President's Message                                                      

Annette Teijeiro, MD, CCMS President 2009-10

I am most humbled and at the same time feel very privileged to become the 55th president of our medical society. During this one year journey, there will be storms to weather and adjustments to our course which may be expected or unexpected. I am confident that together we can continue “to serve the needs of the physicians, their patients and the Clark County community with responsibility and integrity.” This journey is made possible by the active participation of the Clark County Medical Society membership, the Clark County Medical Society Alliance and our community partners. We have many levels of involvement and I encourage you to become familiar with the standing committees and your board of trustees so that your suggestions and contributions can be enacted. We cannot complete the voyage if all hands are not on deck during the crucial parts of our journey.

Our past legislative session was the first test of medical malpractice tort reform for Nevada. This legislation has begun to stabilize the malpractice insurance premiums for all healthcare professionals and in so doing has increased patient access to care. We cannot rest on the laurels of this accomplishment. There is still much work that needs to be done to clarify and strengthen this first bold step. Our community deserves a stable and growing medical community. When we compare ourselves to similar size communities, the numbers show we have critical needs for more physicians in our present population. With this future need in mind, we must take more steps to protect patient access to care.

There are so many special interests that do not have our patients’ best interest at heart. We must be prepared to counter their carefully constructed spin in the media. Our opponents are very eloquent and use sensationalism to erode our great strides. Those that demand perfection and almost magical results, or else assume negligence must be to blame, make it difficult to build quality healthcare in Clark County. We must be ready to educate the community with the facts and the risks at stake. Access to healthcare is not the property of any political party or philosophy; however it is the mark of an advanced and civilized society that values all of its members.

The attack on the physician–patient relationship is long standing. We have lost some of our privileged relationships with our patients in our naive belief that it would make things easier for our patients if we worked within the artificial constraints of the third party payor system. We were told this would increase access and keep down the costs for our patients. It is painfully obvious now that the compromise was not worth the sacrifice. Our patients now feel betrayed almost as much as we feel betrayed. Both patients and physicians must change the course together; neither group can do it alone.

We must strive to defend our patients’ rights to their precious pursuit of life. We must expose the outside industries that demand cost effective medical delivery, but at the same time with their regulation drive up the cost of delivery. There are those who promised that exclusive or restrictive business arrangements would reduce costs. The effects of these outside restrictions are worn as scars on the medical community and our patients’ lives. [The Hepatitis C scandal is but one of the most visible examples.]

The erosion of the individual long term relationship of patients and their family doctors has been so successful that professional care has been replaced with a “fast food” consumer model. This model may work well for hamburgers and hot dogs but in healthcare leads to decreased quality, increased errors, unnecessary testing, interference in free choice, and reduced critical cutbacks in the time spent with our patients. The results have been devastating evidenced by the open hostility from those we wish to make whole, our patients.
We have many opportunities to serve and partner with our community. At present, we are so overwhelmed with the constraints, mandates, and restricted reimbursement that we have become disconnected from the rest of our community. We must leverage and manage our time carefully to extract some of our precious time to reeducate the public on their need for quality healthcare. Other professions are very vocal about the free services they give the community so we must clarify and proclaim how much free care we already deliver to our community. We must never assume that the community knows who we are or how much we contribute, for in assuming they know we become a silent minority.

There are changes on the horizon. Everyone outside of the medical delivery system wants to dictate what our patients need and deserve. They may think they understand the delicate balance of science and art to the practice of medicine but only the physician and the patient understand what is needed. Our great nation was founded with the concept that the American people “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and the right to choose is inherent in the fabric of this great document. We should facilitate the individualized medical choice plans and minimize the concept of one size fits all in company/government mandated plans. We need to abolish the inequities between large companies and individual citizen’s ability to purchase medical coverage with pretax dollars. The American people need and deserve the right to choose who they want for physicians and other third parties should not impede this process with the false promise of cost effective delivery.

Only healthcare professionals can deliver healthcare. Only patients can decide the best course for their personal life. Together physicians and patients can be compassionate, supportive, and cost effective in delivering health care. Outside entities make decisions based on external bottom lines and projected company earnings, none of which will take into account the individual’s rights. We may have to reeducate the community how it consumes health care dollars yet in order to do this we must remove barriers. Let us not surrender control to these outside forces. Let us empower and educate the Clark County community to select freedom in healthcare choices rather than restrictive mandates in patients’ lives. Unfortunately, universality in a single payor system carries with it the incredible and unacceptable cost of denying individual rights.

There are win-win solutions that remain unexplored. We have tried what the others mandated for decades. Now, we must forge a new path because their course has not delivered what was promised to our patients. We must present our solutions to the health care problems in the community and on a larger scale our nation. We can show our present adversaries that they should work with us to deliver quality healthcare as a team player not like an oppressive ruler. Together we can reach a better balance but in order to do so we must go into some uncharted waters with ugly storms on the horizon. Ours will not be the easy journey but it will be worth it for our present patients and future generations.