Specialty Medicine
* Apropos your publication of a recent letter about the role of specialty care in the overall picture of health care in the United States, the public needs to know some facts!
Blue Cross’ Wellpoint program takes more than 30% of the premium’s dollar for profit in administration. In 1992 this profit amounted to $300 million!
Recently, we were notified by Blue Cross of California that they were going to decrease compensation for surgical specialists by 16% because of cost constraints!
What is going on here? There is something definitely fishy in the fish pond. Leonard Shaeffer of Wellpoint Blue Cross had a salary of $1.3 million last year, and Wilson Taylor of Cigna had a salary of $2.1 million.
If the overall plan of these companies is to decrease the quality and availability of specialty care, they are certainly doing an excellent job of it as of now.
As specialists leave California and take up jobs elsewhere and residency programs are cut back in surgical specialties, the public may well find themselves going back to the non-specialists for care of their progressive scoliosis curve or their severely arthritic hip.
If this is the goal and the hidden agenda of the health carriers, American medicine is doomed.
The public had better make their concerns known before it is too late!
DR. SANFORD H. ANZEL
Clinical professor of orthopedic surgery
UC Irvine
