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MEDICAL TUESDAY . |
NEWSLETTER |
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Community For Better Health Care |
Vol X, No 2,
April 26, 2011 |
In This Issue:
1.
Featured Article:
Ayn
Rand on tax day
2.
In
the News: ObamaCare Opt Outs
3.
International Medicine: Intellectual
Dishonesty On Health-Care Issues
5.
Medical Gluttony:
Tossing Drugs into
the Toilet.
6.
Medical Myths: Information technology will
improve efficiency and safety
7.
Overheard in the Medical Staff Lounge: Is Newt Gingrich
Presidential?
8.
Voices
of Medicine: The Social Security trust fund is an Empty
Lockbox
9.
The Bookshelf: No one can
fully appreciate the great fortune we have to be Americans . . .
10.
Hippocrates
& His Kin: The modern
Squatters
11.
Related Organizations: Restoring
Accountability in Medical Practice and Society
Words of Wisdom,
Recent Postings, In Memoriam . . .
* * * * *
Always remember that Chancellor
Otto von Bismarck, the father of socialized medicine in Germany, recognized
in 1861 that a government gained loyalty by making its citizens
dependent on the state by social insurance. Thus socialized medicine, or any
single payer initiative, was born for the benefit of the state and of a
contemptuous disregard for people’s welfare.
Thus we must also remember that ObamaCare
has nothing to do with appropriate healthcare; it was similarly projected to
gain loyalty by making American citizens dependent on the government and
eliminating their choice and chance to improve their welfare or quality of
healthcare. Socialists know that once people are enslaved, freedom seems too
risky to pursue.
* * * * *
1.
Featured Article: Ayn Rand on tax day
American politics | Democracy in America
Taxes and government | The Economist | Apr 15th 2011
. . . April 15th, tax day! (But not this year; this year,
it's Emancipation Day, which is worth observing if anything is.) And probably
not coincidentally, the movie adaptation of Ayn Rand's widely-loved and loathed
novel "Atlas Shrugged" opens today at theatres nationwide. So what
could be more appropriate and entertainingly polarising than a discussion of
Ayn Rand's views on taxation?
Ayn Rand's position
on government finance is unusual, to say the least. Rand was
not an anarchist and believed in the possibility of a legitimate state, but did
not believe in taxation. This left her in the odd and almost certainly untenable
position of advocating a minimal state financed voluntarily. In her essay
"Government Financing in a Free Society", Rand wrote:
In a fully free society, taxation—or, to be exact,
payment for governmental services—would be voluntary. Since the proper services
of a government—the police, the armed forces, the law courts—are demonstrably
needed by individual citizens and affect their interests directly, the citizens
would (and should) be willing to pay for such services, as they pay for
insurance.
This is faintly ridiculous. From one side, the
libertarian anarchist will agree that people are willing to pay for these
services, but that a government monopoly in their provision will lead only to
inefficiency and abuse. From the other side, the liberal statist will defend
the government provision of the public goods Rand mentions, but will quite
rightly argue that Rand seems not to grasp perhaps the main reason government
coercion is needed, especially if one believes, as Rand does, that individuals
ought to act in their rational self-interest.
It's true that we each benefit from the availability of
genuinely public goods, but we benefit most if we are able to enjoy them
without paying for them. A rationally self-interested individual will not
voluntarily pay for public goods if she believes others will pay and she can
get a free ride. But if we're all rationally self-interested, and we know we're
all rationally self-interested, we know everyone else will also try to get
a free ride, in which case it is doubly irrational to voluntarily pitch
in. Even if you're not inclined to ride for free, why throw good money at an
enterprise bound to fail? By threatening coercion against those who refuse to
pay, the state establishes the conditions under which it would not be
pointless to pitch in—a condition in which you can be confident others
will pitch in too. Tax collection solves the "assurance problem", as
the game theorists call it.
Generally, Rand's moral and political philosophies run
aground by failing to follow the correct but counterintuitve logic of the
social contract tradition. The interests of individuals in society are best met
when limits on self-interest are observed and enforced. At a sub-political
level, the internalisation of moral constraints on self-interest is, seemingly
paradoxically, a requirement of self-interest. At the political level, the
artful application of state coercion overcomes the conflict and
mis-coordination that prevail under conditions of "natural
liberty" and establishes the peaceful and prosperous conditions of
"civil liberty". It's worth adding that, in my opinion, the
libertarian anarchist is right that if the public-goods argument justifies the
services of the night-watchman state, it also justifies much more. In my opinion,
the public-goods argument goes as far as justifying a scheme of social
insurance that indemnifies individuals against a certain degree of bad fortune.
