As a busy physician, you might wonder what organized medicine can do for you. This is why I think you should get involved.
Medicine can be better. It should be better. For our patients. For you. For all involved. We chose medicine to care for patients, but much of our clinical day is spent struggling with insurance companies, worrying about liability concerns, and drowning under ever-increasing clerical duties. Ethically, we cannot abandon our patients to go on strike, while anti-trust law hamstrings our ability to effectively negotiate with payers. If you have an issue or concern, and especially if you’re not being heard, I encourage you to bring it up at your specialty, local, state, or national meetings.
It’s wonderful to know that you’re not alone in contending with the frustrations in medical practice today. Many like-minded colleagues attend our regular meetings, and some of my best friends are those whom I have met through organized medicine.
We are more powerful when we speak with a united voice to advocate for our profession, which allows us to achieve our twin missions of protecting public health and defending the practice of medicine.
My name is Albert Hsu, and I am the current Chair of the MSMA-Young Physician Section. As a reproductive endocrinologist at University of Missouri Health Care, I see patients in my clinical practice and am involved in research on endometriosis (a common cause of both pain and infertility). My wife, Tracy, and I both are in medicine, and we have four children who keep us busy with soccer, baseball, crew, and Ultimate Frisbee. My previous practice was at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire, and I had served on the New Hampshire Medical Society’s Leadership Council for the past three years.
Before coming to Missouri, I had the opportunity to participate in several advocacy efforts that led to real change. Memorable examples include campaigns to:
- ban smoking in bars and restaurants in New York City, arguing that workers should not have to choose between their health and their employment. Our successful lobbying efforts on the city and state level in 2002 helped encourage other states (and countries) to pass similar laws;
- encourage Medicaid in Massachusetts to cover medications to prevent preterm labor in women with histories of preterm deliveries. Medicaid was unwilling to pay for a $100 weekly injection for these patients. This penny-wise policy was rather shortsighted, however, and taxpayers were paying for it, as those weekly injections could have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional NICU costs;
- lobby against mid-year and retroactive tuition increases at the public medical schools in New York State. My friends and I passed an “emergency” resolution on this issue in the AMA House of Delegates, and a few years afterwards, students at public medical schools in California won a court case and received some reimbursement for similarly inappropriately-timed tuition increases at their medical schools.
Despite the ongoing and exciting revolutions in biology and medicine today, we also are in a time of severe austerity, in which we must fight merely to preserve funding for clinical care, for medical education and research, and for public health initiatives. While I believe in the effectiveness of advocacy and organized medicine, most of us lack the time or patience to go marching in the streets – or lobby in Jefferson City or Washington DC. However, there are things that you can do without leaving your town, such as calling state and national representatives, meeting with local legislators, giving to a political action committee, and attending meetings of your specialty, local, state, and national medical societies.
In organized medicine, we don’t have permanent “friends” – just permanent interests. We work closely with both Republicans and Democrats to advance solutions to issues that are important to us, such as with Republicans on liability reform and with Democrats on preventing abuses by the health insurance industry. Medicine has “friends” in both parties, but we also have politicians of all stripes who view us as the problem, and not the solution. When protecting our patients and our profession, we are most effective when we speak with a unified voice.
I look forward to meeting you at an MSMA or AMA event!
Biography
Albert Hsu, MD, MSMA member since 2017 and Chair of the MSMA Young Physician Section, is a Reproductive Endocrinologist at the Missouri Center for Reproductive Medicine and Fertility in Columbia, Mo.
Contact: scooberhsu@gmail.com
