In an April 9, 2023, opinion piece in the Portland Press Herald, Deborah Patten, M.D. of Bath lays out how our profit-driven system “sabotages” medical practice.
“At some point, most of us who entered medicine for altruistic reasons find ourselves providing a declining quality of care. We find that we have become a high-speed data entry person for the various corporations that decide how we practice medicine – the insurance companies, the drugmakers, even the corporations that run the practices and hospitals. Some of these corporations can use the label nonprofit because they pour the revenue into administrative salaries. In response to our feedback and calls for change, we are told that we must be more ‘resilient.’”