March 24th, 2010 by DrRich in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion, Primary Care Wednesdays
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DrRich is obviously far more intelligent than those wayward Democrat Congresspersons, whose last-minute “yes” votes Speaker Pelosi is seducing with her winning smile, and with her double-super-hope-to-die promise that the Senate will surely agree with the reconciliation package the House has finally assembled.
Unlike Pelosi’s reluctant Blue Dogs, DrRich understands that once the House has deemed the Senate bill to have been passed, and the President signs it into law, and the confetti drops and the champagne pops and the press goes into raptures and the work begins to revise Mt.Rushmore, the odds immediately become vanishingly small that the President, the Senate, or even the 200 House Democrats who really like the new law, will actually then embark on a new, prolonged, contentious spectacle of a reconciliation fight in the Senate.
Rather, once healthcare reform becomes law, political expediency dictates that we in the teeming masses never hear another word about healthcare until after the November elections. We will be distracted by more pressing matters, from which there will be many to choose — gasoline prices, Iranian nuclear weapons, economic collapses in the PIIGs, etc.
Now, DrRich does not have the stamina to study the new law all at once as a whole. He must bite off little pieces. And the first thing he sought in embarking on his study of our new healthcare system was evidence of how the new law would rescue the Primary Care Physician (PCP). Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Covert Rationing Blog*
March 15th, 2010 by DrRich in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion
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Seeing President Obama traveling the land this week, delivering yet more speeches on the critical importance of passing THIS healthcare reform legislation NOW, makes DrRich shake his head in wonderment.
For one thing, the President’s rhetoric on healthcare reform is already stale. As he himself has said, the arguing has gone on long enough; minds are made up. And the President seems to have nothing new to say.
We proles, in fact, know that the status quo is unacceptable, and that the health insurance companies are evil and are assiduously pricing people out of the market just as fast as they can; and we have concluded that something needs to be done. The fact that the majority of us have not made the connection between “something needs to be done” and “this is the only solution that we may consider” is not, as the President has claimed, due to the fact that he hasn’t explained it to us often enough. We just don’t like the solution he and his party have settled upon. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Covert Rationing Blog*
March 5th, 2010 by DrRich in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion
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DrRich is pleased to note that events have so quickly confirmed the explanation he gave, in his last post, regarding what the health insurance companies are up to by choosing to massively increase insurance premiums at this critical juncture. The insurance companies, to repeat, are willfully embracing their assigned role as “villain,” in order to get apparently stalled healthcare reforms back on track.
A mere few hours after DrRich had posted, Kathleen Sibelius issued a press release angrily documenting several additional requests for large rate increases by health insurance companies all across the land, and pointedly reminding us regular folks that healthcare reform would prevent these greedy companies from committing such abusive and harmful acts. And thus has the administration now officially established runaway health insurance premiums as the crisis of the moment. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Covert Rationing Blog*
February 16th, 2010 by DrRich in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion
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In his past few posts, DrRich has offered a substantive criticism of the new code of medical ethics which has now been formally adopted by over 120 physicians’ organizations across the globe. (See here, here and here.) Fundamentally, the New Ethics abrogates the physician’s classic obligation to always place the welfare of their individual patients first, by adding to it a new and competing ethical obligation (called Social Justice), which requires doctors to work toward “the fair distribution of healthcare resources.”
The New Ethics was explicitly born of the frustration felt by physicians as a result of the multitude of coercions the payers have thought up to force them to place the needs of the payers (the proxy for “society”), ahead of the needs of their patients. Thanks to the New Ethics, doctors can now bend to this coercion without violating their ethical standards. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Covert Rationing Blog*
February 6th, 2010 by DrRich in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion
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A few days ago Mr. Doherty (who is also the ACP’s Senior Vice President of Governmental Affairs and Public Policy), graciously agreed to engage in this discussion, and promised to do so after consulting with the ACP’s Committee on Ethics, Professionalism, and Human Rights.
DrRich had hoped that Mr. Doherty would reply with a post on his ACP blog, which (since it likely has a vastly greater readership than the CRB), would more effectively give this topic some much-needed airing – and in particular, might engage some of the ACP’s membership (specialists in internal medicine) in this important discussion. DrRich was disappointed, then, when the reply came today in the form of a comment, which was tacked on to a long queue of reader’s comments at the end of DrRich’s posting.
DrRich was also very disappointed by the content of the reply which, fundamentally, was: This is a non-issue, and even if it was an issue, it’s now a settled issue. (So go away.) Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Covert Rationing Blog*
