The problem is the 'middleman' - (sm)
Posted By: the 'Invisible' MT on 2007-10-29
In Reply to: This is the thing that concerns me about this field. Pay is staying the same not increasing! - Charlene
(ie., MTSO's). Back in the day, ALL MT was done inhouse, and if the rest of the hospital employees received cost-of-living wage increases, so did we.
Then all this 'cost-cutting' c-r-a-p-o-l-a started, right about the time the HMO's started gobbling up hospitals all over America. And even though every year the hospitals and doctors charged more and more for their services ($14.50 for ONE Kotex pad? Gimme a break! But that's what was on my bill when I had surgery one time.)
But the HMO's want managers, micro-managers, mini-managers, mega-managers, heck - they're just management-obsessed. And they kept on hiring management personnel, and paying them more and more and us less and less.
The MTSO's came to be, and in the beginning they were smaller mom-&-pop companies (still no Internet quite yet), and they tended to service hospitals just in their local areas. Their MTs worked inhouse. At first MTs made almost the same, maybe a little less, than inhouse hospital MTs.
But then MTSO's began proliferating, and between their competition with each other and the HMO's determination to more of the 'big wheels' and fewer of the 'cogs' like us, things started to take a turn. First it was the way we were treated. Then as the Internet grew and more and more MTs began working at home, soon the largest of the MT companies began looking at India for cheap labor, where they could run transcription sweatshops and keep more of their company's profits for management.
And now, here we are.
I think we need to SERIOUSLY take a look a unionization. It may be the only way left to save the medical transcription profession from going extinct in this country.
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