12/11/2023    Paul Kesselman, DPM

A 40-Year Retrospective (Bret Ribotsky, DPM)

RE: A 40-Year Retrospective (Bret Ribotsky, DPM)
From: Paul Kesselman, DPM

First, thank you to all of those who may have
called, emailed or texted with regards to the
recent article in the current Podiatry Management
on a retrospective view of forty years in
podiatry. Much of what we have been talking about
for the last four decades is the attempt to be
treated as equals to our allopathic and
osteopathic colleagues. The last portion of the
recent article discussed righting the ship just
as many PM News postings complain about Medicare
Replacement Plans paying 30 and 40 cents on the
dollar.

Perhaps there are two other wake-up calls worth
reviewing. An interesting story in today's
Becker’s Health Care cited more major orthopedic
groups leaving those "A" plans citing universal
denial of procedures as one of their chief reasons
for leaving. For more on the Becker's story Click
Here

Another personal reflection recently is members of
our profession willing to work for pennies by
agreeing to perform Peer Reviews (one requiring a
read of over 6,000 pages) for a few hundred
dollars and another willing to do a three hundred
pager for $250. For those of you who don't perform
peer reviews, this is not a simple task. It
involves more than reading every page of chart
documents.

It also involves preparing a detailed written
report and citing recent relevant journal sources.
Certainly reading through 6,000 pages of hospital
and medical records by itself perhaps at 150
pages/hour is a week's worth of work by itself,
not including the report and collection of
citations, etc. Is your time so low in value that
you would work for such a miniscule amount? Where
has our self-worth as a profession gone?

In speaking to my orthopedic colleagues, they
clearly state uniformly that they would never be
so desperate to work that many hours for such a
minute sum and I ask, How can we expect to command
respect from carriers if we stab ourselves in the
back and show such weakness? If we can't provide
an outward respect for our own value, then why
should any carrier?

Paul Kesselman, DPM, Oceanside, NY

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