By Kevin Pezzi, MD
GCC/Staff
Mar. 8, 2010

Anyone who supports government-run healthcare fundamentally misunderstands how physicians practice medicine.

We don’t do it by waving magic wands or receiving divine inspirations; we do it by ordering tests, performing procedures, and prescribing drugs.

Anyone who interferes with the ability of doctors to do those things is hampering our ability to help patients.

When I worked in a VA hospital, I witnessed how tests could be canceled by employees, ultimately representing the government, who had considerably less training than physicians.

When the government employee canceled my order, she did not care that the patient might die or just suffer longer; she cared about doing what she was ordered to do by the government bureaucracy so she could keep receiving her paycheck.

Anyone who values his life, or the lives of loved ones, should fear any healthcare system controlled by the government because the government excels at creating massive bureaucracies, such as those in VA hospitals, in which employees who are not doctors can overrule physician orders.

No President or Congressman would have the guts to personally tell a doctor what he can and cannot do, but the need of politicians to control us is so strong that they create cold and uncaring bureaucracies to do the dirty work for them.

Who is on the short end of the stick when politicians ration care? Patients, who pay for that rationing with more suffering and an increased risk of death.

President Obama tried to dismiss the notion of government “death panels” by claiming that he would create no such bureaucracy.

He doesn’t need to do that to achieve his objectives because every government bureaucracy in which doctors can be overruled by people who don’t know what they are doing is functionally a death panel even though it is never labeled as such.

President Obama is smart enough to realize the inherent dangers of a system in which the most knowledgeable people–doctors–can have their orders canceled by employees who don’t know how to practice medicine and know nothing about the patient in question.

Thus, by claiming there would be no “death panels,” Obama may have tried to deceive us, or perhaps he simply did not know what he was talking about. In either case, it does not bode well for the American people.

If he is willing to lie about policies that might push you or a loved one into a grave a few decades too soon, you should wonder about his other prevarications.

On the other hand, if he is simply misinformed, he is being dangerously reckless by meddling in matters that he does not fully understand.

Unlike President Obama, I have worked in a VA hospital and witnessed how they ration care: mindlessly and often counterproductively.

The test I mentioned above was ordered to determine if a patient was ready for surgery, but it was canceled by the lab technician because she said they exceeded their budget for the week.

The government did not save anything by canceling the test because the $50 it cost was spent early the next week when I reordered it.

Furthermore, the government had to pay for a few more days of hospitalization. The net result wasn’t a savings; it was a huge additional expense.

This isn’t being penny wise and pound foolish, this is being moronic. Misguided or not, it is one of the heavy-handed ways the government tried to economize on healthcare back in the mid-1980s when our economy was in much better shape than it currently is.

Now that we are in a serious economic crisis, the government surely will be no less eager to try saving money.

We will be subjected to countless limitations on healthcare, and doctors will be coerced into giving third-rate care whenever it is less expensive.

The one thing the government refuses to do is listening to doctors with innovative ideas on how to substantially improve our health while spending much less on healthcare.

The government gives lip service to basic preventive care while ignoring low-cost (or no-cost) preventive measures that would do much more for our health, happiness, and brainpower.

Those benefits would help revitalize our economy by increasing productivity and innovation. We cannot compete with China in terms of cost of production, but we can leave them in the dust in terms of inventiveness.

 However, for a variety of reasons–many pertaining to health–our pace of innovation has stagnated.

Ultimately, politicians are poor listeners because they don’t have to be. Who needs good ideas when you have a government so powerful that it can force us to accept the wacky ideas they insist on cramming down our throats?

 

Source: ER Doctor 

 

 

Editor’s Note: We would like to know what you think. dan@goldcoastchronicle.com