Podcast:

It should by now be obvious to everyone that, in its great push to take over the American healthcare system, our government will do everything it must to eliminate private practice physicians. This is necessary because Obamacare (or any government-controlled healthcare system) simply cannot operate unless physicians cooperate completely with the Central Authority. Physician behavior absolutely must be controlled, and so doctors who insist on acting independently must either be reeducated or eliminated.

(Don’t get too exercised about DrRich’s language here – he is talking mainly about forcing recalcitrants into early retirement, or career changes. The other kind of “elimination” probably will not become necessary.)

Accordingly, under Obamacare all doctors are to be driven into federally-sanctioned organizations that will operate strictly under government directives. The current parlance for such an organization is the “Accountable Care Organization.”

The ACOs will be run by administrators who (theoretically) will become expert at navigating the morass of rules and regulations now being conjured up under Obamacare.  These administrators will interpret the rules and regulations in such a way as to determine The Way It Must Be Done, and then will pass The Way It Must Be Done down to the ACOs’ clinical chiefs (doctors who perhaps used to practice medicine, and maybe still do, a little, but who are now mainly brevet administrators), and the clinical chiefs will finally pass the restrictive rules of engagement down to the doctors who will actually take care of the patients. These doctors, struggling in the trenches, will attempt assiduously to follow those rules without exception, if they would like to keep their jobs as well as avoid a federal fraud rap. The patients, of course, will get whatever they get, but always with official assurances that whatever it is they get, it will be of the highest quality.

As DrRich has pointed out, doctors have very little leverage under this kind of system. Not only do they have the full weight of the federal government pushing them toward their fate as functionaries within ACOs, but they also are being pushed to so assimilate by their own professional organizations. Indeed, thanks to the New Age medical ethics which their professional organizations have promulgated on their behalf, joining collectives such as ACOs is about to become the only ethical way of practicing medicine. (DrRich has shown that this is explicitly so, and that Dr. Berwick agrees.) Doctors who try to make a go of it on their own will not only be practicing extra-legally, but also extra-ethically.

So this is where we are headed.

But we’re not there yet. Far too many physicians are still fundamentally independent-minded; there is still a lot of work to be done to get all the doctors to assimilate into the Borg.

And a major step in this direction will be to eliminate Independent Practice Associations. While the systematic emasculation of IPAs has been going on for years, it is to accelerate rapidly under Obamacare.

IPAs are groups of doctors who own independent medical practices, and who join together to provide bulk services to health insurers at rates of payment that are negotiated collectively. IPAs have a long and respected history for over a half-century. But they have been on the Fed’s hit list since at least the Clinton administration.

The rules under which IPAs must operate in legally negotiating with insurance companies have become complex, illogical, restrictive, arbitrary and ultimately ironic. The full weight of the federal government has been brought to bear against IPAs, apparently to protect the large and powerful health insurance companies, not to mention government health insurers, against “price fixing” by independent doctors – while simultaneously imposing price fixing by those same insurers upon the IPA physicians .

So: not only is it a violation of anti-trust for two random doctors to have a cup of coffee and mention anything to each other about their respective reimbursement rates, it is also illegal for fellow members of an IPA (who are joined together in collective bargaining with insurers) to do so. Indeed, the only kind of negotiation that is apparently allowed (“apparently” because the actual rules are not explicit but implied, and change arbitrarily depending on which administrators are running the Federal Trade Commission) is called the “messenger model” of negotiation.  The messenger model is necessitated by the fact that physician members of the IPA are not allowed to communicate with each other about rates, so each IPA must hire a “negotiator” who communicates between individual physician IPA members and the insurer. Furthermore, physicians are not allowed to declare to the insurer what level of reimbursement they will accept (because that would be price fixing), but rather, they can only hear the proposed reimbursement rates from the insurer, and accept or reject them. And in recent years, rejecting the offer by insurers, especially government insurers, has sometimes been determined also to be physician price fixing. This system, for reasons unfathomable to DrRich, is NOT to be considered price fixing on the part of the insurers.

DrRich is not sure he has this entirely right, because it is far more complex than he has allowed, and indeed, the rules are manifestly changeable and unclear, even to professional IPA negotiators.

In fact, it has proven to be very easy (and progressively easier as the years have gone by) for IPAs to get into serious trouble with the FTC, and incur massive fines, for “violations” that are not only fundamentally harmless to any party, but that had been perfectly acceptable behaviors in the recent past. To get the full flavor of the runaway prosecutorial zeal with which the FTC has been acting against IPAs, DrRich strongly recommends that you read this article in the December Reason Magazine by S. M. Oliva. (Many thanks to concerned reader Robert R. for pointing DrRich to this article.)

When the FTC decides to prosecute an IPA for price fixing or other violations-du-jour of the negotiating process, the IPA’s only reasonable course of action is to cave in immediately, sign a consent decree, pay the always-huge and always-arbitrary fine, and then abjectly accept whatever reimbursement rates the insurance company is willing to pay. This resolution to federal charges is unattractive, but at least it gives the IPA some chance of continued survival.

And if you don’t like the terms of the consent decree being imposed upon you, for God’s sake keep your mouth shut about it. When the director of a Colorado IPA recently told the press that her organization had done nothing materially wrong, but had signed the consent decree because they simply could not afford to fight the FTC in court (a truism for any IPA), the FTC sanctioned her as an individual, and barred her from negotiating with insurance companies for two years (effectively ending her career, simply for exercising her right of free speech). Even one of the FTC’s own commissioners, in a dissenting opinion, agreed that this latter action had been a travesty. (It was carried out nonetheless).

And so, operating a medical practice in an IPA has been a pretty dicey thing for several years now.

But Obamacare escalates the risk to a whole new level.

While dealing with the FTC is itself a decidedly nasty proposition, it’s nothing compared to dealing with the Justice Department. And Obamacare brings the DOJ into the fight to eliminate “price fixing” by doctors. That is, a violation of arbitrary and unpredictably changeable rules during IPA negotiations is not just a civil matter anymore, but is potentially (at the discretion of the Feds) a criminal matter.

It looks more and more like the handwriting is on the wall for IPAs, or for any independent, private practice physician who wants to take care of insured patients.

So, once again, DrRich begs his physician friends to consider the alternatives. Think about getting out now, dropping out of the system altogether while you still can, and establishing a direct-pay practice before that, too, is rendered illegal. The window of opportunity is closing.

And, sadly, you may want to re-read DrRich’s helpful suggestions regarding black market healthcare, as that may become the only viable alternative to the Borg – and much sooner than DrRich had previously thought.

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Thanks to Ms. Wood of the Occam Practice Management Blog for calling DrRich’s attention to an interesting article appearing recently in the Wall Street Journal Health Blog. This article describes the efforts of a non-profit organization called the Investor Protection Trust to (it appears) medicalize the problem of financial scams involving the elderly.

Specifically, under the auspices of the IPT, government securities regulators will be teaming up with physicians organizations (in particular, the American College of Physicians and the American Academy of Family Physicians), to train PCPs to recognize signs that their elderly patients are victims of financial fraud or exploitation. If such fraud is uncovered or suspected, the physician is to notify Adult Protective Services, an organization which (helpfully) is not subject to certain annoying confidentiality regulations. IPT estimates that screening for financial abuse can be accomplished by adequately-trained PCPs in only three short minutes.

The plan is to have PCPs take special training to help them recognize the signs of financial elder abuse. This training can be accomplished in only two hours, the IPT explains, and will be conducted “under the auspices of medical ethics continuing education.”

Long-time readers will know that DrRich is the President (and sole member) of Future Old Farts of America. (He retains this position despite the fact that his eligibility for FOFA is rapidly expiring, and, some have suggested, has already expired.) As President of FOFA, DrRich naturally deplores financial fraud perpetrated upon the elderly. Indeed, this is one of the chief reasons he opposes Obamacare.

So DrRich applauds this new effort to protect the fiscal wholeness of our beloved elderly. The plan is flawless, as it has something good in it for everyone – except, perhaps, the PCPs.

The IPT itself stands to gain much from this new program, since this organization is funded through fines collected from investment-fraud cases. Having American PCPs embark on a major, sustained, grass-roots effort to troll for such investment fraud (using screening criteria developed by the IPT itself) should greatly increase this organization’s revenue.

The major physicians organizations which represent PCPs – the ACP and the AAFP – also come out ahead by supporting this effort. They reap, of course, all the public relations benefits that always go along with new programs aimed at assisting our esteemed elderly population. But perhaps more importantly, their participation in this program helps them with the small “ethics problem” they have lately created for themselves.

As regular readers will know, the ACP and AAFP are major proponents – and indeed the authors – of the New Age medical ethics that was formally adopted by the medical profession in 2002. This new ethics, as DrRich has patiently explained, obligates physicians to strive to practice medicine for the benefit of the collective. Practically speaking, the “new ethics” creates the ethical foundation by which American physicians will practice medicine according to fiats handed down by government-controlled expert panels. That is, it excuses physicians from their now-obsolete obligation to always do what’s best for the individual patient, in favor of doing what’s best for society as a whole, as determined at a distance by the Central Authority.

All well and good. As DrRich has amply demonstrated, the ACP (at least) is quite satisfied with its new medical ethics, and sees no reason to reconsider. But still, this creates a problem for the ACP when it comes to “medical ethics continuing education.” Thoughtful physicians, when faced with indoctrination programs aimed at getting them to absorb the new medical ethics, often raise uncomfortable questions, questions which (as, again, DrRich has shown) even the chairperson of the ACPs’s ethics committee cannot effectively answer. Clearly then, having formally tossed real medical ethics aside has undoubtedly made these ethics sessions somewhat awkward for the instructors.

What better solution to this embarrassing problem than distraction? Simply turn these annoying continuing education sessions into something other than a discussion of medical ethics.  Turn it into, say, a two-hour session on recognizing financial fraud among the elderly. You’ve got to have something to talk about, after all – and defrauding the elderly is unethical, is it not?  It is not hard to understand why physicians organizations are so supportive of the IPT’s new effort.

