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According to the May 7 edition of the AMA News, a poster issued by Florida Medical Quality Assurance, Inc. urged people to get a flu shot by saying, "Ask your health care provider about a flu shot." This gentle public service reminder unleashed a firestorm of protest by Florida doctors. |
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The problem is that doctors don't like to be called providers. It dehumanizes them, they say. Instead of supporting the medical hierarchy that doctors trained 12 - 16 years in order to straddle, the term "provider" reduces all people who work in the health care field to the lowest common denominator (doctors, nurses, nurses aides and respiratory therapists, for God's sake, all lumped together into a vast managed care pudding.) It undermines the special relationship that patients have with their doctors. Many managed care executives are oblivious to or amused by the fact that one of their favorite jargonisms is seen as an insult by physicians. ("I think [physicians'] arrogance and paranoia is the problem," one says.) Besides, the term provider is simply too practical to abandon. When you're communicating about people who participate in clinical care, it's just easier to say "provider" than to take the time to carefully differentiate each time among all the different varieties of providers. Let's not get too PC here. The Florida doctors have won a small victory, however. The new posters tell people to contact their "physician or HMO" for their flu shots. DrRich comments: It is probably gratifying to managed care organizations that physicians are reduced to arguing about terminology. That way, the MCOs can mollify the disgruntled docs for a while by merely dropping the word "provider" in an occasional poster or pamphlet, letting the doctors think they have won some kind of moral victory, all the while continuing their full frontal assault on the doctor-patient relationship (and all the while continuing to use the pejorative "provider" on the thousands of documents they unleash on the health care system every day.)
May, 2001
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