The Complete Patient

It's always an accomplishment, as a writer, to crack a new or different kind of publication. In my case, I never expected to get anything into a medical publication, so I'm feeling good about having a letter to the editor in the most recent issue of Family Practice Management magazine. The letter responds to a question posed in an editorial a couple months previous in the magazine about how the various powers that be would react if more physicians went "cash only"--in other words, went around the insurers to market directly to patients. This is a subject I wrote about earlier this year in my BusinessWeek.com small-business column in which I profiled a physician who is prospering by refusing to do business with the insurance companies.

I can remember back in the 1950s and 1960s when physicians dominated the economics of the health-care world, and the American Medical Association (AMA) was the premier professional organization in the world, credited with protecting the physician cartel. How times have changed.