The implausibility of voluntary-financed government
notwithstanding, elements of Rand's view remain profoundly appealing. For
example:
The principle of voluntary government financing rests on
the following premises: that the government is not the owner of the citizens’
income and, therefore, cannot hold a blank check on that income—that the nature
of the proper governmental services must be constitutionally defined and
delimited, leaving the government no power to enlarge the scope of its services
at its own arbitrary discretion. Consequently, the principle of voluntary
government financing regards the government as the servant, not the ruler, of
the citizens—as an agent who must be paid for his services, not as a benefactor
whose services are gratuitous, who dispenses something for nothing.
The general view expressed here captures much of the
reasonable moral core of the movement to restore and reinforce effective
constitutional limits on government. Many Americans believe, not unreasonably,
that far from acting always as an instrument that serves their interests,
government often acts as if citizens' lives and labour are instruments to the
special interests that control government. Indeed, the principle embedded
in Mr Obama's budget speech, that tax increases are spending cuts,
suggests the objectionable idea that all income is
government-owned, which it then "spends" by choosing not to hoover it
up in taxes. To object to this way of picturing the relationship between
citizens, their property, and their government is not to deny that the
infrastructure of security, property and law maintained by government is
necessary for a well-functioning economy that generates good jobs and decent
incomes. It is necessary. But that infrastructure is for us. We are
not for financing it. And we certainly aren't for financing whatever
extraneous functions our continually mission-creeping government happens to
have taken on. Necessary taxation is not theft. But there are margins at which
taxation becomes difficult to distinguish from theft.
As Abraham Lincoln said so well, "The legitimate
object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to
have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in
their separate, and individual capacities." Citizens reasonably resent a
government that milks them to feed programmes that fail Lincoln's test. The
inevitable problem in a democracy is that we disagree about which programmes
those are. Some economists are fond of saying that "economics is not a
morality play", but like it or not, our attitudes toward taxation are
inevitably laden with moral assumptions. It doesn't help to ignore or casually
dismiss them. It seems to me the quality and utility of our public discourse
might improve were we to do a better job of making these assumptions explicit,
and of seriously and respectfully considering whether our ideological
opposites, be they socialists or "Atlas Shrugged"
fans, might have one or two worthwhile points.
Read the whole Ayn Rand view of voluntary taxation. .
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* * * * *
2.
In the News: ObamaCare Opt Outs
States
turn down money for the law's new insurance exchanges.
It's not
often that states turn their back on money from Washington, but at least two
states may say no thanks to federal grants to implement the new federal
health-care law.
In February
the federal Department of Health and Human Services selected seven states to
get $240 million in demonstration grants this year to kick start the health-care
plan. But Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin announced last week that the Sooner
State will decline $54.6 million from the feds to establish new insurance
exchanges. Read more…
And as early
as this week the New Hampshire state house is expected to pass a bill rejecting
$666,000 the feds bequeathed to that state to start up exchanges. Two other
grant recipients—Kansas and Wisconsin—may also turn down the funds as well as
request Medicaid waivers to design their own health-care law for low-income
residents.
Oklahoma
faces a $500 million budget shortfall and at first accepted the federal health
dollars. But Oklahoma citizens approved a ballot initiative last year to block
implementation of the new law and its nearly 2,000 pages of rules and mandates.
Oklahoma is also among the nearly 30 states that have filed a lawsuit
challenging the law's constitutionality. State officials fear that taking even
one dollar of the money would run the risk of the federal government running
health care in Oklahoma.
So now the
Sooners are devising their own insurance plan to comply with the ObamaCare
mandate that every state create an insurance exchange by 2013. The Oklahoma
plan is to create an insurance "network" that would increase
portability of private employer health plans, increase the range of choices of
insurance coverage (including high deductible health-savings account plans),
allow workers and small employers to use pre-tax dollars for health coverage,
and subsidize the uninsured to purchase an insurance plan. "We think that
by relying on markets, we can do this at a much lower cost to the state than
the ObamaCare plan," Governor Fallin says.
