jeffreymark

ET TU LIBERAL MEDIA?

Has liberal media outlet Brute (CBS) turned on Caesar Obama? Even his most faithful propagandists are publishing numbers antagonistic to Obama's public sector revolution:

HEALTH CARE-A PHYSICIAN'S VIEW

I do not comment often about health care. In fact, I state quite often I am an Economics 101 illiterate. I do, however, appreciate and listen to conservatives who study the issue like Godfather blogger Hugh Hewitt. The Don Hewitt posted a provocative piece from a retired physician on his website today. The posting sounds a sort of Clarion call to the non medical community, exhorting them to wake up now and defeat public health care or face the consequences of employing amateur physicians-a scary thought. I posted the entire piece below because of its compelling nature:

I’m an Internal Medicine sub-specialist in Infectious Diseases retired from Academic Medicine, now in medical publishing (at the rip ole age of early 40’s).  I have been listening to your show each evening.  Thank you for focusing exclusively on health care reform.  My upfront disclaimer on what I’ve “done to fix things”: I have contributed to Docs4patientcare, but I have gone above & beyond the call of duty by announcing on my Facebook that you are doing an excellent job with your interviews, and telling everybody to listen to your show.  Yay for me.

You have done well so far in airing the current problems that physicians have with Medicare (& Medicaid) reimbursements. One of your surgeon callers adequately described that an in-house level III consult is worth $70 (of which overhead & taxes take ?), and few physicians can be motivated to get up at 2 a.m. & drive to the hospital, stay for half the night, for roughly $35, no matter how altruistic. 

To play devil’s advocate, I’d like to point out what my liberal non-physician friends say when the cuts in reimbursements are discussed:  “Well, if your income of $185K goes down to $150K, then you’re still making $80K more than I am, so I think you can survive…” (From a strictly philosophical position, there are so many things wrong with this statement that I don’t know where to begin.) But, let’s focus on the pragmatic.  Average Joe doesn’t understand the debt to income ratio incurred by physicians (with debt taking many forms, not only financial). And society has done a great job of stigmatizing physicians as being money-grubbing entrepreneurs who don’t give a damn about patients, such that Average Joe actually feels almost liberated when reimbursements are cut.

I want to point out that current medical students today incur more than $125,000 for 4 years of med school (if they go to a cheap state school). This figure does not include college. The repayment schedule for my debt ($100K, because I graduated in the 1990’s) is $700/month and extends until I’m 65 years old. As a subspecialist physician, I trained for 14 years to do what I do (4 college 4 med school 4 med/peds residency 2 fellowship).  While my friends and neighbors were becoming teachers and loan officers and hair stylists and restaurateurs and claims adjusters, I was going to school learning how to take care of old folks, babies, and AIDS patients. Not only did I incur debt, but concurrently, I deferred income for almost a decade. So, while my friends were buying homes and having babies, again, I was learning to take care of AIDS patients.  

All of this was my choice, and I do not regret that choice. But let me be clear: medical students will not continue to make these sacrifices for peanuts. They will not.  And the Americans who now sit idly by, watching politicians abscond with their health care—all for ideology, will one day wake up to a health care system run by nurse practitioners & physician assistants because they are cheap. And I don’t say that to disparage NPs & PAs. But a Master’s degree does not rival 14 years of training to understand complex disease.  And If you’ve got bacteria growing in your blood or you’re having a heart attack, you don’t want “adequate” care.  You want fantastic care—that only 14 years of training gets you. In no other profession—not teaching, not law enforcement, not journalism—are people expected to make these kinds of sacrifices—financial, familial, emotional, intellectual.  No other profession.  If you want future doctors, you’d better invest in them, because no person is going to go through all this for minimal salary.  They’d be stupid to do that.  And medical students might be a lot of things, but they aren’t stupid.

Thank you for calling attention to these matters,

CM

PS: as one final shocker, I’d like to tell you the salary I had a subspecialty trained Academic ID doc.  As Assist Professor, my salary was $90,000/year, for which I was expected to teach, conduct research, & provide patient care.  I worked 80-100 hrs/week.  My NP who was employed at my HIV clinic, who worked 3 full days/week, was salaried at $80,000.

CONSERVATIVE TABLOID JOURNALISM

With the election over and anger at the mainstream media still seething, some conservative outlets look a little tabloidish in their coverage of president elect Obama. This recent article from World Net Daily provides a case in point:

The strain of the long campaign and a frenetic transition period is beginning to wear on the face of President-elect Barack Obama, who has developed a facial tic under his right eye.
The tic on the lower part of his right orbital bone is clearly visible in his recent interview with ABC's Barbara Walters. Campaign insiders say it first emerged during the primary season and has now become chronic.
A facial tic is a repetitive, spasmodic movement often involving the eyes and facial muscles. The cause of tics is unknown, but stress appears to increase their severity.
"The patients I've treated with tic disorders had one thing in common: They knew that the tics worsened when they were under stress," said Dr. Robert T. London, a psychiatrist with the New York University Medical Center.

So what if Obama feels a little stress. Presidents age rather quickly. Instead of focusing on Obama's negatives we ought to applaud his centrist appointments and rigorously engage him in policy debate when he veers to the left. But, targeting a few minor physical quirks reeks of conservative hypocrisy.

OLDER ADULTS POSSESS MORE WISDOM?

As we age we realize that we develop a little adult ADD. Folks at the NY Times explain why, and it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out:

When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong. Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit. The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, “Progress in Brain Research.” Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.

