Providers (was: well-endowed)

[James C Stalker]

How about the "commodification" of medicine?  Once it was an art, then a
science, now a business.  (Consumer beware.) All people and institutions
who/which provide any kind of health service (I decline to dfine "health
service," check with your current insurer) are providers.  Doctors hold no
special status, and anyway, what kind of doctor, OD or MD? I would suggest
that the shift to "provider" parallels the shift to "human recources" from
"personnel."  The latter was a unique category.  The former puts humans in
the larger category of resources--robots, computers, copy machines, humans,
whatever.

Jim

Peter A. McGraw writes:

> (Or should I say, "were: well-endowed"?)
>
> "Provider" is one of those words I'm sick and tired of hearing, and I'll
> be
> glad when they go on to the next fad and this one becomes "SO early
> 2000s."
> I guess one reason it irks me is that I don't understand the motivation
> for
> it.  Is it being pushed by companies like Kaiser, whose strategy is to
> keep
> you away from an M.D. for as long as possible, so they want to promote the
> idea that "physician's assistants," etc., can help you just as well as an
> M.D. because they're both "providers"?  Or by the trade associations of
> "providers" who aren't M.D.s?  Can someone enlighten me?
>
> Peter Mc.
>
> (Who, when he's sick, wants to see a "doctor," dammit!)
>
> --On Thursday, May 26, 2005 2:18 PM -0700 Ed Keer <edkeer at YAHOO.COM>
> wrote:
>
>> Thanks Larry, I just spent a half hour turning all the
>> "doctors" in a heart brochure I'm writing into
>> "healthcare providers". Fun!
>
>
>
> *****************************************************************
> Peter A. McGraw       Linfield College        McMinnville, Oregon
> ******************* pmcgraw at linfield.edu ************************
>



James C. Stalker
Department of English
Michigan State University