Meeting location outrages doctor

When Dr. William Ramos learned that the Nevada State Medical Association was going to hold its annual convention in Arizona, he didn't cope with his anger by visiting a shrink or tearing off his stethoscope.

The Las Vegas physician vented through a blistering letter to the editor of the Clark County Medical Society bulletin, displaying something other than his best bedside manner: "I am outraged!"

"WHY?" he wrote, boldfacing, capitalizing and underlining for emphasis.

"Why go to Phoenix when the Nevada economy is suffering such a fiscal crisis?" he asked in this month's issue of the County Line. "Wouldn't that money be better spent in our own state?"

Today, a few weeks since he says he wrote his letter "in the heat of the moment," Ramos seems a tad embarrassed by his populist passion.

But only a tad.

"I probably got a little too emotional," he said last week. "Other doctors have given me good reasons why the convention is being held at the Wigwam (Golf Resort & Spa in Phoenix). Maybe I shouldn't have written it until I thought it all through. But I still think the public is going to feel the way I initially did. I don't think this is good public relations for doctors when we're in such hard times. The public is going to think we don't care about them. And it's doctors doing it to themselves."

Dr. Richard Seher, president of the Nevada State Medical Association, doesn't think the public perception of Nevada's doctors will suffer from 100 of the Silver State's best doctors heading to Phoenix. Not when fiscally conservative people learn, he said, that it was actually cheaper for the association to spend money in Arizona.

"You have to remember that we voted on these plans a year ago," the Reno physician said. "It cost us $5,000 less than to have it in Las Vegas. Las Vegas isn't really set up for small conventions like ours. But five of our last six conventions were in state."

Seher also said that when the annual association's conventions are held in Las Vegas -- he said two recent ones were at the Embassy Suites and at the Alexis Park -- it's hard to get the local doctors to participate.

"They tend to keep doing their work, going to hospitals and taking calls, and it's hard to get them to go to more than a few meetings," he said. "We get much more done when we're away from Las Vegas or Reno, and the local docs can't take calls. I'd like to have our convention in a more rural area like Winnemucca for that reason, but people complain about getting there."

Ramos said he has found Seher "very persuasive" since his letter came out. Ramos said it is interesting to know the Wigwam throws in the meeting rooms for free because so many doctors and spouses are staying in hotel rooms.

"That isn't done in Las Vegas because doctors here don't rent as many hotel rooms," Ramos said. "So the meeting rooms end up costing us a lot more."

Ramos said it also makes sense that doctors participate more when away from their patients.

Dr. Dale Carrison, head of emergency at the University Medical Center, agrees.

"When there's a convention here," he said, "I keep answering calls the way I always did. It's just the way it is."

Yet Carrison agrees with Ramos on the possible PR problem and says a rural in-state location might be the key.

"People are going to want to know why Nevada physicians have to leave the state to have a convention," he said. "It seems incongruous."

Of course, earlier this decade when Nevada physicians said they were leaving the state, it worked in their favor. Thousands of doctors said that physicians were leaving in droves because malpractice insurance rates were too high. Though the argument was found to be specious by the nation's General Accounting Office, it was used successfully in 2004 to persuade Nevadans afraid of losing their doctors to vote for tort reform.

If you think the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority would be upset by the physicians' decision to go out of state for a convention, think again.

"It's strictly a business decision," spokesman Jeremy Handel said. Handel notes that the authority does all it can to persuade people from around the world to leave home and come to Southern Nevada for trade shows, conventions and meetings; Las Vegas now averages more than 22,000 such gatherings a year.

Though Ramos understands that the business of business is business, he said he wishes there had been a way to cancel the out-of-state convention.

"I know that would cost doctors money," he said. "But I wonder if the cost of negative public perception from leaving the state will be more."

Contact reporter Paul Harasim at pharasim@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2908.