Republicans
who control both houses in the New Hampshire legislature have reached the same
conclusion. House Speaker William O'Brien wants to return the federal money to
lower the federal deficit. That's popular in the first Presidential primary
state, where polls are finding that voters disapprove of the law by nearly a
two to one margin.
Democratic
Governor John Lynch may veto the bill, but the political trend shows that the
President's health reform is not getting any more popular with age, despite
Democratic and media predictions. The states are concluding that the more they
get to know about ObamaCare, the less they think they can afford it.
Read
the entire editorial at the WSJ – Subscription required . . .
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* * * * *
3.
International
Medicine: Intellectual
Dishonesty On Health-Care Issues
Public and private health care: facts
and logic needed
By Peter Blaikie, Special to The Gazette
One morning last week, after I had read
the Gazette headline “Hip surgery wait times fail seniors,” I heard Mike Finnerty on
Mr. Finnerty
asked each of them to answer a simple, direct and highly relevant question,
namely, “If elected, would you act to shut down all private medical services in
Quebec?” Each of the three, following the mantra clearly ordered by their
respective leaders, said exactly the same thing: “Yes, if such services
violated the Canada Health Act.”
All parties are displaying the most blatant
intellectual dishonesty on health-care issues. To borrow from Aneurin Bevan, speaking of Anthony Eden during the Suez
crisis, “If he is sincere in what he is saying then he is too stupid to be a
Prime Minister.” It is perhaps more a matter of integrity than stupidity. There
are a few simple facts that any moderately intelligent and intellectually
honest person knows about the health-care system.
First, however much those responsible seek
to deny it, we already have a two-tier system and, probably, several other
tiers as well.
Second, if an attempt were made by a
Canadian government to shut down all private health-care services, the entire
health-care system would very quickly collapse. Of course, the threat is merely
the most blatant hypocrisy, since the existence of private services is
well-known to all.
Third, in its present form, the Canadian health-care
system is not sustainable in the long term, either financially or in terms of
resources
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Canadian
Medicare does not give timely access to healthcare, it only gives access to a
waiting list.
--Canadian
Supreme Court Decision 2005
http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca/en/2005/2005scc35/2005scc35.html
* * * * *
4.
Medicare: ObamoCare
Although the federal district
courts have split on whether people can be forced to purchase government-designed
health insurance, they have assumed that Congress may constitutionally regulate
health insurance in general. But that assumption is wrong: In fact, the
congressional power to regulate "Commerce ... among the several
States" does not include authority to regulate health insurance. Under the
Constitution, health insurance is a matter of state, not federal, jurisdiction.
In assuming the contrary, the lower courts have relied
on a single erroneous U.S. Supreme Court decision, U.S. v. South-Eastern
Underwriters Association. Since the case is standing precedent, lower
courts must follow it. However, when the cases challenging the recent health
care legislation reach the Supreme Court, the justices should begin by
overruling that case.
As used in the Constitution, "commerce"
refers only to a particular subset of economic activity — primarily the buying
and selling of goods by merchants. We know this from several studies of how the
founding generation used the term. In two studies, for example, Georgetown
University Law Center professor Randy Barnett surveyed thousands of
contemporaneous uses and found this to be the dominant meaning. . .
The founding-era understanding that
"commerce" excluded most forms of insurance was honored by the
Supreme Court for more than 150 years after the Constitution was adopted. In a
string of cases, the Court affirmed that "commerce" did not include
insurance. In the most famous of these, Paul v. Virginia (1869), a
unanimous Court wrote that insurance contracts "are not articles of
commerce in any proper meaning of the word." . . .
www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=12930
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Government is not the solution to our
problems, government is the problem.
- Ronald Reagan
* * * * *
5.
Medical
Gluttony: Tossing Drugs into the Toilet.
Mary had peptic disease manifested by
heartburns that awakened her at night. Her family physician prescribed an acid
reducer in the form of Pepcid, which she felt was very effective in relieving
the daytime symptoms and eliminating the nocturnal discomfort. Another
physician prescribed Ranitidine. She had three bottles of these two acid
reducers essentially nearly full.
For reasons unknown, her physician sent
her to a gastroenterologist who told her to discard the acid reducers she had
and take Prilosec.
