All of the TMB members need to be looked at carefully- even the lay people. The Cartel is well organized and its actions are very well-planned. No stone should be left unturned!
Dr. Kalafut, the acting president of the TMB, although her term has expired, is one of those Rehab docs (who apparently claims to have graduated from Johns Hopkins but in fact did not). You may recall that that specialty grew by leaps and bounds in the 1980s when Medicare started paying big bucks for inpatient rehab, in an effort to avoid the higher costs of prolonged hospitalization.
As could be expected, Medicare cut way back on all of that after about 15 years. This lead to a lot of Rehab docs looking for work. Some of them got some weekend courses and went in to Pain Management; they learned how to do injections, etc. Unfortunately, the Anesthesiologists were headed that way, too, and the poor Rehab docs were out of luck again. Some of them have found their niche, however, in the evil empire’s attempt to maximize profit at any cost to the physician and patient. This specialty of rehab medicine, along with retired physicians and certain academics, is often seen in the stable of “experts” that specialize in not treating patients, withholding care, and denying care on the basis of their “expertise”.
One could imagine that each disease entity has generated an entire line of defense by those that don’t wish to pay for that disease’s care. These different lines of defense comprise a Cartel that is defrauding the American public and eliminating American doctors. This Cartel consists of health insurance entities, big employers, big pharmaceutical industries, large hospital corporations - in a nutshell, big business linked to Wall Street. As everyone knows, when a business looses its focus on its core competency and focuses entirely on its stock price (and the quarterly statements that drive that stock price) the business operation becomes of secondary interest. This is the common thread that gets admission to the Cartel. Unfortunately, an independent medical community is a threat to the Cartel in that we threaten its hold on profit in many ways.
One of the most blatant- and transparent- abuses of power by the Cartel occurred in Texas with the recent Workers’ Compensation reform debacle. The Texas Association of Business and the Work Comp carriers were very active in this- to the point of having Carrier executives on the panels that eliminated doctors from the new Approved Doctor List. I believe that we and the American association of Physicians and Surgeons should expose this as a perfect example of the systematic attack on the independent practice of medicine by this Cartel. The Cartel was very careless in their methodology here, and the information when publicized would be very illustrative of the process. It has all of the makings of a great film- big money, big lobbying by big corporations, big involvement with the legislature, and big damage to doctors and patients.
When physicians successfully treat very difficult problems this can lead to more insurance benefits being paid out to patients. This adversely affects the bottom line of insurance companies and other members of the Cartel. The mold problem is rife with the same scenario of sham (bad faith) peer review, professional character assassination, government complicity, and outright fraud that pervades medicine at the current time. I envision a broad, national coalition of doctors and patients who will oppose and expose the Cartel.
