem like we cannot simply quit. If we fail out due to poor function under these unrealistic expectations, there is almost no way to pull yourself out of debt.

[@CareTalkPodcast]

@@kaylakinker7823 Great insights - thanks for sharing!

[@grant4360]

This video missed a lot.
- Physicians in the US are the highest paid, but 1- the US isn't a cheap place to live, and 2- US docs go into the largest amount of debt by far (several of my colleagues count themselves lucky to have graduated with only 200k in student debt.).
- EMR and other clerical duties that have nothing to do with medicine being pushed onto doctors which either lead to less time with patients or having to take that stuff home
- Fighting with insurance companies to get care covered when insurance companies make profit by denying care
- Corporate medicine. It is "illegal" , but nothing is happening about it. if someone else is saying that a provider doesn't need to spend x amount of time with a patient, dictating what a patient needs or doesn't need, etc. , the patient's healthcare isn't wholly in the hands of the doctor.
- Rising cost of healthcare, but that money isn't going to physicians. For profit health care is an issue. People who are sick and need care have the least leverage to bargain with, so they always get railed. And now patients aren't even getting care because corporate can and has said don't provide care to patients with x amount of debt. Before patient's got care and then their debt was sold to someone else who did something terrible to them to get them to pay, so hard ot believe that this is worse.
- Greater demand on doctors. Fewer doctors, but more and more patients.
- Constant complications of growing health problems like obesity, etc.
- Physician suicide rate is at its highest rate, ever.
- Doctors have antitrust laws against them forming unions, striking, etc., so it is not the same as nurses or any other profession forming unions.
- Physicians are getting sued at higher levels than ever before.
I can keep going if someone likes, but I stopped listening a third of the way through and made my own list. I'm not even saying universal healthcare is the issue because I don't want to get political. But the US pays more for healthcare and doesn't have anywhere near the best outcomes. The American healthcare system is the issue and it isn't sustainable. Eventually the people in it will just break, and some small breakdowns are already happening. So someone figure this shit out, because all the people actually involved in your care are either burned out and don't have the time or energy to fix it (not that they were ever trained to do so anyways) or making so much money off of you and your misery that they don't want anything to change.

[@cruzmunoz2405]

Docs are paid well in surgical specialties. In pediatrics, we earn about half of what our peers who work with adults earn. Why is this the case? Children's diseases are no less complex than adult diseases. In addition, we often have more than one patient to treat - the actual patient and the parent.

[@shunnyday]

If nurses can do it, why can't docs? I agree that it's potentially not great for the patients, however.

[@mdavis3262]

A MD union is better for patients than no union. Its the current nonunion system and corporate greed that has caused healthcare to be so poor.

[@grant4360]

There is an antitrust law that prevents doctors from and makes it illegal for physicians to, and I quote, "collectively bargain, set fee schedules or even strike are acting in violation of antitrust laws." It starts to get messy very quickly, but results ina. system that is incredibly easy to harness when employee recourse (physicians and other healthcare workers and providers) is limited by law.

[@MelissaGeropolis]

Because every other industry is unionizing so they probably feel the pressure to do so as well.
This is where it gets dangerous, because union workers like to strike.
What if someone needs a life saving surgery but the doctor is a strike?

[@dustingrant8531]

ya to explain the hirarchy of black occult you need the same

[@zero450571]

Doctors frame the argument as wanting to provide better care for patients, but we know it's all about them wanting to do less paperwork at the end of the day. Patient care won't be affected because they don't care about patients. And having more patients and less time for each patient means more money in their pocket and that's all they care about. Keep it real.