Monday, June 16, 2014

Hypocrisy in organized medicine- an OBGYN states MOC facts

While many physicians donate their services seeing patients, volunteering at Free and community clinics, freely working on hospital and other not-for-profit committees, there is a tendency for retired academic physicians who have always had a hard time relating to those of us in the trenches to get big salaries from the American Boards and other organized medical societies.  Are you interested in how to find out what your specialty pays its leaders?
Do we really believe that the executive running the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology,a former University department chair currently works 70 hours per week? Or is that number used in the 2012 federal tax return to justify a salary of $582,136 plus $ 566,799 in "deferred compensation". Does his "Director of Evaluation", another former department chair really work 70 hours per week? Many OBs do actually work that number of hours, but are there 2 AM emergency "evaluations"? How many practicing OBs would love a job that paid $524,198 plus $519,183 in deferred compensation making sure that evaluating other doctors was valid? I give these guys credit, 70 years old and still working 70 hours per week? Do they actually go into the office those 70 hours? Or do they count the numerous dinner meetings, flying to Academic meetings, going to Washington to lobby on their organizations behalf and reading scholarly journals in order to keep up as work hours?  Obstetricians and Gynecologists do all those things and don't get paid for their time. In fact, those of us with private offices have to pay high overheads in order to do all those things; that's why many of us really work 70 hours per week. MOC makes us pay for their life style and costs us real money plus 30-50 hours each year that goes un reimbursed. Shouldn't we in the words of Mahatma Gandhi demand satyagraha (insistence on truth)? Veritas vos liberabit, Howard C. Mandel M.D., FACOG 

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