The Pepcid and Ranitidine, when they were
proprietary, cost $4 or $120 a month. They are now ten cents or $3 per month.
The Prilosec, before it became generic, was $5 or $150 a month. It is now 50˘
or $15 a month.
So the cost of throwing a few hundred
tablets in the toilet wasn’t all that much. But it creates a culture of tossing
medications.
Several years ago, that same attitude
would have tossed $120 or $150 into the toilet.
Medical Letter cites research that most
drugs are good for about 10 years after the expiration date. Hence, there is
seldom a reason to toss medications for symptoms that are ongoing. Drugs
manufactured in the United States are unusually stable. The exception is liquid
medications.
Physicians and nurses need to be oriented
to all cost-saving measures. Tossing good pharmaceuticals is not one of them.
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Medical Gluttony thrives in Government and Health Insurance Programs.
Gluttony Disappears with Appropriate Deductibles and Co-payments on
Every Service.
* * * * *
6.
Medical Myths: Information technology will
improve efficiency and safety.
A
large part of the savings projected from “healthcare reform” is supposed to
come from wider use of information technology. The federal government is
expected to “invest” some $45 billion in encouraging (or compelling) doctors
and hospitals to use electronic records systems.
“Information
is the lifeblood of modern medicine. Health information technology (
In
the real world, there are many problems in implementation. The University of
California San Francisco Medical Center is one institution that is quietly
writing off about a third of the $50 million it has poured into electronic
medical records over the past 5 years. The system is still not fully up and
running. UCSF terminated its contractor and is prepared to start part of the
project from scratch (Huffington Post 11/23/09).
According to
one study, between 50% and 80% of electronic health records systems fail. The
larger the EHR project, the higher the risk of failure (IEEE Spectrum 1/1/10). . .
Read the entire myth . . .
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Medical Myths Originate When the Government Designs Healthcare.
Myths Disappear When Patients Pay Appropriate Deductibles and
Co-Payments on Every Service.
* * * * *
7.
Overheard
in the Medical Staff Lounge: Is Newt Gingrich
Presidential?
Dr. Rosen: Last week we discuss how best to contribute
effectively politically. The landscape is changing. We now have Newt Gingrich
with a web machine that’s bringing in $millions. Is he a winning candidate?
Does he represent physicians' interests? Does he represent true constitutional
interests? Would he be good for America?
Dr. Yancy: I wouldn’t vote for Newt if he was the final
candidate. He tried to turn off our government and then reneged after 10 days.
Dr. Ruth: And the people that had a week off without pay
returned and got all their back pay when he got cold feet.
Dr. Michelle: That was a week and a half of additional paid
vacation for all federal workers. But did he have an option?
Dr. Yancy: Certainly. If he had kept the government shut down
for a month or two we would have saved considerable moneys.
Dr. Dave: We might also have found out that we could run the
government with significantly fewer employees.
Dr. Milton: Maybe half?
Dr. Dave: Well, maybe not that many. But I would guess we could
cut 20-30 percent without any loss in services.
Dr. Paul: How could you have possibly come up with that figure?
Dr. Milton: Have you ever gone into a government office and
found more than half really working?
Dr. Dave: It’s the culture of a government job. It’s just a
gravy train to retirement. Using sick time before or after a holiday is just
considered a benefit—like vacation time. There is no virus or bacteria that
only strikes 24 hours before a holiday.
Dr. Milton: My government patients come in with the flimsiest
excuses and want me to write a note that they can’t work for a few days.
Dr. Yancy: Have you ever tried not writing that note and
succeeded without a threat of RIGHTS?
Dr. Milton: I’ve hesitated a few times, then quickly realized
they would have their Union Organization get involved. It’s almost as if they
have a constitutional right to be out for fake sickness.
Dr. Rosen: So you’re left with an ethical dilemma. They are not
sick enough to require time off from work so you’re party to subterfuge and
unethical medical practice by writing the note.
Dr.
Michelle: I’ve been able to sweet
talk a patient into believing work would be good for him.
Dr. Milton: But you’re sweet, smart and gorgeous and could talk
almost anybody into anything you set your mind to.
Dr. Michelle: I’ve had my share of grumpy patients.
Dr. Rosen: Back to Newt. I wouldn’t vote for him because of his
lack of character. Any man who carries on an affair with his staff, then
criticizes the president for messing around with an intern, is not a role model
fit for a president.