But, of course, the very first among the beneficiaries of the medicalization of elder fraud is the government.

Most directly, anything that helps to keep the estates of the (pleasantly) befuddled elderly intact, until they pass on to their more permanent rewards, will increase revenues to the state and federal governments through inheritance taxes.*

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*DrRich leaves it to the reader to decide whether the benefits to the overall economy are greater if the accumulated wealth of the elderly is passed on to the government, or to perpetrators of fraud. Which entity – government or crooks – is more likely to make use of that money in a truly stimulatory fashion? It boils down to the old argument between Keynes and Hayak, of course. In the interest of both brevity and civility, DrRich declines to take up this argument at the present moment. Still and all, it is indeed a point for consideration.
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But the government – and any healthcare payer – benefits immediately from this new program, even before the elderly person dies.

A major strategy in cutting the cost of healthcare – THE major strategy – must always be directed toward controlling the behavior of PCPs. This strategy, for instance, fully explains the massive tangle of uninterpretable rules and regulations which the PCP must painstakingly navigate today, the violation of any one of which is now a federal crime punishable by massive fines and imprisonment. Another tactic for controlling the PCP’s behavior is to severely constrain their face-time with patients, and to tightly regulate what must occur during these now-brief doctor-patient encounters.

Accordingly, during the 7.5 minutes allotted for each patient visit, the PCP must complete a 10-to-15-point checklist of required activities that fall under the rubric of “Pay for Performance.” Such checklists are designed, among other things, to keep the PCP and patient from straying off to address medical questions which do not appear on approved lists, and which might lead to unfortunate medical expenditures.

From the government’s standpoint, adding yet another obligation to the PCP’s critical checklist – an obligation which is so obviously beneficial to our elderly citizens, and which after all takes only three minutes to complete (leaving a full 4.5 minutes for actual medical issues) – is a very useful thing. And furthermore, it is the right thing. Anyone objecting to PCPs being directed to screen for financial abuse in their elderly patients immediately reveals themselves to be completely heartless and unfeeling and, likely, a Republican.

The PCPs, of course, are the only losers here. They are being asked to add yet another impossible task to their already-impossible list of jobs. Furthermore, as we have seen, once some outside body declares that it is the PCPs job to accomplish some impossible new task (such as assuring that all of their patients actually quit smoking), then our friends in the legal profession can immediately begin suing PCPs who fail to accomplish it.

So now the adult children of neglected elderly parents, finding that their inheritance has been frittered away because someone talked Pap-Pap into having a new roof installed on his house every year, will have somewhere to go to recover their damages.

If, as has been DrRich’s contention, the ultimate goal is to render primary care medicine so very odious, demeaning, exasperating and dangerous as to become a completely untenable proposition for any self-respecting American physician, so that by default the role of PCP will have to be filled with lower-level professionals who presumably will be more accepting of central directives, happier with checklists, and more comfortable with time-clocks than most doctors ever could be, then this new initiative is more than just a good idea. It is truly inspired.

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In prior posts DrRich introduced his readers to Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, PhD, brother of Rahm, eminent medical ethicist, and one of the White House’s chief advisers on healthcare policy. Dr. Emanuel was one of the authors of that recent paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine which admonished American physicians that resistance is futile. He has also famously called upon American physicians to abandon the obsolete medical ethics expressed in the Hippocratic Oath.

The reason the ideas (and pronouncements) of Dr. Emanuel are important is that he presumably will be a major “decider” in determining who will serve on the GOD panels, and how those panels will operate to advance his (and Mr. Obama’s) program of healthcare reform.

So, before we leave Dr. Emanuel to his important duties, let us take one more pass at the views he has expressed, regarding the direction of American healthcare, which we can expect to see manifested in government guidelines and policies in the coming years.

In particular, and especially relevant to the subject of this blog, let us view how Dr. Emanuel would direct the rationing of our healthcare.

His ideas in this regard were probably spelled out most clearly in an article Dr. Emanuel co-authored in The Lancet, in January, 2009, which proposed a system of healthcare rationing based on what he and co-authors call the “complete lives system.” Most notably, the complete lives system proposes rationing healthcare on the basis of age, in a way that frankly “discriminates against older people” (The Lancet, Vol 373, p 429).

While Emanuel has taken a lot of heat from the right wing for espousing such a thing, his argument for doing so is unique and thoughtful, and DrRich finds it worthy of more careful consideration.

First, we should note that the outrage we often hear expressed at the very idea of healthcare rationing (with each side accusing the other of wanting to ration) only applies to politicians. When healthcare ethicists get together for instance, they (like DrRich) understand that healthcare rationing is utterly unavoidable, and that in fact we’re already not avoiding it. Ethicists argue, instead, about how to do it. In this way, DrRich feels a certain sense of brotherhood with these ethicists (a group which, in nearly every other way, DrRich most often feels a sense of disgust).

So let us consider the ethical argument most often made for discriminating against the elderly in a system of healthcare rationing. Almost always, the argument is a utilitarian one. Saving the life of a 90-year-old might “buy” him only an extra two or three years of life, whereas spending the same amount of money to save a 10-year-old might buy him another 70 – 80 years of life. So society gains much more if it spends the money on the younger person, and withholds it from the older one. From a utilitarian viewpoint the argument for discriminating against the elderly is unassailable.

Non-utilitarian ethics asserts that all individuals have equal value, so discriminating against any person should be avoided, and therefore the 10-year-old and the 90-year-old should have an equal opportunity to receive the medical service in question. (That is, either both should get it or neither should get it.)

DrRich believes that most people would sympathize with the idea that if only one life can be saved, saving a young person’s life might make more sense than saving a very old person’s life. He thinks that even most 90-year-olds he has known would agree with this proposition. The problem, DrRich believes, is with the rationale we use for making such a decision.

The utilitarian argument for discriminating against the elderly in a rationing system rests on the idea (as does all utilitarian ethical reasoning) that individuals are not of equal value, at least, not from society’s point of view. And since they are not equivalent in value, it is right and proper for some agent of society to determine the relative value of individuals, so that resources can be distributed accordingly.

Obviously, utilitarian ethics opens the door for differentiating the intrinsic values of individuals for reasons other than age. That is, if you can devalue the elderly to optimize the public good, then you can also devalue the disabled, the stupid, the lazy, the left-handed, and the obese (for instance) to optimize public good.

Emanuel’s “complete lives system,” he argues, is NOT a utilitarian one. Emanuel would favor treating the 10-year-old over the 90-year-old not to maximize public good, but to maximize the opportunity of individuals to enjoy “complete lives” over the entire age spectrum. That is, under his system all individuals are taken as having equal intrinsic value. And during the course of their lives, everyone experiences an equal spectrum of priorities – first, the priority of a 10-year-old, and later (if lucky enough to live that long) the priority of a 90-year-old. While in practical terms this still means discriminating against the elderly, it does so in a way that cannot be extended to other groups of people (i.e, the disabled and so forth), and that, in fact, yields equal age-based priorities across individuals through the course of their complete lives. In other words, when one considers the entire course of an individual’s complete life, he or she is treated the same as any other individual during the entire course of their lives.

In this way, Emanuel asserts, the complete lives system is not a utilitarian system; while it would allow us to withhold medical care from the elderly, based on their age, it would do so in a way that would not open the door for discriminating against others, for other reasons.

DrRich understands this reasoning because he proposed something entirely similar in his book, as an option for dealing with the age issue in a rationing system. In fact, since DrRich wrote his book a few years before Emanuel published his “complete lives system,” it is entirely possible that Emanuel got his idea from yours truly.

DrRich does not expect any thanks from Dr. Emanuel in this regard, however, and in fact he wishes to thank Dr. Emanuel for showing him the fatal flaw in such thinking. Indeed, thanks to Dr. Emanuel, if DrRich were to produce a new edition of his book, he would propose no such thing.

For, no sooner does Dr. Emanuel propose his complete lives system as an alternative to utilitarian ethical reasoning, than he demonstrates, in the very same article, how easily his system can be twisted to the ends of utilitarian ethics.

Specifically, Emanuel argues that a healthcare rationing system should also discriminate against the very young, and asserts that his “complete lives system” justifies such discrimination (since every individual, at one time in their lives, is very young). But in explaining why it would be desirable to withhold medical services from the very young, Emanuel reveals that his rationale, in fact, is entirely utilitarian:

“Consideration of the importance of complete lives also supports modifying the youngest-first principle by prioritizing adolescents and young adults over infants (figure). Adolescents have received substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, in contrast, have not yet received these investments.” (The Lancet, vol 373, p. 428)

So, Emanuel holds that it is OK to discriminate against infants, toddlers and young children on the grounds that society has not “invested” a lot of resources in them yet. That is, their worth to society is not all that great.

This provision is extremely disturbing, to DrRich at least. For it essentially discards the notion that all human lives are of equal intrinsic value, in favor of the idea that an individual’s real value ought to be determined by their worthiness to the collective. And so society has the right and the duty to determine which individual lives are valuable enough to save, and which are not. Note that the rationale for discriminating against the elderly in the complete lives system was framed specifically to avoid having to do this.

In DrRich’s view, this provision against the young entirely negates the purported ethical premise of “complete lives.” This provision is what finally places the state, the insurers, or the GOD panels in the position of assigning intrinsic value to individual human lives, from a distance, as a matter of policy. If this can be done based on extreme youth, then it can also be done based on any other factor which some empowered panel decides will influence the worth of individuals to society.

The above figure, from Emanuel’s article on the complete lives system, reduces the question to a stark graph, with age on the X axis and value to society on the Y axis. Your age is determined by God. Your value to society is determined by the state.

It is easy to envision other, similar graphs, with your worthiness to society plotted on the Y axis, and certain personal features other than age plotted on they X axis – your income, your IQ, your disabilities, your BMI, etc.

