The next time you or a loved one break a leg, have any injury that affects your ability to care for yourself, or have a devastating stroke, it’s worth knowing that the highly educated therapists who are with you in the darkest times of your life, likely work for a multi billion dollar “therapy contractor” who resells their skilled labor to Medicare, pockets up to 80% of that money, pays their therapists as little as possible, forces them to be face-to-face with patients for 90-95% of the day (barely leaving time for a bathroom break) despite being required to complete 4-5 hours of paperwork strictly for billing purposes.
These people enter a “helping” profession, knowing they won’t make tons of money like an MD or even nurse practitioner, study their asses off, are incredibly knowledgeable after 6-7 years of post-secondary education, and genuinely want to help you .
Many new therapists entering the field try to give patients their full attention, and complete their billing “off the clock” out of a sense of duty, staying at work for hours unpaid, but eventually burn out. Many either quit the field or live with constant gut wrenching guilt knowing that they can’t truly help anyone properly, and become mindless paperwork machines.
So if you ever need the services of a PT, OT, or ST, and they seem to be ignoring you, have their heads buried in a laptop for most of your 45 minute session, or don’t seem to do very much actual therapy with you, know that they desperately want to help you, but are prevented from doing so by private business interests who exploit them for the money they attract from Medicare.
There are no unions, and the professional organizations that are supposed to represent them them were sold out to “corporate sponsors” years ago (yep, the same ones reselling their labor to Medicare).
Oh yeah, and during Covid when revenues were down because rehab facilities were overwhelmed with infection, companies responded by cutting pay/benefits, increasing productivity requirements, and laying people off. Then they’d send out emails from corporate calling their employees “heroes”.
Shit like this is why the US is the richest country in history but consistently ranks in the high teens for quality of care.
Something needs to change.