The Obama team has allowed a mere two weeks, over the busy holiday season, for collecting all the “input” they need for rapidly forcing a radical “health system reform” plan through Congress. House parties are explicitly designed to elicit tearjerkers showing the “need” for precisely the changes that the Obama/Kennedy/Daschle/Baucus/”stakeholders” forces intend to implement.
On very short notice, AAPS organized a virtual house party, with input from a number of specialties around the country. The doctors warned that the monopolistic stranglehold of big insurers would be tightened, as the insurance industry traded its support for a mandate forcing some 45 million new customers to buy its product.
Universal “coverage” would be a “currency without a marketplace,” like in Massachusetts, without the personnel and facilities to cope with burgeoning demand from healthy, newly entitled consumers. Careful diagnosis and personalized treatment would be further diminished, to be replaced by 11-minute shotgun visits with minimally trained, protocol-wielding physician extenders.
The Hippocratic Oath is already a joke, stated one pathologist, because it is impossible in many cases to comply. Resistance to the destruction of medicine gets one branded as a “disruptive physician.”
Information technology, the panacea for all problems, is a hugely expensive debacle as currently being implemented, physicians say. Physicians are turned into data entry clerks, yet the relevant data may be impossible to find.
Patients may not care that their primary-care physician is only earning $30,000/yr while working harder than ever, but may soon find that what they consider a $10 office visit is not available at any price.
Myths about superior care under socialized medicine, administrative cost savings, the vast potential of the “medical home,” the benefits of “evidence-based medicine,” and other widely believed fantasies need to be debunked by physicians, stated Dr. Jane Orient, AAPS executive director, who moderated the conference.
Powerful special interests are lined up behind the proposed program, and few are left to speak against it. It is vital that Americans hear from their doctors.
Please add your comments below to the edited transcript of the meeting.