DrRich reminds his readers that eugenics has been, from the beginning, an intrinsic part of the Progressive program. The idea that society can (and must) be perfected hinges, to a large extent, on the idea that mankind can (and must) be perfected. And perfecting mankind will require at least some culling of the herd. Indeed, early Progressives unabashedly embraced eugenics as an essential feature of societal perfection – and said so. Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, and Margaret Sanger are only the most well-known of the Progressives who openly extolled eugenics.

Openly espousing eugenics became politically inadvisable after the Nazi atrocities came to light. But, since you can never achieve a perfect society while you are “carrying” a large proportion of people who are defective in their bodies, or minds, or thoughts, finding an acceptable way to eliminate such undesirables remains intrinsic to Progressivism.

DrRich believes that gaining control of the healthcare system, and gaining control of who gets what, when and how, provides both a new venue and a new language for Progressives to bring their program to fruition.

He humbly suggests that Dr. Emanuel’s “complete lives system” is an example of this new language, and that it offers a glimpse of what a system of Progressive healthcare rationing will look like.

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In his last post (and in several past discussions) DrRich asserted that the Hippocratic Oath has been declared formally and officially obsolete by the medical profession itself, and that as a result of this action, the medical profession has voluntarily placed the professional viability of all physicians entirely into the hands of the government. Hence, DrRich has postulated, the Amish Bus Driver Rule is thereby activated, which permits (and probably compels) the government to use the leverage of medical licensure to control and direct the behavior of physicians – even their ethical behavior.

Lest anyone think DrRich is exaggerating about this, let us listen to the words of some of the physician-intellectuals who now hold positions of official responsibility, within the Central Authority itself, for determining the behavior of American doctors. DrRich asks his readers to notice both the content and the tone of these words, as both are important.

First, listen carefully to Donald Berwick, MD, recent recess-appointee to the position of head of CMS, in a passage from his ominously-titled book “New Rules,” (co-written with our old friend Troyen Brennan, MD):

“Today, this isolated relationship [between doctor and patient] is no longer tenable or possible… Traditional medical ethics, based on the doctor-patient dyad must be reformulated to fit the new mold of the delivery of health care…Regulation must evolve. Regulating for improved medical care involves designing appropriate rules with authority…Health care is being rationalized through critical pathways and guidelines. The primary function of regulation in health care, especially as it affects the quality of medical care, is to constrain decentralized individualized decision making.”

(Thanks to Dr. Gaulte of the excellent blog, Retired Doc’s Thoughts, for pointing us to this valuable passage.)

Dr. Berwick’s views on the need to constrain individualized decision-making in the practice of medicine is echoed by none other than Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, PhD. Dr. Emanuel is a bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health, and a fellow at The Hastings Center (a bioethics research institution). He is the brother of former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel (himself an expert in political ethics). Dr. Emanuel was brought in to the Obama administration as a high-ranking adviser on healthcare reform, and is widely expected to have a strong hand in determining who will sit on the GOD panels and how those panels will operate.

Regular readers will recall that Dr. Emanuel is also the co-author of that infamous paper recently accepted for publication in the Annals of Internal Medicine (and whose editors, thereby, formally auditioned for seats on those GOD panels) which called upon American physicians to abandon their ancient tradition of primarily serving their patients, and instead embrace their true destiny, which is assimilating into the Borg.

DrRich has found two instances in Dr. Emanuel’s writings in which he specifically commented on the obsolescence of the Hippocratic Oath.

In the May 16, 2007 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, in an article entitled, “What Cannot Be Said on Television About Health Care,” Emanuel expresses the following complaint about American physicians: “Reasoning based on cost has been strenuously resisted; it violated the Hippocratic Oath, was associated with rationing, and derided as putting a price on life, akin to the economist who knew the price of everything but the value of nothing.”

In the June 18, 2008 issue of the same journal, in an article on healthcare “overutilization,” he discussed seven factors that drive the overuse of medical services. He identifies one of these factors as a “culture of unwarranted thoroughness” on the part of American doctors, which serves to drive up cost. “This culture is further reinforced by a unique understanding of professional obligations, specifically, the Hippocratic Oath’s admonition to ‘use my power to help the sick to the best of my ability and judgment’ as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of cost or effect on others.”

Thus, Emanuel finds that it is a stubborn adherence to outdated medical ethics, which causes doctors to strictly place their individual patient’s interests above society’s interests, that accounts for a substantial proportion of unnecessary healthcare costs.

These passages from the very physicians who are directly driving healthcare policy through the auspices not of professional medical organizations, but through the auspices of the Central Authority itself, are striking in two ways.

First, their directness is striking. Doctors no longer work for the good of their patients; they work for the good of the collective. And heretofore they are obligated to follow the rules which are promulgated centrally, rules backed by the righteous force of the Central Authority, rules whose primary function is to make sure that decisions on medical care will be directed centrally, rather than at the doctor-patient level.

Second, the indignation these passages reflect is striking. The obligation of physicians to follow central directives is not an item of negotiation or persuasion – it is a DONE DEAL. Physicians’ own elected leadership of their own professional organizations – all of them – have formally signed on to the New Ethics, ethics which obligate doctors to practice medicine in a way that follows the dictates of remote panels guarding the interests of the collective  (rather in a way that jealously guards the needs of individual patients). And while this abandonment of an ethical precept that had been in force for over two millennia was promulgated with little fanfare, and while most practicing physicians seem not to realize that it has even happened (though we can be sure that all medical students everywhere are being steeped in it), it is a DONE DEAL.

And doctors who persist in practicing the “old way,” are not only acting in a manner that is “no longer tenable or possible,” but they are also violating the very ethical precepts which their own profession has now voluntarily adopted. They are behaving unethically. They are being evil.

No wonder our physician leaders are indignant. No wonder they have little choice but to divine the necessary “rules with authority” to force these recalcitrant physicians to do their self-admitted duty to the collective. By persisting with their old fashioned ideas in the face of that which medical ethics now prescribes, doctors are forcing the Central Authority to take strong action. Fortunately, since (we all know) our government is a benign entity, it will begin gently, with tough central rules and regulations (backed by authority) to “constrain decentralized individualized decision making.” The Central Authority will only invoke the Amish Bus Driver Rule (or worse) if these kinder, gentler steps fail.

As for the doctors who do not like this new reality, DrRich has a harsh message. You brought this on yourselves, by allowing your professional organizations to propose, write, and adopt these “New Medical Ethics.” For all the statements of Berwick, and Emanuel, and other health policy experts, castigating you for your inadherence to these new ethics, are predicated on the fact that you have a formally-adopted obligation to follow them.

It does no good to protest that you yourself were unaware that your profession has taken this formal action. Just as President Obama is your President whether you voted for him or not, the New Ethics is your formal rule whether you agreed with it (or were aware of it) or not.

And if you do not like the idea that the details of your behavior as a practicing physician are going to be handed down from on-high, and that you are not to be permitted any longer to primarily advocate for your patient, against the competing interests of the slavering Central Authority, you have nobody to blame except yourself.

And what this tells us is that if you are going to change things, you cannot hope to seek relief from legislators, or from your medical leadership (which has already assimilated with the Borg). Your only hope is to begin by reclaiming your profession yourselves, and re-asserting your primary obligation to your patient. There are several ways to undertake such a course, all of which will require standing up to the government and to your own leadership, and all of which will be difficult and dangerous at this late stage.  But it is the only path that remains open to you for your professional salvation.

Just keep this undeniable fact in mind: Obamacare, or any other form of centralized control over the practice of medicine, can only be achieved with the active acquiescence of physicians themselves. If physicians decide they simply will not allow themselves to be coerced to unethical medical actions, and insist on reestablishing the doctor-patient covenant as the guiding precept of their profession, the entire house of cards will fall. Physicians are far from powerless, if they would only dare to act.

We will still need healthcare reform, to be sure, but physicians have the power to insist that it can only be a kind of healthcare reform which fully honors and guarantees that covenant.

This is a delicate topic, and even DrRich (who has displayed on these pages a willingness to risk alienating Progressives, Conservatives, President Obama’s minions, fat people, editors of prestigious medical journals, global warming enthusiasts, babies, bunnies, and even his beloved fellow cardiologists) is hesitant to bring it up.

But events force DrRich to throw caution to the wind, and issue a warning, and a plea, to those among the broad community of physicians for whom he has the most respect – the PCPs. The event to which DrRich refers, of course, is the recent, tragic gunning-down of a physician at Johns Hopkins University Hospital by a disgruntled patient (or rather, by the clearly disgruntled son of a possibly disgruntled patient).

This is DrRich’s warning: the recent shooting at Johns Hopkins may indicate that the long-predicted (predicted by DrRich, at least) bloodbath of American PCPs may now be at hand. And this is his plea (and here is where even the usually audacious DrRich must admit to a slight bit of trepidation): PCPs, for your own good, for the survival of primary care medicine, and therefore for the success of Obamacare, you must now prepare to defend yourselves.

Yes, dear readers, it is time for American PCPs to begin packing heat.

DrRich well understands that many of his readers at this moment doubtless think he has, at long last, lost it; that his finely-honed (and amply-demonstrated) abilities in logical discourse have finally taken their leave, that he has, sadly, gone ’round the bend. DrRich forgives you for this reaction.

After all, the doctor who was shot (whose identity has not been disclosed, but who is apparently expected to recover fully), works at Johns Hopkins, one of the premier medical institutions in the world. And therefore, while its leaders undoubtedly give the requisite lip service to the importance of primary care medicine, Johns Hopkins likely does not have very many actual PCPs frequenting its premises. So (DrRich’s clever readers correctly surmise), it seems very unlikely that the shooting victim was a PCP; and for him to find a lesson for PCPs in this unfortunate incident is obviously too ridiculous for words.

DrRich does not take such criticism personally. He realizes that those of you who doubt him in this case are not being mean-spirited, but merely misinformed. DrRich accepts the fact that most of you do not scour the relevant scientific literature with as much care as he does. And so, he does not expect you to be aware of the recent work of one David Fishbain, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Miami, who published a study in NewScientist Magazine which indicates that up to 1 in 20 patients would like to kill their primary care physicians.

