Is Retainer Medicine The Only Way To Practice Ethical Primary Care?
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*
