G. Keith Smith, M.D.
Surgery Center of Oklahoma
November 2012
…now that the government is going to pay for the care, the government is going to decide what care you get. They will have no trouble finding “scientists” to find whatever they need for them to find, not unlike the global warming “scientific” findings. I guess the federal government doesn’t have to list their conflicts of interest when they are commissioning a study!
I was taught in medical school that a surgeon who has never taken out a normal appendix has missed the diagnosis many times. In other words, a certain percentage of these operations are necessarily unnecessary in order to catch all of the sick patients. Then there’s the piece of mind issue: ”Your breast has a cancerous lump, but studies show that we should leave it in you and the government won’t pay for its removal anyway.” Shouldn’t the patient and her physician decide together? Is it not clear that deciding what care you receive goes hand in hand with ceding authority to pay for your “care”
Mammograms are the poster child of preventative health screening. Prostate antigen screenings are another preventative tool that are under scrutiny by government-paid researchers, finding (SHOCK!) that this is also unnecessary. So much for a focus on preventing disease. If government is going to make women keep their cancer, I think they should let them keep their large sodas too.
Read the entire article at Surgery Center of Oklahoma.
Also at the site:
Lack of Coverage Doesn’t Mean Lack of Care
During a radio interview the day before yesterday, a caller, a surgeon from Ohio, made an incredibly insightful point. I had just repeated Jane Orient’s pithy quote, “coverage doesn’t mean care,” the idea being that just because you have an insurance card in your wallet doesn’t mean that a physician will see you. His point: ”lack of coverage doesn’t mean lack of care.”
This may seem obvious, but think about what he said and what he does for a living. He treats patients (as a surgeon!) who have no insurance. A lot of them. After the radio interview was over I had this thought. It’s not that so many folks lack health insurance. It’s that corporate medicine charges so much for healthcare that insurance seems more necessary than it is. Ironically, it’s the presence of insurance that renders these high prices…
The “Kenya-Care Pathway” Coming Soon
The National Health Service in Great Britain has made no secret about their use of the “Liverpool Care Pathway” as their favorite method to kill sick people. They have even admitted to using this method, which consists of denying food and water to patients while simultaneously sedating them, to free up hospital beds for those waiting. About 133,000 patients per year. In Great Britain. Euthanasia is standard in countries that have socialized the resources necessary to deliver health care, as having adopted the “we’re all in this together,” Marxist philosophy, puts the “good” of society ahead of individual rights. After all, you just can’t have all of these sick folks draining the “public,” “community” resources when they could be put to “better” uses, according to the central planners. Wow. These folks must be really smart to know who should live and who should die. I can’t imagine the “gunvernment” abusing this sort of power, can you?
Whether it’s rationing through death panels or shortage-causing price controls, the socialistic Unaffordable Care Act will bring murder to medicine just like all the rest of the countries that have gone down this road…
The doctor also linked to this: Now sick babies go on death pathway: Doctor’s haunting testimony reveals how children are put on end-of-life plan
- Practice of withdrawing food and fluid by tube being used on young patients
- Doctor admits starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in neonatal unit
- Liverpool Care Pathway subject of independent inquiry ordered by ministers
- Investigation, including child patients, will look at whether cash payments to hospitals to hit death pathway targets have influenced doctors’ decisions
Read it.