Professor Fishbain learned this interesting tidbit in a survey he conducted among 800 patients undergoing physical rehabilitation or suffering significant pain.

Those PCPs who are reading this startling news, and who, by virtue of the fact that they are still working as PCPs, have have most likely honed their skills of denial to a high art form, are doubtless consoling themselves at this very moment with this observation: “Sure they want to kill me. But as they’re disabled, their chances of success seem low.”

So chew on this. In a control group of patients who were not suffering from pain or disability, Fishbain reported that “only” 1 in 50 admitted to having murderous tendencies toward their PCPs.

Any way you cut it, the math is not pretty: the typical PCP with a patient load of 3,000 souls can assume that at least 60 of these individuals (up to 150, if he/she treats a lot of patients with pain or disability) would not only like to see them dead, but would be pleased to be the instrument of their demise. Worse, even these statistics are surely unreasonably cheerful, as they rely on the likelihood that everyone who wants to see their doctor lying lifeless in a pool of blood are comfortable admitting this fact to medical researchers doing written surveys.

In any case, whatever the specialty might be of the physician who was shot at Johns Hopkins, it is the PCPs who are at the highest risk. And now that the shooting has actually begun, DrRich does not think PCPs should take much comfort in the possiblity that the first casualty may not have been one of them.

Why are patients murderously angry with their PCPs? Let us count the ways.

DrRich has expended much space and effort on this blog describing how PCPs have been maneuvered into covertly rationing healthcare at the bedside. Patients who go to their guideline-compliant, non-fraudulent PCPs these days will find themselves limited to 7.5 to 12.5 minutes of actual face time, most of which their doctor will spend sitting at a keyboard, staring at an LCD screen, desperately attempting to make the appropriate clicks on the most favorable little boxes next to a government-sanctioned Pay For Performance checklist. There will be little or no time for whatever pressing issues may be on the patient’s own (non-government-approved) agenda.

The patient, who has waited weeks for this opportunity, will be asked to wait weeks more for another appointment to discuss those other things – or will be directed to an emergency room.

But the greatest sin of all is that, to assuage their guilt and to make such behaviors seem less than reprehensible, physicians have allowed their professional organizations to formally adopt a new code of medical ethics, one which charges physicians with the task of achieving a just distribution of healthcare resources – namely, with covert healthcare rationing at the bedside. This new ethical obligation officially drives a stake into the heart of the classic doctor-patient relationship, and is an abject admission that the practice of medicine no longer constitutes a real profession.

Patients may not know the niceties of this New Age medical ethics – they may not be able to articulate the reasons they feel abandoned in their hour of need – but they certainly perceive its effects on their lives. Their anger is not unjustified.

The fallout for the medical profession from all these developments has landed disproportionately on the PCP. For most patients, their PCP is the face of the medical profession, and it is in the PCP’s office where they most often experience the changes.

PCP’s, of course, are no happier with this new reality than are their patients. The loss of their professional integrity and their ability to act as autonomous advocates for their patients has (far more than the steady ratcheting down of their pay) made primary care medicine an exquisitely unattractive proposition, both to current practitioners and to potential future PCPs.

Unfortunately, any notion that this damage to primary care medicine can be readily reversed is sadly mistaken. It would be a great mistake, for instance, to place the blame for all this on Obamacare. While Obamacare will indeed utterly rely on PCPs to do the dirty work of covert rationing, the basis for such reliance was established long ago by the medical profession itself, which voluntarily adopted their New Age ethics several years before anyone had ever heard of Barack Obama or his healthcare reforms.

So it should be no wonder that patients are pissed. And since that which is pissing them off is not going away anytime soon, and indeed is about to become greatly accelerated, PCPs must be alert to the likelihood that the lethal ideations entertained by a small but not insignificant proportion of American patients may soon find an outlet beyond mere daydreaming. The Johns Hopkins shooting ought to be a wake-up call to all doctors – but especially to the American PCP.

And so, as a public service, DrRich reluctantly suggests that perhaps it is time for PCPs to prepare to defend themselves in one of the few ways they have left to do so.

PCPs may have lost everything else, but to this point, at least, they still have the second amendment to rely on.

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DrRich has now read large portions of the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” i.e., Obamacare. He finds in it the very essence of Progressivism.  To understand Obamacare, then, we must understand the basics of Progressive thought.

DrRich has always found American Progressives to be a bit enigmatic. He has found much of their behavior to be persistently, almost defiantly, illogical and counterproductive to the rights Americans hold dear, rights which Progressives themselves also insist they revere – in particular, our inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

As long as 20 years ago, DrRich had developed a sneaking suspicion that Progressives, their protests to the contrary notwithstanding, never really bought into the “inalienable” thing. On this point, he concluded, they were prevaricators. Since by then it was beginning to look like the Progressives were going to be running things for a while, it occurred to DrRich that it would be a good idea to understand what they really think, and what their agenda really was. And so, after much time and study and contemplation, DrRich developed his theory of Progressive thought, which he is now pleased to share with his readers so that they, in turn, might better understand Obamacare.

The Roots of Progressivism

When DrRich began his study of Progressives he did not quite know where to begin. So he decided to proceed, like Descartes before him, from the simplest and most irreducible of truths. Namely, that Progressives are really, really smart – or think they are. We know this because all the professors in all the best Ivy League schools are Progressives.

From this simple truth we can deduce that, whatever it is that Progressives are actually up to, it must have its roots in the writings of The Philosopher.

And sure enough, it was not at all difficult to discover the roots of Progressivism within the teachings of Aristotle.

Aristotle tells us that man is innately a political animal, an animal with an inherent propensity to gather into increasingly complex communities. The essence of man, according to Aristotle, is society.

The formation of complex societies is what defines mankind; it is what differentiates man from the rest of the animal kingdom. Hence, because man is defined by society, society is inherently on a higher plane of importance than the individual. Individuals are entirely beholden to and dependent upon and subservient to the society to which they belong. Indeed, they are defined as individuals by their place within that society. Without society, a man is just an ape (with a persistently infantile face).

In this sense, “socialism” is reduced quite simply to a philosophy in which society – the collective – takes precedence over the individual. Furthermore, the precedence of the collective over the individual is not something we can simply choose to accept or reject; it is the very essence of mankind. It is nature. It is just the way it is.

So, as you can see, Aristotle nailed Progressivism.

Clearly, while the name “progressivism” has only been around for a century or so (and we will shortly see from whence the name came), its roots are a very old idea. This idea, in fact, was the normal way of looking at the relationship between individuals and society until just a few hundred years ago, when humanists began to cautiously explore the radical notion that individuals (rather than the collective) constitute the fundamental unit of humanity. The new humanist heresy – which declared the primacy of the individual – was for a long time called “liberalism” (a term whose meaning has, recently, drastically changed, and is now a synonym for what had always been its opposite). Classical liberalism reached its zenith, DrRich thinks, a mere two and a half centuries after its painful birth, with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.

But to Progressives, classical liberalism has always been an aberration. Despite what America’s founding documents might say, society takes precedence over the individual. It takes this precedence by way of the very essence of mankind, as was taught by The Philosopher, and so it cannot be otherwise.

The Progressive Program

The Progressive Program – the thing that makes Progressives progressive – is to develop the perfect society. This program is not optional; it is dictated by the nature of mankind.

Since society is what defines mankind, it follows, as the night follows the day, that the program of mankind, the purpose, the work, the essence of mankind, is to create the perfect society.

The perfect society has two basic requirements. First, it must meet all the basic needs of the individuals within that society (such as food, clothing, shelter, sanitation, and health), without which individuals will always be tempted to engage in the counterproductive behavior of striving for things. Second, the social order must be of such a nature that it can persist, theoretically forever, without fundamental change. Indeed, the very notion of perfection implies that any change, of any type, is bad, since it will necessarily constitute a movement away from perfection.

The perfect society therefore requires complete stability. This would include (at a minimum) a stable population size, the preservation of natural resources and the earth’s environment (indeed, when one hears the word “sustainability,” one is listening to Progressive gospel), the careful management of the economy, and the careful control – if not suppression – of unplanned innovations. This latter refers both to material (or scientific) innovations, and innovations of thought, either of which will always threaten hard-won societal stability.

The perfection of society is the paramount work of mankind, so any method which may help in achieving this perfection is to be embraced; none discounted out of hand. The only considerations one must make in choosing methods of action are: Is this method practicable? And: Is this method more likely to be successful, or counterproductive? These two questions fully define Progressive ethics.

So that’s DrRich’s theory of Progressivism and the Progressive Program. While it is only a theory, DrRich hereby asserts that his formulation is correct.

He makes this assertion for the purpose of advancing the debate and inviting argument. If any of his readers have a better explanation of Progressivism, one that more successfully fits the facts and explains the otherwise difficult-to-explain behaviors we’ve seen from Progressives in recent years, why, DrRich will be delighted to hear it. If it is convincing, DrRich will cheerfully abandon his own theory and adopt yours.

But to accomplish this feat, your theory of Progressivism will have to offer a more successful explanation of the following Progressive behavioral phenomena than DrRich’s theory does:

Individuals and Groups Within Progressivism

While Progressivism by definition places individuals in a subservient position to society, this is not to say that individuals are merely interchangeable cogs in a great machine, or entirely analogous to worker bees in a hive. DrRich’s prior sarcasms aside, Progressive society is not the Borg.

Indeed, individuals within a Progressive society are differentiatable, and can be publicly celebrated or castigated as individuals. But to a great extent the potential worth of an individual is pre-determined by the group to which the individual belongs. Group identity in Progressive society is critically important, as it provides the only feasible means by which the leadership of Progressive societies can attempt to control and direct individual behaviors.

(Group identity is so critically important to Progressive thought that it has been given a special name – “Diversity” – and has been designated as the Cardinal Virtue, from which all the other, subsidiary, virtues – faith, hope, charity and the like – must necessarily spring.)