Dr. Ruth: What really set me against him was not only him
having an affair while his wife was in the hospital with breast cancer, but
when he actually went to the hospital and told his wife in the midst of her
critical cancer time that he was divorcing her. He couldn’t even wait until she
was home to do it privately.
Dr.
Michelle: That really was
unbelievable, crude, inhumane, insensitive and so undignified that he should
never be the leader of our country. He’s a scum bag.
Dr. Milton: He’s got so much baggage that he would be the
easiest for Obama to annihilate. It would cause irreparable harm to the
constitutional party.
Dr. Rosen: Then we would really become Napoleon’s France or
Germany’s Bismarck—pouring 250 years of progress in Freedom down the drain.
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The Staff Lounge Is Where Unfiltered Medical Opinions Are Heard.
* * * * *
8.
Voices of
Medicine: A
Review of Articles by Physicians
Social Security:
It’s still an empty lockbox
By Charles
Krauthammer, MD, Opinion Writer, Washington Post ,
Last week, President Obama’s budget chief, Jack Lew,
took to his
White House blog to repeat
his claim that the Social Security trust fund is solvent through 2037. And
to chide me for suggesting otherwise. I had argued in my
last column that the trust fund is empty, indeed fictional.
If
Lew’s claim were just wrong, that would be one thing. But it provides the
intellectual justification for precisely the kind of debt denial and
entitlement complacency that his boss is now engaged in. Therefore, once more
unto the breach.
Lew
acknowledges that the Social Security surpluses of the last decades were
siphoned off to the Treasury Department and spent. He also agrees that Treasury
then deposited corresponding IOUs — called “special issue” bonds — in the
Social Security trust fund. These have real value, claims Lew. After all,
“these Treasury bonds are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S.
government in the same way that all other U.S. Treasury bonds are.”
Really? If these trust fund bonds represent anything
real, why is it that in calculating national indebtedness they are not even
included? We measure national solvency by debt/
Why?
Because the intragovernmental bond is nothing more
than a bookkeeping device that records how much one part of the U.S. government
(Treasury) owes another part of the same government (the Social Security
Administration). In judging the creditworthiness of the United States, the world
doesn’t care what the left hand owes the right. It’s all one entity. It cares
only what that one entity owes the world.
That’s why publicly held bonds are so
radically different from intragovernmental bonds. If
we default on Chinese-held debt, decades of AAA creditworthiness are destroyed,
the world stops lending to us, the dollar collapses, the economy goes into a
spiral and we become Argentina. That’s why such a default is inconceivable.
On
the other hand, what would happen to financial markets if the Treasury stopped
honoring the “special issue” bonds in the Social Security trust fund? A lot of
angry grumbling at home for sure. But externally? Nothing.
This
“default” would simply be the Treasury telling the Social Security
Administration that henceforth it would have to fend for itself in covering its
annual shortfall. How? By means-testing (cutting the benefits to the rich),
changing the inflation formula, raising the retirement age and, if necessary,
hiking the cap on income subject to the payroll tax . . .
Invoking the “full faith and credit” mantra for those
IOUs in the trust fund is empty bluster. It does not change the fact that, as
the OMB itself
acknowledged, those IOUs “do not consist of real economic assets that can
be drawn down in the future to fund benefits.” Yet Lew continues to insist that
these “special issue” trinkets will pay off seniors for the next 26 years.
Nonsense. That money is gone with the wind. Those
trust fund trinkets are nothing more than a record of past borrowings.
They say nothing about the future.
Consider: If Treasury had borrowed twice as much from
Social Security in the past — producing twice as many IOUs sitting in the
lockbox — would this mean the trust fund is today twice as strong? Solvent for
50-some years instead of just 26? Of course not. The trust fund “balances” are
mere historical record-keeping. As the OMB itself admitted, future payouts will
have to be met by future taxes and future borrowings — or by Social Security
reform that, by reducing benefits, makes such taxing and borrowing unnecessary.
There
is no third alternative. There is no free lunch. And there is nothing in the
lockbox.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
Read
Dr. Krauthammer’s entire OpEd on the Washington Post . . .
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VOM
Is an Insider's View of What Doctors are Thinking, Saying and Writing about.
* * * * *
9.
