Protest Managed Care
Southampton Hospital's medical director and nearly a third of the physicians on its staff have lost their patience.
As members of a newly formed national ad hoc Committee to Defend Health Care, they will join thousands of doctors, as well as nurses, nurse-practitioners, and other medical professionals to dramatize their opposition next week to what they call "market-driven," or profit-oriented, medicine.
Dr. Elaine Fox, a Southampton internist and geriatrician, is leading the local effort. The public has been invited to learn more about it at Parrish Hall in Southampton Tuesday at 7 p.m., when Dr. Fox will speak.
In Boston Harbor
The meeting will coincide with a public forum in Boston, the committee's national headquarters, broadcast by satellite to some of the more than 20 states, including New York, where groups have formed.
The broadcast will follow a 3 p.m. "re-enactment of the historic Boston Tea Party," when, dressed in hospital whites, doctors and nurses will board a ship and toss overboard into Boston Harbor paper bags filled with ersatz money and other symbols of for-profit hospitals and managed-care companies.
"I think it's great," said Dr. Steven Sigler, Southampton Hospital's medical director. "The same people are still running things - Tories, kings, American patricians, Hancocks."
Annual Reports Overboard
Sensitive to the environment, the demonstrators will recover what they throw into the harbor, said Sarah Bennett, the national group's executive director - including 11 crates containing annual reports of 200 managed-care and for-profit hospital corporations.
"We are disturbed about the trends of market-driven medicine invading all areas of health care," Dr. Fox told The Star this week.
She said the case of an East Hampton infant at risk for sudden infant death syndrome, described in these pages last week, was "a good example of the problem." Oxford Health Plans, a managed care company, had threatened to cut off the child's nursing care until ordered by a State Supreme Court Justice to continue it.
2,300 Authors
The national committee's position will be outlined in the December issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association in what it calls an "unprecedented" article, signed by the largest authorship in the journal's history - more than 2,300 Massachusetts doctors and nurses and students at Harvard and Boston University Medical Schools.
The names alone, in tiny type, take up four and a half pages.
The magazine embargoed reprints of the article until it is published, on Wednesday. It reportedly calls for an immediate moratorium on corporate takeovers of health institutions, as well as a return to "a caring vision."
Local Support
The national group's founders include Dr. Bernard Lown, a noted Harvard cardiologist who in 1985 accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
The committee is an offshoot of an older Chicago-based organization called Physicians for a National Health Program.
Nearly 30 local doctors and 28 nurses, including some who work for the Dominican Sisters Health Service, East End Hospice, and the East End H.I.V./AIDS Clinic, have signeda petition being circulated by Dr. Fox, in support of the JAMA article and the Boston protest.
Dr. Fox does not participate in any health plan.
Universal Medicare?
Dr. Sigler, a longtime member of Physicians for a National Health Program, said American medical care could be "outstanding" if the 12 to 14 percent of national resources that now go into the partially for-profit system were allocated to a "single-payer universal Medicare"-type approach.
He predicted such a shift would occur "within five years."
"A lot of doctors are getting creamed," said Dr. Sigler. "So are the hospitals, and the patients."
More information on the national effort is available on the committee's Web site: www.defendhealthcare.org .
"For Our Patients, Not for Profit: A Call to Action" is the title of Dr. Fox's talk on Tuesday.