And so, to stand out as individuals, individuals must stand out as a member of their group, and the manner in which they stand out must fundamentally reflect the assigned essence of their group. So, for instance, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are celebrated individuals, whose accomplishments nicely reflect their assigned group identities. In contrast, Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell are not celebrated by Progressives, and indeed are castigated as abominations, because their individual accomplishments do not reflect their assigned group identities.

Therefore, while individuals within Progressive societies can achieve a certain level of importance, individual importance is merely of tertiary concern, rather than primary or even secondary concern. Individuals can become officially “important” only if their importance reflects the essence of their assigned group; and the importance of the assigned group (the secondary concern), in turn, is proportional to its ability to advance the Progressive Program in general (which, of course, is the primary concern).

While individuals have the potential of rising to a state of importance within Progressivism, the vast majority of individuals will never actually do so. The great masses of individuals will be regarded by society as featureless members of their group, and will be treated accordingly. And the status of a particular group is always subject to change, given the extant needs of the leadership class. Certain groups (e.g. labor unions) may be exulted by the leadership, while others (e.g. the elderly, the white males, or the fat) will be devalued. Yet other groups (e.g. illegal aliens) may be celebrated by the leadership at one point in time (when, for instance, it behooves Progressive leaders to acquire voting rights for them before 2012), but then may be dismissed at some other point in time (in 2013, for instance, after the critical votes have been gathered, and now the group just represents large volumes of mouths to feed and healthcare to consume).

Good and Evil In Progressivism

Many Progressive intellectuals are fond of saying there are no absolutes, and so there is no such thing as inherent good and inherent evil. These intellectuals are wrong, even from within the Progressive paradigm. Because the Progressive Program – which, again, is to achieve a perfect society – is the innate agenda for mankind, there indeed exists a standard by which one can determine good and evil.

“Good” is anything which advances the Progressive Program; and “evil” is anything which threatens it.

Anyone who doubts the existence of good and evil within the Progressive Program need only observe the scores of behaviors and figures of speech which are condemned as unrelentingly evil by Progressives, with all the certainty and fervor of a Jonathan Edwards.

Accordingly, individuals who hinder the Progressive Program are a danger to mankind’s very essence. They are evil, and must be rehabilitated or eliminated.

Progressivism and the Leadership Class

Despite its lip service to the contrary, Progressivism is not egalitarian, even in theory.

The duty of mankind is to strive for the perfect society. The chief tool by which mankind is to achieve this program is man’s intellect and logic. It is axiomatic that only a minority of people will have the intellect and logic necessary to direct the program of mankind. Therefore, Progressivism fundamentally relies on an elite corps of individuals to guide our progress toward a perfect society. The perfect society will not just happen, it must be engineered by those who are gifted enough to lead.

The lack of egalitarianism in Progressive thought is illustrated by the special treatment accorded to the elite corps. The leadership class must be nurtured and valued by society. Furthermore, it must be given special privileges which others in society do not have. Because their work is so critical to the essential program, the elite must be removed from worry over the mundane necessities of life. That is, providing the leadership class with certain luxuries and privileges, and even freedom from having to follow all the rules that apply to the masses, is therefore not hypocrisy, but is an essential good. It redounds to the benefit of the Program.

Anyone who has not noticed recent glaring examples of this “different standard” for the Progressive elite should consider activating their “durable power of attorney” forthwith, so that a more alert individual can manage their affairs.

Progressivism and the Unwashed Masses

It goes without saying that, if left to their own devices, the populace would devolve into some primitive societal arrangement (such as capitalism) in which individuals would spend all their time striving to improve their own individual situations, even at the expense of others.

This means that the great unwashed masses must be “managed.”

Ideally, the best way to manage the population is through education, and so all efforts must be made – through formal education and by controlling the public media – to indoctrinate the population to the great benefits of the Progressive agenda, to the natural duty and obligation of all men and women to work within society to realize the Progressive Program, and to the inherent evil of all the alternatives. Since education will never be sufficient, the unwashed masses may need to be controlled through pacification (i.e., attempting to meet all their basic needs, so as to eliminate their impulse to strive). If this fails, they must be controlled through coercion, intimidation, peer-pressure, or (as a last resort or to serve as an object lesson) violence.

Fundamentally, the Progressive Program relies on all members of the great unwashed to subsume their own individual needs to the needs of the collective. That is, the Progressive Program requires a fundamental change in human nature. This change will never be forthcoming, and so Progressives are apparently doomed to be frustrated in their efforts. (However, as we will see shortly, Progressives ultimately have the answer to this problem, as well.)

So, despite their frequent hymns of praise to the worthiness of the common man, Progressives invariably develop an underlying contempt toward the unwashed masses. It is not difficult to spot this contempt if one is alert to it.

Progressivism and Politics

Under the Progressive Program, just like Aristotle says, mankind is essentially a political animal. In fact, the Progressive Program can only be achieved by political action. This means that politics – and to be clearer, political control – is the fundamental work of Progressives. Without politics, without political control, there is nothing. To lose political power is oblivion.

This attitude toward politics is in stark contrast to the attitude of conservatives, for whom government (and therefore politics) is merely a necessary evil, with which one must occasionally contend, when it cannot be avoided, as a part of life. For most conservatives politics is an afterthought.

For Progressives, politics is everything, the essence of human behavior. And it is worth any cost, any desperate measure, to maintain political control. Indeed, to fail to lie, cheat and steal in order to keep political control would be unethical.

Progressivism and Religion

Progressives have a natural adversity to organized religion. For one thing, religions tend to give a higher priority to some supernatural entity (and worse, to an afterlife), than to mankind’s “true” imperative, which is to achieve a perfect society right here on earth. However, since religious leaders can be readily coerced to serve the needs of the state (and always have been), this is not an insurmountable problem.

The real difficulty with organized religion is that the major ones stress the importance of the individual (since individual salvation, or individual enlightenment, is the major theme of the big religions). Under progressivism the inherent importance of individuals is necessarily subsumed by the importance of the collective, so by focusing the ultimate meaning of life on the individual, traditional religions become a major threat to Progressivism.

Apparently realizing that abolishing religion is far too difficult a task, Progressives have adopted the long-term strategy of infiltrating and co-opting religious establishments, and by means of introducing new ideas – such as group salvation, and the concept of social justice as a religious imperative – rendering religion, this “opiate of the masses,” less incompatible with the Progressive Program.

Progressivism and Eugenics

Since World War II, the enthusiasm with which Progressives publicly embrace the idea of eugenics has become muted. But eugenics is, in fact, inherently bound to Progressivism. One way or another, a perfect society will require far more perfect citizens than we have today. Indeed, the seething contempt with which Progressives regard the current genetic pool that comprises the unwashed masses is often difficult for them to suppress.

To a large extent, modern Progressivism was born as an offshoot of Darwinism. The idea that society could be perfected, and the idea that mankind could be perfected, were two sides of the same notion. And early Progressives unabashedly embraced both of these ideas, such that the idea of “culling the herd” became extraordinarily attractive to them – and they said so. Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, and Margaret Sanger (the founder, as it happens, of Planned Parenthood) are only the most well-known Progressives who extolled the idea of eugenics.

But public support of eugenics among Progressives has become quite subdued, ever since the Nazis committed their atrocities explicitly in the name of achieving societal perfection.

One can argue, of course, whether the recent Progressive support of such activities as late-term abortions, or creating human embryos for experimentation, are partially aimed at desensitizing the public for future efforts to “guide” a more favorable genetic makeup for the population. Either way, DrRich reminds his readers of the history of Progressivism in this regard, and of the inherent attractiveness of eugenics to the Progressive Program, and urges them to remain alert.

Progressivism and Environmentalism

Radical environmentalism and the Progressive Program are not perfectly compatible. But they are close.

Radical environmentalists believe that humanity is a plague upon Planet Earth. Everything man has done since the day he first learned to cultivate crops (and thus for the first time became a different kind of animal) has been bad. And anything which delays, halts or reverses the sins mankind has perpetrated upon sacred Gaia, since that day he first departed from Nature, is a good thing. So the radical environmentalists are in favor of strong central governments which will control the behaviors of individuals (and which might ultimately drastically reduce or eliminate the human population).

Progressives are certainly on board with controlling man’s effect on the environment, but (in most cases) they are not in favor of returning mankind to a hunter/gatherer condition (since most Progressives do not view this condition as the embodiment of a perfect society). Rather, they view the environmental movement – in particular, the Global Warming Theory – as a good way to get the populace to give them the power they need to carry out their Progressive Program. So Progressives have completely embraced the Global Warming Theory as a means to their own political end. Accordingly they have declared man-made global warming to be settled science, and they suppress any efforts to study it further.

DrRich is very sorry about this. He suspects that global warming is happening, and concedes that human behavior may be playing a role, and is saddened that this scientific question has been absorbed into the Progressive agenda in such a way that we are not allowed to find out what’s really going on.

Progressivism and the Great American Experiment

Unlike any other nation in the history of mankind, the United States was not founded because of geography, race, religion or ethnicity. It was founded on an idea. It was founded on the still-radical idea that individual autonomy – the individual’s God-given right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – is the chief Fact of humankind, and that the only legitimate role of government is to create an environment in which individuals can enjoy those rights to the fullest extent possible.

One can see immediately that the Great American Experiment – which awards primacy to individual autonomy – is fundamentally incompatible with Progressivism. But because a majority of Americans still like the ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Progressives need to play their cards close to their chests. They need to proceed carefully – but relentlessly.

By slowly re-interpreting the Constitution, and slowly addicting a critical mass of Americans to an array of government programs, Progressives are certain they will ultimately prevail. They have been at it for over 100 years, and have come a long way. DrRich cannot tell whether or not we have already passed the Event Horizon, the point beyond which restoring the Great American Experiment will become impossible. But we are at least very close.

