"Doctors on Health-Care Reform" A revealing Wall Street Journal op ed

Betsy McCaughey: Doctors on Health-Care Reform - WSJ.com

Straight talk. A couple of excerpts:

Dr. Cohen: "Let's talk about specialization for a moment. . . . We don't go to our general attorney when we have a patent problem, but they're telling us to do this now in medicine. We have different types of engineers, even journalists. There's a financial writer, there's a sportswriter . . . . Now in health care we're telling everybody, 'you just go to the guy who's your general doc. He's going to know everything and maybe we'll find a specialist for you if the panel decides maybe you're sick enough to need a specialist.' It really doesn't make sense at all."

and - regarding cost cutting -

Dr. Fields: "Government is in the process of duplicating everything that managed care did for the last 15 years that was reviled by everybody and which we fought very hard to overcome, The courts finally said 'You can't have withholds, you can't pay people to deny care. You can't have gag rules.' The government is in the process of doing all that. Massachusetts is about to establish capitation [a fixed payment remitted at regular intervals to a medical provider] as the rule of the state. Capitation was the wort thing that ever happened to medical care."

Dr. Joel Kassimir, dermatologist, Mt. Sinai Hospital, New York: "We're now being told by physicians advising the president that we take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously."

Dr. Tracy Pfeifer, plastic surgeon, president, New York Regional Society of Plastic Surgeons: "When physicians graduate from medical school we take an oath, the Hippocratic Oath, to do no harm to our patients. It's a very important philosophy to us and we uphold it and hold it very dear to our hearts. Plato, another philosopher, used to say things like 'Those with a poor physical constitution should be allowed to die. The weak and the ill-constituted shall perish.' These government programs that are being proposed I think are very scary in the sense that physicians could be induced to violate the Hippocratic Oath.

"There's a limit to how much of a financial penalty each individual practitioner is going to be able to bear. . . . If the patient is sitting in the examination room with us and they're wondering, 'Is the doctor not ordering a test for me because he's going to get penalized if he does it?' This is a major, major problem for patients and physicians alike."

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