Book
Review: No one can fully appreciate
the great fortune we have to be Americans . . .
A Time For Freedom, by Lynne Cheney, Simon & Schuster, New York, © 2005, ISBN: 13-978-1-4169-0925-5, 282 pp, $15.95 US, $21.95 CAN.
“No one can fully appreciate the great fortune we have to be Americans without knowing the events that brought us to where we are today.” –Lynne Cheney
Lynne Cheney, a teacher, states in her introduction that our freedom and strength are products of the past, and although the choices made by the brave men and women who preceded us do not offer sure guidance to the future, they offer the best guidance that we have. Read more. . .
Unfortunately, fewer and fewer of us are leaving school knowing the basic facts of our history. One study found that two thirds of seventeen-year-olds could not identify the half-century in which the Civil War occurred. A survey of seniors at elite colleges and universities showed that only one out of five was familiar with the words of the Gettysburg Address. A significant number of seniors thought that Ulysses S. Grant was a general in the Revolutionary War.
Facts alone are not enough for understanding history of course, but without the facts understanding is impossible. A full appreciation of the achievement represented by the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, requires knowing that women first organized to work for the right to vote in 1848, more than seventy years before. Comprehending why the Civil War occurred in the 1860s requires knowing that our nation expanded dramatically in the 1840s. It was a question of whether new states would be free or slave that finally made it impossible to paper over the great moral contradiction that slavery represented in a nation dedicated to freedom.
Cheney feels that some dates should be locked in our memory—1492, 1607, 1620, 1776, and 1787 for starters. But it is equally important to be familiar enough with the order of events so that one has a sense of the progress of our national story. We should all understand that when the delegates to the Continental Congress declared that “all men are created equal,” they provided more than a rationale for independence; they gave inspiration to generations of men and women whose struggles would make that ideal a reality for more and ever more Americans.
This book is a time line of the events in our nation’s history. She chose to highlight our political history rather than many other areas of importance. She feels the history of the entire world ought to be a subject of interest for students. But in A Time for Freedom, she chose to start with America. This is our home—how lucky we are that it is.
We shall highlight a few dozen of the hundreds of dates she has listed hoping that will inspire you to obtain a copy of her book and search further. . .
Read the entire book review . . .
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The
Book Review Section Is an Insider’s View of What Doctors are Reading about.
* * * * *
10. Hippocrates & His Kin: The modern
Squatters
In Miami, nearly
60% of home sales last year were buyers from overseas; for newly built condos
in down town Miami, the figure jumps to 90%.
What a way to take over a State? –or a
Country?
The American
Way of Death (We’re researching the validity of this claim)
On two tablets of stone, DIETS & DYING found on Mt
Ararat, a short distance from Mt Sinai, the final word on nutrition and health
were found:
The Japanese eat very little fat or red wine and suffer fewer heart
attacks than the
British or Americans.
The French eat a lot of fat, drink a lot of red wine, and also suffer fewer
heart attacks than the British or Americans.
Italians drink excessive red wine and a lot of cheese and suffer fewer heart
attacks than the British or Americans.
Conclusion: Eat and drink what you like. Speaking English is apparently
what kills you.
The health care industry violates natural law.
The health care industry is the only sector of the economy that is
failing and there’s nothing employers can do about it. Health care is the only
product or service (outside of public education) that has consistently grown
worse over the past 30 years. Every
other product and service in our economy has improved in quality and grown less
expensive over time.
What I will do today is show you why providing health
care by ignoring or violating the laws of economics is like trying to run an
airline while ignoring or violating the laws of gravity. Because doctors and patients are no more
above the laws of economics than pilots and skydivers are above the laws of
gravity.
Excerpted from an address by
Researchers
say:
If Students Misbehave Just 2 Percent of
The Time, Teacher Effectiveness Drops By 60 Percent.
—Economic Intuition/Quarterly Journal of Economics
Two
people in discussion at the Pearly Gates as they’re waiting for Moses to sign
them in:
Well,
with me it was killer bees. It happened when I stopped to smell the roses.