In fact, one plausible theory for President Obama’s headlong pursuit of programs and policies which anger the majority of Americans, and which gravely and immanently threaten the political control which is the center of the Progressive universe, is that he sees America as being at the very cusp of that Event Horizon, and believes that one last, small push will gain it, and make the Progressive Program irreversible, whatever might happen in the next election or two.

Progressivism and Healthcare

DrRich does not need to say much about Progressivism and healthcare right now. Many of the posts in this blog have pertained to this very question, as, undoubtedly, will many more.

But to really understand the current American healthcare system, and to understand Obamacare (the future American healthcare system), it is necessary to understand Progressivism. DrRich sincerely hopes that this current post will help a few of his readers understand, if not Progressive thought itself, at least DrRich’s conceptualization of it.

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In a remarkable article that somehow* was accepted for publication in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the White House offered some friendly advice to American PCPs who may be wondering how Obamacare will affect them. That advice, to summarize, is: “We are the Borg. Prepare to be assimilated.”
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* DrRich is forced to wonder whether yet another group of medical editors is auditioning for the death panels.
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The article was written by Ezekiel Emanuel from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, and Nancy-Ann M. De Parle, who is Mr. Obama’s Czar of Healthcare Reform. (A third author was from the McKinsey Group.) After reminding physicians of their moral obligation to the collective, the White House authors rhapsodized about all of the wonderful changes inherent in Obamacare that will help physicians to realize this obligation.

There’s actually no need to read the entire article, assuming you heard any of the 400 speeches President Obama delivered in his unsuccessful attempt to convince the public that his healthcare reforms ought to displace the holy writ as The Good News. The meat of the article, if you’re a physician, appears at the end:

These reforms will unleash forces that favor integration across the continuum of care. Some organizing function will need to be developed to track quality measures, account for and manage shared financial incentives, and oversee care coordination….These coordinating functions, to the extent that they currently exist, traditionally have been managed by hospitals or health plans….As physicians organize themselves into increasing larger groups — patient-centered medical home practices and accountable care organizations — they are, out of necessity, investing in information technology tools that are becoming both cheaper and more capable and investing in the acquisition or development of management skills that could provide these organizing functions efficiently for physicians groups….For physicians, this means a profession that is more rewarding, more productive, and better able to realize its moral ideal.

DrRich translates this message thusly: “Physicians! You have been neglecting your moral obligation to the collective, in favor of your archaic devotion to the individual patient. Under Obamacare you will need to join organizations which are devoted to the collective goals of Obamacare, and which therefore will guarantee the proper moral ideals. You must function not as individual decisionmakers, but as integrated cogs in a vast healthcare continuum, which will stretch from the centralized bastion of gleaming moral authority (from which we pen this message) all the way down to the humble tip of your stethoscope. You will be rewarded for your cooperation, or suffer for your resistance (resistance, of course, being futile).  So rejoice for the health of the collective, and for your own well-being, and prepare to be assimilated.”

Ostensibly this message is for all American physicians, but it was submitted to the Annals of Internal Medicine for a reason. The Annals is the journal of record for doctors who practice internal medicine, and who comprise the largest group of PCPs. The White House in this article is speaking directly to American PCPs.

This is because PCPs pose the greatest short-term threat to Obamacare.

Most medical specialists have already been “assimilated.” Because they require lots of expensive stuff to practice their specialties – things like gamma cameras, operating suites, catheterization laboratories, hordes of highly trained medical technicians, &c. – it is very difficult for most specialists to function as independent operators. If you want medical specialists to follow the rules, all you have to do is make following the rules a requirement for keeping their access to all the technology and the complex infrastructure they need to practice their specialties.

Only PCPs can fairly readily make themselves independent from the collective.  And more and more PCPs are choosing to do so.

The White House does not like this.  The Annals article, DrRich thinks, is the administration’s first official attempt to curtail the PCPs’ fledgling independence movement. The threat is veiled – the article instead appeals to the PCPs purported moral obligation to the collective, and emphasizes the rewards that will follow when PCPs allow themselves to be assimilated into the Borg.

So this first attempt, for the most part, is merely creepy. The next step will not be as benign.

DrRich urges his PCP friends to take heed. If you have any thought of striking out on your own, and starting a direct pay practice – thus reasserting your profession’s real moral obligation, which is to your patients – you had better act now, before it becomes a federal crime to do so.

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DrRich entered medical school 40 years ago with every intention of becoming a general medical practitioner, and indeed he became one. But after only a year in practice as a generalist, he found himself so frustrated with the frivolous limitations and the superfluous obligations that even then were being externally imposed on these supposedly revered professionals, that DrRich altered course and spent several years re-training to become a cardiac electrophysiologist.

(Electrophysiology is a field of endeavor so arcane as to be mystifying even to other cardiologists. DrRich hoped that the officious regulators and stone-witted insurance clerks would be so confused – and possibly intimidated – by the mysterious doings of electrophysiologists that they would leave him alone. Happily, this ploy worked for almost 15 years.)

Still, DrRich has always held general practitioners (now called PCPs) in the highest regard, if for no other reason than these brave souls – unlike DrRich himself, who cut and ran at his earliest opportunity – have stuck it out.

But, as we all know, the practice of primary care medicine is today in crisis. Today’s PCPs are mostly looking to get out as soon as they can afford to do so, and today’s medical students are avoiding primary care in droves.

But not for the reasons most often claimed.  DrRich’s contention is that doctors are abandoning primary care medicine for reasons that actually have relatively little to do with low pay and high educational debt. The real reasons have much more to do with the fact that primary care medicine has been systematically and purposefully demeaned and diminished, to the point that it has become nearly an untenable choice for most doctors.

Accordingly, every now and then DrRich likes to point out – for the edification of his readers – some of the ways in which this fundamental devaluing of primary care medicine is being accomplished.

And so, here’s another reason it sucks being a PCP:

PCPs whose patients fail to quit smoking are now at risk not only of being publicly labeled as low-quality physicians, but also of being sued.

To see how this works, dear reader, DrRich asks you to place yourself, for a few minutes and for the sake of empathy, in the position of a modern American PCP.

As a PCP, one of the major banes of your existence is the struggle you must make during each and every “patient encounter” to get through a long Pay-for-Performance Checklist (different checklists for different patients, depending on their insurer). Completing these checklists, within the 7.5 minutes that have been graciously allotted to you for such encounters, is of course critical in order to demonstrate to the appropriate healthcare accountants the adequacy of your performance as a modern, high-quality American physician.

One item that invariably appears on each of your mandatory checklists, doctor, has to do with counseling your patient on smoking cessation. It’s likely you may have thought this to be one of the less objectionable mandates you must accomplish during each patient visit. After all, you can get through your well-rehearsed pitch on smoking cessation in 20 seconds or less (unless you are dealing with one of those rare patients who is actually serious about trying to quit), and thereby make up some of the precious time, from your 7.5 minutes, that you have already spent achieving some more challenging check mark (trying, perhaps, to talk a diabetic patient into taking the extraordinary steps necessary to get his hemoglobin A1c down that last 0.5% to target).

So: 20 seconds spent on smoking cessation. Check.

But whoa. Not so fast there, Dr. Welby.

Did you know there are guidelines for physicians on smoking cessation? Did you know that these guidelines were devised under the auspices of the federal government, by a committee of individuals who are anti-smoking zealots (not that there’s anything wrong with that)?

From this latter fact, of course, there are certain things you will already know about these guidelines before you ever see them. You will know that the guidelines must be very long and detailed and tedious, because a) they are federal guidelines, and b) they are devised by people whose one and only mission in life – a mission they clearly believe is far more important than, say, oil spills, terrorism, global warming, jobs, or achieving fine and durable erections upon demand – is to save the world from the scourge of smoking. And now, these zealots have been granted the authority (i.e., the federally-approved authority to generate medical guidelines) to make it your primary mission in life, too.

Now, doctor, have a peek at the actual guidelines, which you can find here. Notice, first, that the federal guidelines for physicians on smoking cessation are 196 pages long. Notice how they step you through the process of counseling, and then step you through each of the measures you must take in order to guarantee that your patient achieves total success. And notice that an early branch point in the process of counseling is the one where the patient informs you whether he/she is willing to go any further with efforts at smoking cessation; and notice further that when the patient concludes that he/she is indeed NOT willing to go any further, thank you very much for your concern, the guidelines do not relieve you of further immediate obligations – no – but instead specify additional interventions you must now, at this moment, embark upon with this unwilling patient, which are “designed to increase their motivation to quit.”

The brash sales techniques required of you by the federally-sanctioned smoking-cessation guidelines would embarrass even a telemarketer, or an annuity salesperson.

This, of course, is all to say: Your 20-second spiel on the evils of smoking just doesn’t cut the mustard, doctor. To really earn that smoking-cessation chit on your P4P checklist, you need to do a lot more than that. The 196 pages of deadly serious federal guidelines detail what that is.

Lest you are tempted to dismiss as an absurdity the expectation that you are actually supposed to cram 2 hours of anti-smoking counseling into a 7.5 minute patient visit, there’s one more thing you ought to know.

One John Banzhaf, Executive Director and Chief Counsel for Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), who bills himself as the “law professor who masterminded litigation against the tobacco industry,” is not taking lightly, doctor, your obvious laxity in following federal guidelines on smoking cessation. Accordingly, some time ago he sent letters to each of the 50 state health commissioners warning them that he will soon begin instigating medical malpractice suits, on behalf of smokers who continue to smoke as the result of their doctor’s refusal to follow federal guidelines to the letter.

Mr. Banzhaf informs the commissioners that “physicians are killing more than 40,000 American smokers each year by failing to follow federal guidelines.” That’s right, doctor, you’re killing them. (Cigarettes don’t kill people; people kill people.) Specifically he invokes your sacred obligation to “warn the smoking patient about the many dangers of smoking and provide effective medical treatment for the majority who wish to quit.” (Emphasis DrRich’s.) That is, it’s your job not just to counsel them and treat them, but also to see that they actually succeed in quitting. If you don’t follow this mandate, you’re killing them. And you must pay.

