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Our Voices Growing
Stronger Every Year
Doctor Barry Liebowitz, President

Welcome to our website.  I hope you will find this to be an effective tool, whether you are one of our thousands of members, are considering joining Doctors Council or would like to learn more about our organization.  Our website is intended to keep members abreast of all news and information affecting our doctors in our various worksites, hospitals, facilities and agencies that we are employed at as well as issues that affect the delivery of patient care.   Members can also submit inquiries to info@doctorscouncil.com or download forms and find out how they can become more proactive in our collective fight for doctors and patients rights.

In navigating our website, you will encounter some of our great victories in contracts, grievances and general advocacy for our members - compelling evidence that unionization works to the advantage of doctors, patients and communities.  Doctors Council has paved the way for lasting change in some of our busiest hospitals and health care facilities and will continue to tirelessly advocate on behalf of our members.  Please log on to our website regularly to get the information you need to improve your work environment and to keep our communities healthy.   

Why Doctors Must Unionize

Medicine, once an art, has become just another business—big business with big profits. As a result, doctors’ compensation, working conditions and their methods of diagnosis and treatment are being dictated by corporate administrators, causing frustration, despair and a sense of helplessness among dedicated health professionals.

This "sea change" did not occur with the participation of doctors.   On the contrary, doctors were engulfed by powerful business forces, which recognized that huge profits could be made by running our nation’s healthcare system like a corporation and by treating doctors and other healthcare professionals as commodities.  Indeed, doctors now find themselves in precarious economic and ethical situations where medical decisions are being made by corporate business policy rather than appropriate medical practice.  Doctors have never been formally trained to deal with this new economic order.  Our professional organizations are prohibited by law from dealing with the "economics" of the practice of medicine. Their main functions are essentially geared toward education and credentialing.

So the question for us becomes—who can handle our economic issues?   For doctors, the answer is clear—unionization. A union’s expressed purpose is to assure the protection of its members’ interests. It negotiates doctors’ wages, their hours, their benefits and assures doctors’ due process.

Unions do not diminish our professionalism. Rather, they enhance it.

The notion of a professional in medicine has certainly changed. As a profession today, we are invisible. Are we to continue to stand idly by, powerless, as others dictate how we provide essential medical care?   Is it professional to allow entrepreneurs to dictate medical diagnoses and treatments?  Is it professional to allow them to place gag orders on us, require drive-through mastectomies and one-day post partum hospital stays for new mothers?  Is it professional to ask patients to diagnose themselves prior to going to an emergency room, or allow substitution for doctors’ prescriptions as corporate policy?

As we are economically assaulted, we are being forced to deny our training and forsake our medical oaths in order to earn money for others.   The era of denial is over.  The concept that we are treated as professionals is a myth, and at this point, believing such, is destructive to regaining our power and authority over medical decisions.  Although powerful both economically and politically, our adversaries are not doctors, they do not possess our skills to heal.

If we organize, we will be a force to be reckoned with.   We can become a countervailing power, regaining the respect, the dignity and the power over our own profession.  As healthcare professionals, we are trained to heal and protect our patients.  We must take bold steps if we are to regain control of our profession.

Our union -- Doctors Council -- represents thousands of doctors. We have negotiated contracts since our inception.   We are also familiar with labor and management as both adversaries and, in the best sense, partners.

A doctor’s union should not be feared by management, rather they offer administrators hope for instilling new programs, new initiatives, and improving patient care within their organizations.

Sadly, we are witnessing the undoing of our professions.   We have spent a great deal of time and resources to learn and master our art.  These days, our time and effort translate into what a corporation considers expensive labor.  In an effort to run health care as a profit-oriented business, our education and expertise are not considered important factors in determining compensation.  But it is important. We are in the healing profession, where what we know and how we are trained to think and act makes a difference; often THE difference.

We cannot turn our backs on thousands of years of study and evolution that has produced the daily life-giving miracles that society takes for granted.   We are interdependent healers who relieve suffering and we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.  This is our time on the watch.

It is for these reasons that we must organize. At this time, are we to cast aside our accomplishments and knowledge and revert to the dark science of medieval times?   I find it difficult to believe that the saving of life and the relief of suffering is now a corporate business.  In the corporate healthcare world, those who deliver the care are not to be consulted, but rather managed.  They are taught to limit care, quiet their voices suspend their knowledge and serve to create a healthy profit for others.

It is a malignancy of the spirit to extract a profit by denying care.   It is a deal not only with the devil but with death itself.  Let us fight this as well as we have fought other diseases.  This entrepreneurial obsession is as deadly as the diseases we have vanquished before.

Medicine has become, more and more, a business that erodes the reason we all become doctors- to take care of our patients with quality and safe patient care.   Doctors increasingly have less of a voice in patient care and working conditions.  Patient care is often sacrificed for the goal of a bottom line or profits.  Patients, be they with insurance, underinsured or without insurance, are entitled to quality and safe patient care.  Doctors are entitled to working conditions that permit this.  Doctors Council is a successful voice for doctors and patients.    As we continue to battle forward and advocate for our membership and our patients, Doctors Council looks to build on our successes in the years ahead.  With your active involvement, we can protect and save our jobs, our patients and our profession.