Are Doctors Too Focused On Doing Everything For The Patient?
If you’ve spoken to any of your physicians about the Health Care bill lately, you more than likely got an ear full. And not a positive response either. One of my physicians said that he and about a third of other doctor’s he knows will retire if the bill passes.
Where will that leave us? Under the care of over-worked physicians that can’t afford to retire, they’re too young, or maybe they even support health care reform??? Where will new doctors come from? Who will even want to enter the field of medicine if they are under a “dictatorship?” Who would want to study that many years and then work under a government run health care system? Which patients would they be allowed to treat? How would they handle turning away those patients that are elderly or disabled? What about patients not deemed important enough to receive treatment? Doctors and would-be doctors would be faced with both legal and ethical questions.
I can’t even begin to imagine the struggles the doctors and patients would be subjected to.
On Friday’s Rush Limbaugh Show, a physician called in and shared his thoughts on the new Health Care bill.
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT- From Rush Limbaugh’s Show – August 28, 2009
A Version of Obamacare Will Pass
RUSH: In Philadelphia. Richard, welcome to the EIB Network, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hi. Good afternoon. I’m a physician in Philadelphia, and when I read that story by Betsy McCaughey in the Wall Street Journal yesterday — I’m so glad that you brought it up — it actually made me physically ill. As a physician reading that, I think of the Hippocratic Oath. I mean, how can you look a patient and the family in the eye and say, “You’re outta luck because some mad scientist, Ezekiel Emanuel, is telling them you’re not worth it.”
RUSH: Let me explain to the audience that may not have heard this yesterday what it was that made you physically ill. Ezekiel Emanuel…. There’s a story written by Betsy McCaughey in the Wall Street Journal, a column, and Ezekiel Emanuel is the number one health care advisor to President Obama. He’s the brother of Rahm Emanuel, the ballerina, who is the chief of staff. Ezekiel Emanuel said the big problem with medicine is the Hippocratic Oath, that doctors are too focused on doing everything for the patient. Doctors have to be more focused on the good of society and make decisions as to, “Hey, it’s not worth treating this patient. We got three 70 year olds and the resources might be better spent on a 16-year-old who’s sick, who’s got a longer life.” So the whole notion here that there aren’t any death panels? The lead advocate for Obamacare is thinking things like this and has written about them. And that’s what Richard in Philadelphia here, a doctor, is upset about.
(For the rest of the story, click on the above link.)
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