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Hippocrates
and His Kin / Hippocrates Modern Colleagues
The Challenges of Yesteryear, Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow
* * * * *
11. Professionals Restoring
Accountability in Medical Practice, Government and Society:
•
John and Alieta Eck, MDs, for their first-century solution to twenty-first
century needs. With 46 million people in this country uninsured, we need an
innovative solution apart from the place of employment and apart from the
government. To read the rest of the story, go to www.zhcenter.org and check
out their history, mission statement, newsletter, and a host of other
information. For their article, "Are you really insured?," go to www.healthplanusa.net/AE-AreYouReallyInsured.htm.
•
Medi-Share Medi-Share is based on the biblical principles of caring
for and sharing in one another's burdens (as outlined in Galatians 6:2). And as
such, adhering to biblical principles of health and lifestyle are important
requirements for membership in Medi-Share.
This is not insurance.
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PATMOS EmergiClinic - where Robert Berry, MD, an emergency
physician and internist, practices. To read his story and the background for
naming his clinic PATMOS EmergiClinic - the island where John was exiled and an
acronym for "payment at time of service," go to www.patmosemergiclinic.com/ To
read more on Dr Berry, please click on the various topics at his website.
Review How
to Start a Third-Party Free Medical Practice . . .
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PRIVATE NEUROLOGY is
a Third-Party-Free Practice in Derby, NY with Larry Huntoon, MD, PhD, FANN. (http://home.earthlink.net/~doctorlrhuntoon/)
Dr Huntoon does not allow any HMO or government interference in your medical
care. "Since I am not forced to use
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To read the rest
of this section, please go to www.medicaltuesday.net/org.asp.
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Michael J.
Harris, MD - www.northernurology.com
- an active member in the American Urological Association, Association of
American Physicians and Surgeons, Societe' Internationale D'Urologie, has an
active cash'n carry practice in urology in Traverse City, Michigan. He has no
contracts, no Medicare, Medicaid, no HIPAA, just patient care. Dr Harris is
nationally recognized for his medical care system reform initiatives. To
understand that Medical Bureaucrats and Administrators are basically Medical
Illiterates telling the experts how to practice medicine, be sure to savor his
article on "Administrativectomy:
The Cure For Toxic Bureaucratosis."
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Dr Vern Cherewatenko concerning success in restoring private-based
medical practice which has grown internationally through the SimpleCare model
network. Dr Vern calls his practice PIFATOS – Pay In Full At Time Of Service,
the "Cash-Based Revolution." The patient pays in full before leaving.
Because doctor charges are anywhere from 25–50 percent inflated due to
administrative costs caused by the health insurance industry, you'll be paying
drastically reduced rates for your medical expenses. In conjunction with a
regular catastrophic health insurance policy to cover extremely costly
procedures, PIFATOS can save the average healthy adult and/or family up to
$5000/year! To read the rest of the story, go to www.simplecare.com.
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Dr David
MacDonald started Liberty Health
Group. To compare the traditional health insurance model with the Liberty
high-deductible model, go to www.libertyhealthgroup.com/Liberty_Solutions.htm.
There is extensive data available for your study. Dr Dave is available to speak
to your group on a consultative basis.
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David
J Gibson, MD, Consulting Partner of Illumination Medical, Inc. has made important contributions to the
free Medical MarketPlace in speeches and writings. His series of articles in Sacramento
Medicine can be found at www.ssvms.org. To read his "Lessons from the Past," go to www.ssvms.org/articles/0403gibson.asp. For additional articles, such as the cost of Single
Payer, go to www.healthplanusa.net/DGSinglePayer.htm; for Health Care Inflation, go to www.healthplanusa.net/DGHealthCareInflation.htm.
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ReflectiveMedical Information Systems
(RMIS), delivering
information that empowers patients, is a new venture by Dr. Gibson, one of our
contributors, and his research group which will go far in making health care
costs transparent. This site provides
access to information related to medical costs as an informational and
educational service to users of the website. This site contains general
information regarding the historical, estimates, actual and Medicare range of
amounts paid to providers and billed by providers to treat the procedures
listed. These amounts were calculated based on actual claims paid. These
amounts are not estimates of costs that may be incurred in the future. Although
national or regional representations and estimates may be displayed, data from
certain areas may not be included. You may want to
follow this development at www.ReflectiveMedical.com.
During your visit you may wish to enroll your own data to attract patients to
your practice. This is truly innovative and has been needed for a long time.
Congratulations to Dr. Gibson and staff for being at the cutting edge of
healthcare reform with transparency.