When the federal government takes the pains necessary to draft detailed management guidelines for physicians, guidelines that, if followed as written, will save tens of thousands of lives each year, then surely society has every right to expect you to follow those guidelines to the letter – and to save those lives.

This is such a brilliant scheme for ending smoking-related death and disability, one must wonder why it hasn’t yet been applied to other intractable medical problems. Just think of all the good that could be accomplished, for instance, by federal guidelines requiring PCPs to assure that each of their patients maintain an optimal body weight, follow an exemplary diet, exercise vigorously for at least an hour a day, maintain unfailingly positive attitudes, and work diligently at their allotted tasks each and every day (secure in the knowledge that adopting right thinking and right behaviors will be invaluable to our dear leaders, as they bravely go forth to assure the good of the whole).

In any case, doctor, consider these anti-smoking guidelines carefully next time you’re putting that little check mark next to “Smoking cessation counseling” on your P4P checklist, and ask yourself: “Have I really done all that I am obligated to do, under the law, to guarantee that this patient has lit up his last smoke?”

Making PCPs responsible for their patient’s personal choices and behaviors, of course, is a time-honored method of covert healthcare rationing. It gives doctors powerful incentives to invent mechanisms for avoiding patients who display obviously unhealthful lifestyles, thus making it relatively inconvenient for these patients to gain access to expensive healthcare services.

But more to the point of this post, it is yet another example of how micromanagement by politicians, activists and bureaucrats has come to infest the practice of primary care medicine, and to relegate PCPs to the diminished role of simply following the checklists continually produced by such as these. If this is what primary care medicine has come to at last, why would you expect anyone who has a choice to take such a career path?

DrRich, for one, does not believe the 10-15% increase in pay hinted at by Obamacare will change the calculus for PCPs very much, and in fact, if it does – given all that is being done to primary care medicine – we should all be very much distressed by the implications.

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It is quite popular for certain medical bloggers who count themselves as scientifically sophisticated to disparage so-called “alternative medicine.”

Indeed, some have built entire websites to demonstrate (Penn-and-Teller-like) that various forms of alternative medicine – such as homeopathy, therapeutic touch, the medical application of crystals, Reiki, naturopathy, water therapy, bio-photons, mindfulness training, energy healing and a host of others – are completely devoid of any scientific merit whatsoever; are pablum for the uneducated masses; are, in short, irreducibly and irredeemably woo.

These same bloggers are scandalized into virtual apoplexy by the fact that the NIH has funded an entire section to “study” alternative medicine, and worse, that some of the most respected university medical centers in the land now seem to have embraced alternative medicine, and have established well-funded and heavily-marketed “Centers for Integrative Medicine,” or other similarly-named op-centers for pushing medically suspect alternative “services”.

(An astounding list of prestigious institutions of medical science now sporting Centers of Woo is maintained by Orec.)

Until quite recently, DrRich counted himself among the stalwarts of scientific strict constructionism. He was truly dismayed that the NIH and some of our most well-regarded academic centers (under the guise of wanting to conduct objective “studies” of alternative medicine) have lent an aura of respectability and legitimacy to numerous bizarre ideas and fraudulent claims masquerading as legitimate medical practices. To DrRich, such developments were yet another clear and unmistakable sign of the End Times.

Furthermore, DrRich (a well-known paranoid when it comes to covert rationing) saw a more sinister advantage to the official and well-publicized support that government-funded institutions were giving to the alternative medicine movement. Namely, fostering a widespread impression among the unwashed rabble that alternative medicine is at least somewhat worthwhile (and plenty respectable) advances the cause of covert rationing. That is, the more you can entice people to seek their diagnoses and their cures from the alternative medicine universe, the less money they will soak up from the real healthcare system. With luck, real diagnoses can be delayed and real therapy put off until it’s far too late to achieve a useful outcome by more traditional (and far more expensive) medical means.

So, for several years alternative medicine was seen by DrRich pretty much as it is seen by all of the anti-woo crowd – as an unvarnished evil.

But in recent days the scales have fallen from DrRich’s eyes. He now realizes he was sadly mistaken. Rather than a term of opprobrium, “alternative medicine” may actually be our most direct road to salvation. Indeed, DrRich thinks that far from damning alternative medicine, we should be blessing it, nurturing it, worrying over it, in the precise manner that a mountaineer trapped in a deadly blizzard would worry over the last embers of his dying campfire.

What turned the tide for DrRich was a recent report, issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, estimating that in 2007, Americans spent a whopping $34 billion on alternative medicine. That’s $34 billion, for healthcare (in a manner of speaking), out of their own pockets.

The implications of this report should be highly encouraging to those of us who lament the impending creation of a monolithic government-controlled healthcare system, and who have been struggling to imagine ways of circumventing the legions of stone-witted, soul-eating bureaucrats now being prepared (Sauron-like) to descend upon us all, doctor and patient alike.

This is why DrRich has urged primary care physicians to break the bonds of servitude while they still can, strike out on their own, and set up practices in which they are paid directly by their patients. Such arrangements are the only practical means by which individual doctors and patients can immediately restore the broken doctor-patient relationship, and place themselves within a protective enclosure impervious to the slavering soul-eaters.

One reason so few primary care doctors have taken this route (choosing instead to retire, to change careers and become deep-sea fishermen, or simply to give up and become abject minions of the forces of evil) is that they do not believe patients will actually pay them out of their own pockets.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, this new report from the CDCP demonstrates once and for all that Americans will, indeed, pay billions of dollars from their own pockets for their own healthcare – even the varieties of healthcare whose only possible benefits are mediated by the placebo effect. DrRich believes that many of the people buying homeopathic remedies are doing so less because they believe homeopathy works, and more because they feel abandoned by the healthcare system and by their own doctors, and realize they have to do SOMETHING. The CDCP report, in DrRich’s estimation, reflects the magnitude of the American public’s pent-up demand for doctors whose chief concern is for them, and not for the demands of third party payers.

Perhaps more importantly, this new report implies that it may be somewhat more difficult than DrRich has thought for the government to outlaw private-sector healthcare activities. As DrRich has carefully documented, a government-controlled healthcare system will require the authorities to make it illegal for Americans to spend their own money on their own healthcare, thus rendering direct-pay medical practices illegal, and putting the final stake into the heart of the doctor-patient relationship.

But the rousing success of the alternative medicine universe will make such laws difficult to enact.

To see why, consider just how encouraging this new CDCP report must be to the third-party payers. Thanks in no small part to the efforts of the government (and the academy) to legitimize alternative medicine, Americans are spending $34 billion a year on woo. This amount indicates tremendous savings for the traditional healthcare system. The actual amount saved, of course, is impossible to measure, but has to be far greater than just $34 billion. Some substantial proportion of patients spending money on alternative medicine, had they chosen traditional medical care instead, might have consumed expensive diagnostic tests, surgery, expensive prescription drugs, and other legitimate medical services. Furthermore, those legitimate medical services (as legitimate medical services are wont to do) often would have generated even more expenditures – by extending the survival of patients with chronic diseases, by identifying the need for even more diagnostic and therapeutic services, and by causing side effects requiring expensive remedies. (While alternative medicine is famous for being useless, it is also most often pretty harmless, and tends to produce relatively few serious side effects – except, of course, for causing a delay in making actual diagnoses and administering useful therapy, but if you’re a payer, that’s a good thing.) So the amount of money the payers actually save thanks to alternative medicine must be some multiplier of the amount spent on the alternative medicine itself.

What this means is that payers (which, let’s face it, will soon mean the government) will be loathe to do anything that might discourage the success and growth of alternative medicine, and this fact alone may stop them from making it illegal for Americans to pay for their own healthcare.

Still, we musn’t be too sanguine about these prospects. Under a government-controlled system, the imperative to control every aspect of healthcare (in the name of fairness) will be very, very strong, and it will be very tempting to the Feds to declare at least some varieties of alternative medicine to be covered services.

But the alternative medicine establishment (bless it) will be largely impervious to government control. Practitioners of alternative medicine are expert at designing vague products and services whose techniques, theories, processes and protocols are fluid, nebulous and ill-defined. So if the Feds declare, say, homeopathy and therapeutic touch to be legitimate, covered services under the Fed’s health plan, why, the alternative medicine gurus will simply come up with entirely new forms of alternative medicine, specifically to remain outside the government plan. (New varieties of alternative medicine already appear with dizzying speed, and can be invented at will. No bureaucracy could ever hope to keep up.)

Therefore, as long as the central authorities depend on alternative medicine as a robust avenue for covertly rationing healthcare, the purveyors of woo will always be able to flourish outside the real healthcare system. And this, DrRich believes, represents the ultimate value of woo, and establishes why we should all be encouraging and nurturing woo instead of disparaging it.

DrRich has speculated on various black market approaches to healthcare which could be attempted by American doctors (and investors) should restrictive, government-controlled healthcare become a reality. But now, thanks to the success of alternative medicine, there is a direct and straightforward path for American primary care physicians to re-establish a form of now-long-gone “traditional” American medicine, replete with a robust doctor-patient relationship, right out in the open – the kind of practice where patients pay their doctors themselves.

Simply declare this kind of practice to be a new variety of alternative medicine. Likely, PCPs will need to come up with a new name for it (such as “Therapeutic Allopathy,” or “Reciprocal Duty Therapeutics”), and perhaps invent some new terminology to describe what they’re doing. But what’s clear is what they will be doing is so fundamentally different from what PCPs will be doing under government-controlled healthcare as to be unrecognizable, and nobody will be able to argue it’s not alternative medicine. In fact, it will seem nearly as wierd as Reiki.

The success of medical woo, in other words, can provide American doctors who want to practice the kind of medicine they should be practicing with the cover they need to do so. And this is why we must support medical woo, and celebrate its continued growth and success.

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Now, read the whole story.

DrRich explains it all in, Fixing American Healthcare – Wonkonians, Gekkonians and the Grand Unification Theory of Healthcare.

