Doctors, Speak Up!
By
Leonard Zwelling
https://www.allure.com/story/elisabeth-potter-united-healthcare
https://www.drpotter.com/blog/
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYkEKoAu5-s/
Dr. Elizabeth Potter is a reconstructive surgeon from Austin specializing in helping patients with breast cancer. Videos about her have gone viral because she was pulled out of the operating room in the middle of a complex procedure to answer a phone call from an insurance company questioning the need for her patient on the operating table to have an overnight stay following the surgery.
Her speaking out about the absurd behavior of the insurers led to many views on Instagram. She testified on Capitol Hill, with The Pitt’s Noah Wylie, himself a very effective advocate for the mental health of physicians both in the media and on his own show. For those of you who have not watched The Pitt, you are missing the best show about medicine ever on television and a very effective platform for airing the damage of stress to those in the modern health care delivery system.
One of the goals of Wylie’s and Potter’s lobbying on Capitol Hill is for the passage of the SPEAK FREE Act. This is an anti-SLAPP law (Securing, Participation, Engagement, and Knowledge Freedom by Reducing Egregious Efforts Act=SPEAK FREE; SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation).
In essence the SPEAK FREE Act would eliminate firing faculty for expressing concerns about the delivery of patient care or policies that hurt faculty. Now, this law is not limited to doctors, but applies to all who publicly speak the truth. It would allow “federal courts to dismiss baseless lawsuits designed to punish people for speaking out.” Often, wealthy targets of public criticism by rank-and-file workers will sue for defamation and cause the truth-speaker to enter into a costly lawsuit. If the bill is passed, these frivolous suits can be dismissed by a judge.
This bill is H.R. 2304 from May 13, 2015. It expired in committee with the 144th Congress.
Let’s think about this. This law would mean that anyone who spoke out against powerful interests (like, for example, a state-run, deep-pocketed cancer center) would be protected from retaliation for their speech. That would also be true of doctors who criticized insurers as Dr. Potter did.
It is essentially a restatement of the First Amendment right to free speech and restrains powerful and moneyed targets of criticism from suing and draining the resources of truth-tellers.
The videos I have attached are worth the watch as is the article from Allure worth the read. What is ultra-interesting is that Dr. Potter did her fellowship at MD Anderson.
My recent experience trying to assist faculty who have been victimized for what they say or what they accuse powerful members of the MD Anderson faculty of doing to them has further raised my awareness that a law such as this is necessary. Right now, the UT System and MD Anderson seem to be impervious to law suits. Faculty leaders have been given sovereign immunity to do whatever they choose during the course of their “duties” and that includes bullying, harassment, theft of intellectual property, and firing. The institution is bathed in fear and the leadership is beyond the reach of any legal system because the president is showing a positive institutional margin and does well before the legislature and the cameras. Frankly, this is all beneath the storied history of MD Anderson.
Furthermore, thanks to the Texas State Legislature, the Board of Regents, the Chancellor, and Dr. Pisters, there is no Faculty Senate to voice the faculty’s position on any new policies. There could be, under the new law, a representative committee formed if Dr. Pisters so desired, but he doesn’t.
What Noah Wylie and Dr. Potter are asking for is the creation of an environment that fosters both good patient care and good doctor care. When things on the front lines are going haywire, who better to sound the alarm than the physicians? And if insurance companies are interfering in patient care who is in the best position to know? The docs. And finally, when a pharmaceutical company is putting too much pressure on those performing clinical research to get good results and to hurry drug approval with the FDA, who will know? The clinical investigators.
This is a real problem at MD Anderson and all over the country. If you want good health care, you need to have doctors in good health themselves and they need to make everyone aware when things in the clinics, operating rooms, and hospitals are going awry.
Let them speak up.
