A Win-Win Arrangement

My regular house cleaning service doesn’t do carpets, but they arranged for it to be done for me. I just dealt with the people I know, and they took care of the rest. I was confident the cleaning would be done well, because I trust my house cleaning service. They made sure it was done well, because I’m their regular customer.

The price was fair, I’m sure, because they probably send a lot of business to the carpet cleaner they contract with. In all likelihood, my cleaning service got a better deal from the carpet cleaner than I could myself, and they may have saved me money. My house cleaning service wouldn’t have charged me more than the going rate, because they like having my regular business. Who knows what the carpet cleaner would have charged me directly! They would have had to build in a higher charge for the billing and for the risk that I wouldn’t have paid. By billing my cleaning service, the carpet cleaners were assured of their payment, and they didn’t have the cost of individual billing to a new household.

I liked the fact that I didn’t have to take the time to write an extra check or to have to deal with mailing it in or to try to assess the quality of different carpet cleaners; my house cleaner took care of all that for me. The carpet cleaning service I received was probably of high quality, low cost, high efficiency and high volume. Their high volume gives them the experience and expertise to do great work, not to mention to buy and maintain the latest and greatest equipment that helps them handle the volume of work that they do quickly and efficiently.

So, What’s the Problem?

Yet it may be that other carpet cleaners are jealous of this particular carpet cleaner, calling its owners traitors to their profession because they are willing to act as a subcontractor, demeaning the profession, and making it harder for the others to earn a living. Low-quality and/or high-cost carpet cleaners may not be able to offer the house cleaning contractor the level of service or the low cost the house cleaning contractor demands.

Sound Familiar?

I guess it might make sense to carpet cleaners who can’t or don’t want to work as subcontractors through general cleaning services to try to enact legislation to restrict the general cleaning service from billing individuals for the work performed by a subcontracting carpet cleaner.

Of course, it would be ridiculous for the government to restrict my cleaning contractor from using a carpet cleaner as a subcontractor and billing me for the work the carpet cleaner did, particularly if they said they were doing it for my benefit. Such legislation would just make it harder for me to get good service at a fair price.

An Analogous Situation

It’s too bad that pathologists don’t recognize how ridiculous it is for them to use legislation to prevent dermatologists from similarly offering their patients these very benefits — convenience, savings and confidence.

Certainly medicine is much more important than carpet cleaning, and pathologists aren’t carpet cleaners. They are extraordinary physicians, committed to a high calling, just as other doctors are. But that makes pathologists’ efforts to restrict trade even harder to justify. Making sure patients have access to high quality care at a reasonable cost is a critical issue.

Patients’ Interests Should Trump Doctors’

Patients and their doctors should be able to choose the consultants they want to use and to have care provided efficiently and without excessive effort or complexity. We don’t need government regulation to benefit the pecuniary interests of specialists who don’t want to compete on quality and price. Such regulation isn’t for our patients’ benefit.

Steven R. Feldman, MD, PhD
Chief Medical Editor