Now on Kindle!

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Recently, DrRich wrote a series of posts detailing how the American healthcare system – even before the new reforms kick in – is taking steps to prevent individual citizens from being allowed to spend their own money on their own healthcare. Part of that effort, of course, is to restrict physicians from offering direct-pay medical services to their patients.

DrRich may have given the impression that only primary care doctors are affected by efforts to restrict their practices in this way. If so, he apologizes.

He particularly owes an apology to his friends the dermatologists. Indeed, DrRich has been reminded of an article that appeared in the New York Times a while back, which castigated dermatologists for the sin of establishing direct-pay practices, and in particular, for creating their own brand of a two-tiered healthcare system – one for patients with skin disorders, and one for “cosmetic dermatology.”

As the Times describes it, patients who wish to see a dermatologist for, say, possible skin cancer are put on a waiting list, and when their appointed time finally arrives (generally several months later) they are subjected to modern medical hell. To wit: Upon arriving in a lackluster office, the patient is shelved for a while in an unattractive, poorly lit waiting room equipped with a broken TV, fuzz balls on the floor, old magazines, the unruly children of other patients, and surly office personnel. Eventually the now-even-more-disheartened patient’s name is called by an indifferent nurse practitioner, who, operating from a checklist of questions, will “triage” her to the appropriate patient-category (e.g., acne, fungus, cancer, warts- you know, dermatology stuff), then have her strip in order to fully expose the large organ (i.e., the skin) for which she has sought assistance, hand her a scratchy yellow paper gown to cover her nakedness, and have her wait for some time in a chilly exam room to see His Holiness, the actual doctor. At last the dermatologist arrives, mutters a greeting (or some other ritual uttering), glances at a clipboard, and announces, “Show me your [acne, fungus, cancer, warts];” whereupon, having regarded the cause of cutaneous concern, and having made a professional determination, he either signs the prescription that has been pre-written for him by the nurse practitioner, or schedules a procedure. Then, placing her bundle of clothing into her arms and wishing her a good day, the doctor shoves her out into the hall to finish dressing, as the formal interview is completed, and the exam room is at a premium.

Presumably, one hopes, some dermatology practices not visited by the New York Times might not be quite so bad. Still, anyone who’s been seen by an American PCP lately will nod sympathetically at the dermatology patient’s ordeal.

Now observe what the Times observes when the patient, instead of having an actual skin problem, merely is sagging here and there and wishes to be shorn up. That is, the patient has a cosmetic issue. That is, the patient wants Botox.

The same dermatologist will often have an entirely different setup for these patients. This time the patient is seen immediately, possibly the same day, as dermatologists are sensitive to the needs of their clients who have an impending public engagement, and thus need to look their best. If this patient is to wait at all, she will wait in a modern, tastefully decorated private room. She will then be seen not by a mere nurse practitioner but by an aesthetician, who will do a careful assessment of the sagging parts, and, aside from suggesting more injection sites than the patient might originally have had in mind, will offer a complete program for long-term cosmetic maintenance, which naturally will include quarterly Botoxification. At just the proper moment the dermatologist comes in, greets the patient warmly and reassuringly; then reviews the recommendations of the aesthetician and discusses those recommendations at length with both the aesthetician and the patient, studying the patient’s face in depth as he does so, pointing, nodding, studying, adjusting, all the while smiling confidently. Yes, he indicates, we will all be very happy indeed with the results. Finally the doctor begins to make the now-thoroughly-discussed-and-agreed-upon injections, doing so with the greatest solicitude and sensitivity. The patient is then given as much time as she needs to collect herself, and is invited to “recover” in a room set aside for this purpose, with flattering lighting, soft music, a cappuccino machine, and perhaps a glass of wine. She leaves the office a new person. And, just as the dermatologist has promised, all are indeed very happy with the outcome.

Naturally, the New York Times is scandalized by the dichotomy which its discerning readers will note here. Why should a patient with a mere cosmetic issue be treated so well, when a patient with an actual medical problem, possibly even skin cancer, is treated so shabbily? How can dermatologists openly encourage such a two-tiered system?

DrRich has a word of advice for the scandalized reporters of the New York Times, and any other concerned Americans who are worried that dermatologists, by setting up separate-but-not-equal practices for their two kinds of patients, are moving us one step closer to the dreaded two-tiered healthcare system we all abhor. That word is: Chill.

Allow DrRich to support this friendly recommendation with two observations.

1) We already have a multi-tiered healthcare system, and little or none of it is the fault of dermatologists. It is the fault of human nature. All countries have at least a two-tiered healthcare system, including countries (like Cuba and China) that have specifically embraced egalitarianism (rather than individual autonomy) as the fundamental operating principle. A second tier is necessary if for no other reason than political leaders and other individuals critically important to the collective effort must have somewhere to go for their healthcare.  The second tier, like the poor, will always be with us.

2) When a dermatologist spends Tuesday afternoon in her run-down office, treating people who come to her for bona fide skin disorders like they’re not really patients but widgets on an assembly line, then spends Wednesday in her other, much more amenable offices, treating the merely cosmetically-challenged like they are minor nobility, she is not really engaging in two-tiered healthcare. Not at all. Instead, on Tuesday she is practicing real, true, prescribed-by-society, by-the-book American healthcare, just as our leaders (in their wisdom) have carefully set it up for us, and on Wednesday she is doing Something Altogether Different.

Injecting Botox is officially and formally not part of American healthcare. How do we know this? Because it is not covered by Medicare or health insurance. If you want Botox you’ve got to pay for it your own self, just as you do if you want a TV or a car. So by all that is sacred, injecting Botox is NOT American healthcare.

Furthermore, when one looks at it objectively, injecting Botox is not even really practicing medicine, at least not in any true sense. In actual truth, it takes very little training or expertise to inject Botox. There’s no reason one must go to college, graduate from medical school, or do several additional years of training in dermatology (or any other specialty) to do this. Anyone with a needle and syringe, an alcohol wipe, and access to Botox could do as well. Just find the wrinkle and stick it. If they made the materials available over-the-counter, most folks would do just fine with it.

The sheer arbitrariness by which injecting Botox is deemed by the authorities to constitute the practice of medicine can also be illustrated by considering a somewhat different, equally well-known cosmetic procedure, one that also involves injecting substances through the skin via needles, and that has much more to do with the actual skin itself than Botox injections (which do not really affect the skin itself, but only the muscles under the skin). DrRich speaks, obviously, of the tattoo. But unlike making Botox injections, tattooing requires real skill, knowledge, training, expertise and artistic talent. Most dermatologists simply could not manage a highly technical skill like that.  The point being, of course, that if you were to describe Botox injections and tattooing to a visitor from Mars, then ask him/her/it which of these two dermatological procedures ought to require a medical license and board certification, the Martian would get it wrong every time.

DrRich understands, of course, that while administering Botox is, in practical and objective terms, no more practicing medicine than is applying an ice-pack to a bruised knee, legally it is indeed deemed to be the practice of medicine. Accordingly, doctors in general (and dermatologists in particular), relying on this nonsensical designation, have legally cornered the market on Botox injections. So it’s not like you could just set up a booth at the Mall and hire high school students to do this (as you can for, say, ear-piercing – which, in contrast to Botox injections, is an actual surgical procedure which is intended to result in a permanent structural change in a body part). If you set up a chain of Botox Booths, you would be practicing medicine without a license, which is a serious crime.

But fundamentally, while performing Botox injections may have a certain legal status, in any true sense it is not really practicing medicine.  Not when ear-piercing and tattooing are not. Rather, in real life, injecting Botox is simply an activity some dermatologists may choose to do when they’re not doing real dermatology.

To say it another way, when the dermatologist goes to her “other office” to cater to a self-paying variety of clientele, she is practicing medicine only from the most arbitrary and strictly legalistic viewpoint. In real life, she is doing Something Else. She is engaging in a Pastime.

Doctors, of course, often have Pastimes. That is, they partake in activities other than practicing medicine when they could, in fact, be seeing more patients. Some have taken up golf. Others have started side businesses such as restaurants or software companies. Some do charity work, or go to graduate school for an MBA. Still others have opted to work part time in order to raise their families.

Society generally finds such activities acceptable, and – to this point – does not insist that all doctors forgo all other human endeavors in order to see as many patients as humanly possible, during all their waking hours. While society seems to be moving closer to declaring that doctors owe this duty to the collective, it has not reached this point quite yet.

Until society sees fit to legislate otherwise (which, DrRich supposes, could happen really very soon now), doctors will continue to spend some of their time engaging in hobbies and business or family activities outside of the formal healthcare system. Some may even leave the formal healthcare system altogether in favor of these other activities. DrRich himself has done this. And until society renders it officially illegal for doctors to do so, DrRich respectfully asks that doctors be left alone to celebrate their individual autonomy as granted to them under America’s founding documents, whether it’s by establishing authentic Indian restaurants, setting up Botox clinics, or even becoming direct-pay practitioners.

One last word of advice for DrRich’s dermatology friends: Have fun with your Botox clinics for now, fellas and ladies, but please don’t become too invested in them.  This is definitely a shallow-moat line of business, and the only thing that gives you any protection at all is your aura as highly trained specialists, with special and secret knowledge about an organ (i.e., the skin) which visibly droops when the underlying muscles become lax with age and gravity. A single action by forces entirely out of your control – say, Congress or the FDA – could render your monopoly entirely moot overnight, and you will be instantly priced out of business by hordes of PCPs, nurse practitioners, Botox booths in Walmart, and even home Botox injection kits. So please remember to at least keep your hand in genuine dermatology, or get your MBA, or perfect your long iron shots, or even learn a real skill, like tattooing – but do something that will provide you with a Plan C. Because Plan Botox is definitely a high risk endeavor over the long term.

________________________________

Now, read the whole story.

DrRich explains it all in, Fixing American Healthcare – Wonkonians, Gekkonians and the Grand Unification Theory of Healthcare.

Now on Kindle!