A community of 30,000 US Transcriptionist serving Medical Transcription Industry

Fighting For Our Jobs - bev

Posted: Aug 03, 2010

I am a medical transcriptionist residing in Missouri. I sent the following e-mail to my representative and I encourage every transcriptionist to send a similar letter to your representative also. Thanks in advance.

Tue, August 3, 2010 6:46:49 PM

Re: Righting the Wrongs at Arlington Cemetery

From:

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To:

Senator Claire McCaskill <senator@mccaskill.senate.gov>

Senator McCaskill, I so appreciate the fact that you are doing your job and looking out for Missouri and America. I think it is terrible what has happened at Arlington and I totally agree with your stand.

I would like to bring your attention to another thing that is happening in this country. I am a medical transcriptionist and have worked in this profession 30 years. I work for a small hospital from my home. We have a huge problem in our industry. Most of the national transcription companies are sending the medical records and dictation overseas to be typed, especially to India. Our citizens are not being informed of this and I am sure if they knew this it would be stopped in its tracks. These national companies are lying to their clients saying, "There are not enough qualified medical transcriptionists in the USA," which is totally false, and is just a simple way of justifying paying cheap labor, which by the way has to be checked by American transcriptionists after coming back from a foreign country for correctness and editing. For 15 years I ran my own transcription business and was forced out because I could not compete against the "cheap labor" in India. I would like you to introduce a bill that informs the general public of this practice of sending their sensitive medical records overseas to be done and furthermore give them the option to agree or to say they want their work done in the USA and to strongly enforce this to make sure all medical personnel adhere to giving the patient a choice and anyone not doing so, should be fined heavily. Not so long ago, a girl in Pakistan threatened to put medical records on the Internet for all to see because of a pay dispute with her company. As we hated to see our American military secrets leaked to the Internet for all to see, I certainly do not want this to happen with our private medical records. There are many qualified transcriptionists in the USA fighting for their jobs. We need a champion such as you to fight for us in Congress. Just think how you would feel if you woke up one day and saw your medical records or one of your family's medical records posted all over the Internet; pretty scary thought! I am encouraging other medical transcriptionists to contact you also.

Thank you for fighting for Missouri and please fight for our American transcriptionists. We are qualified and more than willing to produce a correct medical record. I would like to add one more thing, it has recently been introduced in the UK to inform the public of the practice of sending medical records overseas and there is a bill in place to stop this practice of sending sensitive medical information out of the country to be transcribed. The UK recognizes the danger of this and is trying to stop the practice. I would like to see the USA follow suit. By law we are bound to follow strict HIPAA regulations; are these out-of-country transcriptionists following them?

Thank you for caring,

Proud American Transcriptionist

fighting for our jobs - Viva

[ In Reply To ..]
Excellent!!

Great letter! - bless you

[ In Reply To ..]
I hope your senator cares.

Well-said! Thank you for taking the time to write! - Rocky Raccoon -(nm)

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I sent a letter to my state senators today - wrkn4pnuts

[ In Reply To ..]
Thank you for giving me the courage to write a long-overdue letter to my state senators as well. I also signed it, because I believe telling them who you are and how to contact you gives more credibility. Some things that have been allowed to go on in our field are absolutely outrageous. The only way to make changes is to GET INVOLVED. You have the choice! You can sit by and just watch and do nothing - keeping in mind that apathy and inaction ACCOMPLISH NOTHING - or you can do the right thing, and stand up for what you believe in.

I sent one to mine - MarineMom

[ In Reply To ..]
I live in Iowa, and a few months back I sent a letter to my congressman, too. It took a few weeks, but I got the usual "I agree completely with keeping jobs in the US. I am fighting hard to keep jobs in the US. blah blah blah" same old stuff. I don't think anyone can help us.

BRAVO, I am sending this also. Bring USA jobs back to the USA. nm - yochana

[ In Reply To ..]
nm

Ed Schultz of the Ed Show on MSNBC - talks about S/M

[ In Reply To ..]
outsourcing and offshoring all the time on his show. He advocates bringing jobs back to the United States. I think if enough of us we wrote to him it would help. I think he would be very interested in the "privacy" issues regarding our medical records. Just an idea.

ALL OF THIS IS CHANGING IN 2011!!!! - Thank goodness!

[ In Reply To ..]
This bill just passed. It is certainly not illegal to send any job overseas, but the loophole has been VOTED CLOSED AS OF 2011. The approximately $700 billion dollars in income taxed at 2% will be no more. They pay the same ticket as everyone else. It is no longer AS cost effective to send jobs overseas. They will be taxed twice.

What this means to MTs is that you will see more and more work remain in the U.S. However, in order to be cost efficient, the MTSOs will have to resort to Voice/Speech Recognition as a means to stay competitive, or even in business. That also means they need less MTs. As an old MT, I do not so much appreciate the VR process or my income editing on VR these days. I will simply have to adapt since that is the way the industry has to go.

As an American, I am very thankful that this practice is no longer so profitable to all of these big companies. Our country needs the federal taxes, the state taxes, Medicare taxes, DEFINITELY social security taxes, and hopefully reduce the unemployment rate and payments made for such!

I took wrote everyone I could think of in government, local, every media I could think of, newspapers, TV, and magazines, and even the White House. I really believe our voices were heard. We were not the only industry suffering from this practice.

I am sure that everything that can be done legally to stop this practice has now been accomplished. Now we have the VR to contend with. I am not so good at it YET, but I have no choice but to try, as I am looking at retirement in 5 years and I need the income.

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