The sanctity of the medical profession has been lost to corporate centralization

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Doctors Are Losing Their Calling

The sanctity of the medical profession has been lost to corporate centralization and burnout.

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Physician-trainees at Mass General Brigham are attempting to unionize. If they succeed, the union would be the largest of its kind in the country with more than 2,500 members, joining the estimated 15% of U.S. medical trainees who’ve assembled under the Committee of Interns and Residents in recent years. At the center of the doctors’ unionization efforts is a desire to reclaim their identity as service-driven providers and to fight for the autonomy and fair working conditions that they’ve lost as their profession becomes more commercialized and centralized.

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Now nearly three-fourths of doctors in the U.S. are employees of a corporate entity and, increasingly, both patients and physicians are finding hospital systems to be as obstructionist as insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Most physicians’ time isn’t spent with patients but on the administrative burdens they were trying to avoid. A 2016 study in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that doctors spend two hours on desk work for every one hour with patients.

As healthcare centralizes into denser urban areas, employed physicians have been cleared from towns and communities. This phenomenon isn’t merely brain drain or the shuttering of small businesses—it’s a loss of an important member in a town’s social fabric. Big-box medicine then constrains a doctor’s hours, scope and place of practice, among other things.

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