“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”

RUN DOWN OF DEM'S BIG BROTHER HEALTH CARE

Health care concerns most Americans. They comprehend the real challenge of meeting rising costs in the market. Politicians, more particularly Dems, address those fears. In fact, Dems always hype the issues for their own selfish opportunism. A sea of information exists out there sure to keep voters frantically swimming and fighting to keep the sharks of confusion at bay. Benjamin Zycher of Investors Business Daily puts the microscope to the Dems' latest plans which he declares significantly hurt the consumer. He summarily suggests why government controlled health care is a disaster waiting to happen explaining:

And so the Democrat promise that those who prefer private coverage will be able to keep it, and that the health-insurance market would continue to enjoy the broader economic advantages offered by a private system, borders on the naive or the cynical. Why does this outcome matter?Because governments have interest groups, not patients, and thus face powerful political pressures to squeeze both providers and patients in response to the budget demands of others. The inevitable result is waiting lists, denial of coverage, underinvestment in medical technologies and the long-run degradation of health care quality observed under all single-payer systems. The more "universal" the coverage, the greater the budget pressures, and so the more powerful the forces yielding reduced health-care quality. That's why single-payer "universal" coverage is the enemy of health care, and it's the inevitable outcome of the Democratic proposals.

Continue reading IBD here.

OLDER ADULT VISION

As adults age their tolerance for blurred vision increases. Read the article and take the vision test here.

NEW PROPOSED TREATMENT FOR TOUGH BUGS

New treatment for drug resistant bacteria may lurk around the corner. According to Wired:

As traditional antibiotics prove increasingly ineffective against common infections, scientists think they've found a new treatment: telling bacteria to kill themselves. Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have discovered a protein they call "extracellular death factor" (EDF). Bacteria use EDF to regulate their colonies by inducing suicide in some cells. The protein could be used to create a new class of antibiotics that would effectively treat bacterial species that have grown resistant to conventional antibiotics. A particularly virulent staph bug has caused recent deaths and severe illness. "We need multiple mechanisms to control these bacterial infections," said Clay Fuqua, an Indiana University professor specializing in intercellular communication, who was not involved in the study. "This provides us with a novel way of doing that.

A TYPICAL HILLARYCARE DOCTOR

Our private investigator, Delbert Muldoon, secretly filmed one of Hillary's prize doctors in action . He's a dentist from Hollywood. Delbert informs me Hillary asked this genius to serve as a poster boy for the new Hillarycare plan. Sorry about the less than perfect film quality. I'm a poor blogger and can't afford much. And if Delbert doesn't improve I will withhold his $10.00 Christmas bonus this year.

HILLARYCARE OUGHT TO SCARE US

Hillary's back at the healthcare drawing board again and Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank offers this passionate warning:

Here we go again. HillaryCare is back, and its apparent that Sen. Clinton has learned little since the American people overwhelmingly rejected her last attempt to overhaul the U.S. health care system. Once again her plan, which would cost $110 billion per year in new taxes, calls for greater government control over American health care. If her plan were to pass this time, it would mean higher taxes, lost jobs, less patient choice, and poorer quality health care.

Among the worst features of her proposal:

An individual mandate. Sen. Clinton would require every American to purchase health insurance or face penalties. There are many problems with such a mandate. It restricts individual choice and liberty. It will require a massive new bureaucracy to enforce. And it sets in motion a whole series of regulatory requirements that will ultimately lead to greater government control of our health care.

An employer mandate. Sen. Clinton would impose a “play or pay “ mandate on American businesses, requiring them to provide workers with health insurance or pay an additional tax into a government insurance fund. Such a mandate simply increases the cost of hiring workers, meaning employers will inevitably hire fewer workers. Some may even be forced to layoff current employees and others will offset their costs by reducing wages or wage increases.

Expanding government programs. Sen. Clinton would expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to provide benefits for middle-class families. Yet studies show that many of those who would be covered by such an expansion already have private health insurance. Thus, Sen. Clinton would simply be moving people from private insurance to taxpayer-funded government care. She would also allow people under age 65 to “buy-in” to Medicare despite the fact that the program is already facing a financial crisis.

Insurance regulation. Senator Clinton would require insurance companies to accept all applicants regardless of their health, and would impose “community rating” on health insurance premiums. As a result the young and healthy will be forced to pay more in order to subsidize the older and sicker. And those who practice healthy lifestyles will pay more to subsidize the irresponsible.

With health care, as with so many other things, Hillary Clinton clearly trusts big government more than she trusts the free market and the American people.

Real Clear Politics lists various media takes on the plan.

I'm more concerned about the plight of the wayward souls who refuses to cooperate than I am the cost of this monolith.

SOME THOUGHTS ON HEALTHCARE

We hear a lot about America's uninsured. One source concludes:

We have to wonder just how large a crisis there really is.

If we believe the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is a frequent source for the mainstream media, Americans who do not qualify for current government programs and who make less than $50,000 a year total somewhere between 13.9 million and 8.2 million, no more than 5 percent of the population. Furthermore, according to the Congressional Budget Office, 45 percent of uninsured people will be uninsured for less than four months.

Which brings us to the ultimate question: Does it make any sense to destroy a health care system that 5 out of 100 people do not have adequate access to? Rational people will, of course, say “no.”

Read the analysis that lead to this conclusion here.
(Hat tip:The Doctor Is In)

Of course this issue constitutes another crisis in the long line of mythological crises invented to empower the Dems. My Doctor friends assure me that the effort to enforce some sort of universal healthcare may drive a legion of medical professionals out of business.