A Very Open Letter from an Oncologist

[gdpawel]

A Medical Director at California Cancer Care, an oncology practice in Northern California wrote a candid letter to the Health Beat blog by Maggie Mahar. He is a member of The Century Foundation's Working Group on Medicare Reform. A very experienced and successful oncologist who has served on the board of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the Association of Northern California Oncologists.

http://www.healthbeatblog.org/2009/01/a-very-open-letter-from-an-oncologist.html

[caroladybelle, BSN, RN]

This article is long but it truly rocks and should be a must read for those that think MDs are overpaid, and wonder why they cannot spend much time with their pts and for those that don't think that MDs should be paid for discussing end of life care.

[gdpawel]

A private practice oncologist told me years ago about a patient of his. The oncologist takes his vacation at the end of August. The patient was supposed to come in for chemotherapy on Wednesday, the day before the oncologist left. The patient couldn't make it. The oncologist, therefore, did what he always did in that situation, wrote a prescription to be "filled" at a nearby, large, comprehensive, NCI-designated cancer center. Had the patient received treatment in the office, the oncologist would have received $6,000, which the oncologist said was very generous. The NCI-designated cancer center, however, billed $28,000, and was paid 75% of this amount. (The oncologist knows about the large disparity between what the NCI cancer centers get and what he gets). I thought this was very revealing.

In 2007, NCI launched the Community Cancer Centers Program, a three-year pilot phase of a new program that is supposed to help bring state-of-the-art cancer care to patients in community hospitals across the United States. The program is designed to encourage the collaboration of private-practice medical, surgical and radiation oncologists, with close links to NCI research and to the network of 63 NCI-designated cancer centers principally based at large research universities. Wed the NCI-designated cancer centers with the community cancer centers. NCI-designated cancer centers are a very large business which act as a base of power for academic clinical oncologists who made a mess of clinical cancer research, since the time Nixon first declared war on cancer. http://blog.aperio.com/articles/Fortune_Cancer.pdf