Special Editor’s Column

The IP Editors asked me to write an article on how to become rich and successful through investments and I answered, “Have very good friends and be very lucky”. In truth, psychologists are like everybody else; their best chance to make money is through their own profession. In the panic reaction caused by managed care, many are seeking a niche; a corner of practice where they can specialize in and run away from the monster confabulated by insurance companies, drug companies and managed care.

We are running in the wrong direction. We did not go to school for eight or more years nor invest our lives in the practice of a noble profession in order to run a boutique. For those who do it and manage to survive professionally, I give them credit and wish them the best of luck, but we are abandoning the whole arena of health to business people who are largely amateurs but unfortunately efficient pirates. They do nothing to enhance the crisis in the delivery of health services. Indeed, they run a very leaky ship, which at best keeps barely keeps our heads above water.

The truth is we will never be anything but haulers of wood and carriers of water until we own our own health delivery system. One third of all the dollars spent on administering managed care is wasted on redundant administration and enormous profits for a very few entrepreneurs. It is important for the people who provide the services to own and run the mechanism because like Willy Sutton said, “That’s where the money is”. We need a coalition of the willing doctors, dentists, psychologists, nurses, social workers and other allied professions who will see the good sense of working together to own their own professions.

Psychology has always been more successful at doing good than doing well. That is to say we can be proud of academic and educational monolith, which dominates the world in its excellence and efficiencies. We have long taken the leadership in issues of social justice and the greatest good for people. We are indeed on the side of the angels, in my opinion, when it comes to responding to the needs of our populace and the inequities that the social order imposes. Yes we do good, but in the last several decades we have not done well. The incomes of psychologists have declined. The manner in which we are forced to do business has become laborious and we have an addiction fastened upon us called managed care, the worst of whose crimes being the misshapen nature wherein their profits dictate the ways we treat people. Indeed the enormous pressure of drug companies has redefined psychological treatment in a way which has much more to do with a cartel of money and legislation bending us to a practice which keeps the money to the drug companies and incidentally to the legislators. We are a relatively small association but we are supposed to be very shrewd in terms of influencing people. APA should have as its primary objectives bringing about a coalition of health professions who own and operate their own health delivery system. We should all be partners in such a coalition. We are not going to do this state by state we are not going to do this by inter-professional quarreling, we all have to own our own business.

As for Division 42, we have got to stop spending quarter of a million dollars a year on housekeeping. We have always been leaders in APA and we should have a national agenda. We should move towards a C6 (501 c6) so as to have monies to direct toward the well being of the profession and its memberships on the national scene. We have not been players directly for some years in the business of protecting our member’s livelihood. That was the reason that the Division was founded. I would give better advice in further articles, but my advice is that we should not seek niches and boutiques, which are akin to finding lifeboats and rafts, but instead save the Titanic. It is stupid to submit to the iceberg. Managed care is not a thinking, feeling, responsible organization; we supposedly are. In subsequent articles I will speak on how we can take back the health profession.

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