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Avoiding the “Managed Care Ripple Effect”

By Dr. David Edward Marcinko; MBA, CMP™

The healthcare industrial complex represents a large and diverse industry, and the livelihood of other synergistic professionals who advise doctors depend on it as well. These include tax and estate attorneys who themselves wish to avoid the collateral ripple effects of the current healthcare debacle.

Lawyer as Financial Planner

As a tax, estate planning or bankruptcy lawyer, you already know that almost every legal magazine around has articles or advertisements proposing that you become a financial planning professional or business consultant to your physician clients.

Moreover, lawyers of all stripes are being pushed toward interdisciplinary alliances by encroachment on their turf by the Big Four accounting firms. With audits of publicly held companies now a commodity, the giant accounting firms are getting more of their revenues from consulting, and that puts them into direct competition with attorneys, MBAs, actuaries and other management and financial service professionals.

Avoiding a Medical Career

Of all careers, you know how absolutely onerous it is to practice medicine today, and are finally thankful that you did not take that career route many years ago.

So, like your neighbor the accountant, you begin to explore that potential of developing a service line extension to your legal practice, in order to assist your medical colleagues who have been hit on hard economic times. In fact, you soon realize that more than 90,000 trust, probate and estate planning attorneys like yourself are interested in pursuing financial planning in the next decade. Sure, you know it’s difficult to get a CLU or variable annuity license, or become a Certified Financial Planner™ (CFP), but earning your law degree was no cinch either.

And, you reckon, advising physicians has got to be easier than law, or less stressful than the corporate lifestyle of your MBA trained brother-in-law, right?

So, you set out to stretch your legal horizons and explore the basic legal nuances of those topics not available in law school when you were a student.  Things like medical fraud and abuse; managed care compliance audits and Medicare recoupments; OSHA, HIPAA and EPA standards; anti-trust issues; and managed care contract dilemmas or de-selection appeals.

Assessment

What a brave new world the legal profession has become! Even the American Bar Association’s commission on multi-disciplinary practice has recommended that lawyers be permitted to share fees and become partners with financial planners, money managers and other similar professionals.

As a real life example, the venerated Baltimore brokerage firm of Legg Mason Inc. teamed-up a few years ago, with the Boston law firm of Bingham Danna, LLC, to create one of the first marriages between a law and securities firm.  

And so, if you want in on the challenge, and bucks, you’d better acquire at least a working knowledge of healthcare administration, or perhaps help craft some new case law, or assist your doctor-clients in some fashion; otherwise, you will remain a legal document producer.

Disclaimer: Dr. Marcinko, a court approved expert witness and former Certified Financial Planner™, is also founder of the Certified Medial Planner™ program for all fiduciary consultants in health economics, financial planning and medical practice management www.CertifiedMedicalPlanner.com

Conclusion

Your thoughts are appreciated; please opine? Is this new industry concept a viable one?

Practice Management: http://www.springerpub.com/prod.aspx?prod_id=23759

Physician Financial Planning: http://www.jbpub.com/catalog/0763745790

Medical Risk Management: http://www.jbpub.com/catalog/9780763733421

Healthcare Organizations: www.HealthcareFinancials.com

Health Administration Terms: www.HealthDictionarySeries.com

Physician Advisors: www.CertifiedMedicalPlanner.com

Speaker: If you need a moderator or speaker for an upcoming event, Dr. David E. Marcinko; MBA – Publisher-in-Chief of the Executive-Post – is available for seminar or speaking engagements. Contact: MarcinkoAdvisors@msn.com  or Bio: www.stpub.com/pubs/authors/MARCINKO.htm

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Filed under: "Advisors Only", Accounting, Career Development, Taxation | Tagged: lawyers, tax attorneys |