Thoughts From Your Colleagues

• Inadequate Oversight

• Cataract Surgery Poem

• Accessible Health Care?

Inadequate Oversight

I write in response to “What You Don’t Know Could Hurt Your Practice—Get Up to Speed” (Savvy Coder, August), which mentioned that providers have been excluded from Medicare for improper coding. In many situations, we hire individuals to do tasks without us having a clear indication of their abilities. This is just another example of inadequate oversight.

There have been many situations of fraud in which administrators or others have embezzled large quantities of money from practices when adequate oversight would have caught this early.

A physician in every practice should have enough interest to try to avoid these unfortunate situations.

Frank J. Weinstock, MD, FACS 
Canton, Ohio 

Cataract Surgery Poem

I enjoyed reading Dr. Brown’s poem on cataract surgery (Letters, August). There’s another part of surgery—an artistic, poetic part. Dr. Brown brought forth those feelings in me as I read it. I wonder if it was written from his experience as a patient undergoing cataract surgery?

Thanks for sharing your wonderful poem.

Ronald J. Smith, MD, MPH 
Los Angeles 

Accessible Health Care?

I read “Narrow Networks: How to Stay Part of the Plan” (Practice Perfect, August). It raised this question in my mind: If the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is supposed to increase access to care, and there is already a shortage of physicians available to provide that care, why is the ACA legally empowering insurance companies to reduce access to care by having “narrow networks” and to force us to waste our time begging for the right to participate in them, when we should be spending it caring for patients?

Legislation such as the ACA will not make health care affordable, or even accessible, as long as payers continue to control patients’ access to physicians now.