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Dr
Richard B Willner,
President,
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Semmelweis
Society International, Verner S. Waite MD, FACS, Founder; Henry Butler MD,
FACS, President; Ralph Bard MD, JD, Vice President; W. Hinnant MD, JD,
Secretary-Treasurer; is
named after Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, MD (1818-1865), an obstetrician
who has been hailed as the savior of mothers. He noted maternal mortality of
25-30 percent in the obstetrical clinic in Vienna. He also noted that the first
division of the clinic run by medical students had a death rate 2-3 times as
high as the second division run by midwives. He also noticed that medical
students came from the dissecting room to the maternity ward. He ordered the
students to wash their hands in a solution of chlorinated lime before each
examination. The maternal mortality dropped, and by 1848, no women died in
childbirth in his division. He lost his appointment the following year and was
unable to obtain a teaching appointment. Although ahead of his peers, he was
not accepted by them. When Dr Verner Waite received similar treatment from a
hospital, he organized the Semmelweis Society with his own funds using Dr
Semmelweis as a model: To read the article he wrote at my request for
Sacramento Medicine when I was editor in 1994, see www.delmeyer.net/HMCPeerRev.htm. To see Attorney Sharon Kime's response, as well as the
California Medical Board response, see www.delmeyer.net/HMCPeerRev.htm. Scroll down to read some
very interesting letters to the editor from the Medical Board of California,
from a member of the MBC, and from Deane Hillsman, MD.
To view some horror stories of atrocities against physicians and
how organized medicine still treats this problem, please go to www.semmelweissociety.net.
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Dennis
Gabos, MD, President of
the Society for the Education of Physicians and Patients (SEPP), is
making efforts in Protecting, Preserving, and Promoting the Rights, Freedoms
and Responsibilities of Patients and Health Care Professionals. For more
information, go to www.sepp.net.
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Robert
J Cihak, MD, former
president of the AAPS, and Michael Arnold Glueck, M.D, who wrote an
informative Medicine Men column at NewsMax, have now retired. Please log
on to review the archives.
He now has a new column with Richard Dolinar, MD, worth reading at www.thenewstribune.com/opinion/othervoices/story/835508.html
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The
Association of American Physicians & Surgeons (www.AAPSonline.org), The Voice for Private
Physicians Since 1943 representing physicians in their struggles against
bureaucratic medicine, loss of medical privacy, and intrusion by the government
into the personal and confidential relationship between patients and their
physicians. Be sure to read News of the Day in
Perspective. Don't miss the "AAPS News,"
written by Jane Orient, MD, and archived on this site which provides valuable
information on a monthly basis. Browse the archives of their official organ,
the Journal of American Physicians and
Surgeons, with Larry Huntoon, MD, PhD, a neurologist in New York, as
the Editor-in-Chief. There are a number of important articles that can be
accessed from the Table of
Contents.
The AAPS California
Chapter is an unincorporated
association made up of members. The Goal of the AAPS California Chapter is to
carry on the activities of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons
(AAPS) on a statewide basis. This is accomplished by having meetings and
providing communications that support the medical professional needs and
interests of independent physicians in private practice. To join the AAPS
California Chapter, all you need to do is join national AAPS and be a physician
licensed to practice in the State of California. There is no additional cost or
fee to be a member of the AAPS California State Chapter.
Go to California
Chapter Web Page . . .
Bottom
line: "We are the best deal Physicians can get from a statewide physician
based organization!"
PA-AAPS is the Pennsylvania Chapter of the Association of
American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), a non-partisan professional
association of physicians in all types of practices and specialties across the
country. Since 1943, AAPS has been dedicated to the highest ethical standards
of the Oath of Hippocrates and to preserving the sanctity of the
patient-physician relationship and the practice of private medicine. We welcome
all physicians (M.D. and D.O.) as members. Podiatrists, dentists, chiropractors
and other medical professionals are welcome to join as professional associate
members. Staff members and the public are welcome as associate members. Medical
students are welcome to join free of charge.
Our motto, "omnia pro aegroto"
means "all for the patient."
“Imagination
is more important than knowledge.” –Albert Einstein
“Don’t
argue with a fool. The spectators can’t tell the difference.” –Charles Nalin
“Anyone
who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” –Albert Einstein
Some Recent
Postings
In The April 12 Issue: