Managed Care Leading to Multimillion-Dollar Madness

How long will people tolerate fatally restricted health care while contributing to multimillion-dollar early-retirement bonanza packages for creative ex-accountants (“Crowley Likely to Get Payout of $21 Million,” Jan. 8)?

Medicine has come full circle from miracles to total madness, all in the seven short years it took Mr. Crowley to help trample the once-lush landscape of available medicine in America.

Ask any physician you know if making $1 million a year was ever a part of their hard-earned lives before managed care. On average, it took family physicians 10 years to even come close to earning (and spending) $1 million.

These days, physicians have been downgraded to “primary care providers” to subliminally persuade patients of their lesser value. They’re no longer allowed to make highly skilled medical decisions that may save their patients’ lives. Now those critical decisions are “authorized” or “denied” by “case managers” at the end of an 800 number.

Is it any wonder that most physicians today are overwhelmed with despair and now regret the effort that went into earning their highly skilled professional degrees? They are expected to take the full risk and legal responsibility for human lives, at someone else’s discretion, while ending up the least financially valued members in an obscenely profitable managed-care nightmare.

Mr. Crowley can hide behind his multibillion-dollar company’s legal counsel and ERISA while physicians are held personally accountable for the harm brought to human life by the monetary maelstrom that has replaced the practice of medicine.

SUSAN D. LUTSKY

Administrative and

business manager

Riverview Medical Group

Santa Ana