California News:
The duped physician is the one who is easily taken advantage of, especially by being cheated or blamed for something. And once controlled, that physician becomes a menace to society by prescribing disability, poverty, and squalor instead of healing, contentment, and well-being. This is the plight of the average American physician today, and it is now time to fix this harmful and unproductive behavior. This paper is about the encumbrance of the free market of ideas and their implementation in the medical field and exactly how to blow that burden to smithereens.
There are four phases of doctoring that I have been exposed to during my 74 years of life. The first was the 1950’s up to approximately 1985. These were my growing years, learning how to be a doctor. America was in the “doctor knows best” culture wherein the doctor was respected for knowledge, wisdom, good judgment, kindness, caring, and complete fairness in dealing with economic arrangements with patients. There was a high amount of trust. Another feature of that era was the disproportion of male and female physicians. It was about ten to one, male over female, but by the early 1980’s changing to maybe three or four to one. It was also a time saturated with high quality care for each other and of peaceful, productive, and clean business in the conduct of medical therapy.
Overall, doctors were appreciated in society and were paid for their services proportionate with the amount of training and dedication they put into their careers. And every bit of that rigorous training and wisdom gained throughout those educations remains vital and needed for you to have good doctors today. There is no place for shortcuts.
It took many years of training before beginning those careers compared to their peers who began working and developing their families and their American dream earlier in life, for example a plumber, a banker, or an engineer. Training doctors don’t make a living, rather they sacrifice a living to pay their teachers. They make up for those years sometimes nowadays with a half-million dollars in student debt.
My father, a struggling land developer, paid for my medical education and was proud to do it. Parents don’t help children nearly as much now. And when I asked my dad how I could pay him back he said, “Do the same for your kids plus maybe a little more.” It was great advice.
A very important aspect of the American culture of those years was the streetwise practical development of how to do simple effective business. Doctors missed out on that experience, and they still do. And this is quite different from their peers like plumbers and accountants as mentioned above. For example, the plumber makes the deal, “I’ll clean your drains for $500, and you pay me on completion of the work. I get paid and you’ve got a functioning habitable home again.” With time I have learned the motto of the plumber, and I am not putting plumbers down because I think they are smart businesspeople. It goes, “Water runs downhill, payday is on Friday, and don’t bite your fingernails.” Real basic, but very effective, and I’m not worried about plumbers washing their hands. As a surgeon, I frequently worked on the gastrointestinal tract, and clean hands are a must. The point is that plumbers know how to do arithmetic, and they expect to be paid in full for services rendered, and they are not going to be very happy if they aren’t.
And regarding clean hands, I frequently watch Judge Judy on TV. Repeatedly, she defines the doctrine of dirty hands. If you come to court with clean hands as a plaintiff, your evidence is credible. But if you act unethically or unfairly in relation to the subject matter of the dispute, you will not likely be made whole.
At business, doctors are naïve and quite impressionable. Their nature is gentle, and frankly unperturbed by crude and dishonest patients and nefarious and envious hacks and swindlers all over the place that want what they have. The natural compassion and empathy of a doctor for a patient remains without bias, because when a low character person becomes a patient in pain and suffering, they become quiet little angels like everybody else, and the unsuspecting doctor has no problem putting up with it. Rather, the doctor is very satisfied with the treatment rendered and the patient is no longer suffering. And when confronted with the fact that he or she isn’t being paid, the response is, “I leave the billing to billers. I’m quite happy just helping the patients.” That doctor’s actions are a fool’s errand. Sooner or later, it catches up with him and him and he burns out. There is an article in my series here at California Globe titled The Dangerous Side Effects of Physician Burnout, that clarifies what happens when doctors burn out. They become dangerous.
It was about 1985 when phase two came onto my scene. Our American culture was slowly changing. We were so prosperous that we began to figure out how to get very materialistic. Everybody now owned a nice home with a nice car in the driveway and a generous credit line. Increasing contentment in paychecks introduced shortened work weeks, longer vacations, and better benefits at the job. Unions got involved. It was spectacular. The question became…” Why do I need to work so hard since I am so wealthy?” This sloppy slothful behavior demanded more stuff with less work. Doctors were no exception. The ugly term debt began to appear and the word disability as a response to rationalize that debt.
Our cunning and expanding government and the complacent public sector took a turn for the worse. Word got out that the cost of doctors and hospitals were spiraling out of control relative to the other sectors of the industrial capacity (gross domestic product) of the USA when considering inflation. We were described as price gouging and needy of government regulation to curb our greedy appetites. The government told the public they wanted to help and thus the great rip-off of the medical profession began. It was pure propaganda and a government program disguised as a humanitarian project. The government told the unsuspecting populace, “We need to stop the profligate spending and price gouging by these profiting, rich doctors, and we are thinking of how hard you are working and how to help you from getting ripped off! After all, the American people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that might suggest medical help for people who possibly can’t afford it”. Their propaganda worked, and physicians fell into place!
I remember one night talking with my wife who was my small Sacramento surgical business office manager, who showed me our latest monthly health insurance bill (Blue Shield). The insurer warned us that our monthly premiums and overall deductible for our family of five would be going up because doctors and hospitals were charging too much for their services. We looked at each other and laughed because that’s not what insurance companies like Blue Cross, Blue Shield, Medicare, and Medi-Cal were and are doing. They began paying way less than the job demanded and it only got worse with time. You and I were and are living a lie while the government was and is stealing. We got a little hint of that the other day when DOGE uncovered $500 billion in waste, fraud, and abuse, per year via Medicare! Thank you, Elon Musk. We find that Nancy Pelosi inside trades stock (healthcare stock?), like John Boehner, a predecessor colleague who inside traded healthcare stock along with countless other elites in Washington D.C. We ask, where’s the money that was supposed to pay the doctors? There’s a lot of money missing and a lack of accountability. Are we being hustled?
You don’t need to be an MBA to be a successful entrepreneur, doctor or otherwise. But when the government “helps,” things get really complicated, confusing, and corrupt! That’s why I left medicine, because both doctors and patients were getting ripped off, and they still are getting ripped off.
The standard of care of medicine has plummeted, and there is no trust or ethics. There is no safety now, and no affordability. I define the government nowadays as LGBTQ, and that’s not what you think it is. My definition of government bureaucrats is Lazy, Greedy, Bigoted, Temeritous, and Quixotic, a bunch of abject and outright evil, abusive, dirty reprobates (Remember, waste, fraud, and abuse). And patriots get punished for exposing the Truth (Big balls of the DOGE team).
A summary of the second phase of my experience of doctoring could be defined as “government knows best.” These LGBTQ fools become more controlling, abusive, progressive and cruel as they gobble up more power via flat-out theft and destruction of morals, money, goodwill and production. The motto of the racecar driver is, “Horsepower is expensive.” The motto of the politician is, “Political power is expensive.” And that runaway power is challenging the doctor patient relationship and eroding trust in physicians thus lowering the ethical standards of the profession. It’s called “shared decision making” because the persuasion of the bureaucrats is not credible, and the opinion of the slave doctor echoes the dictator.
The third phase of doctoring I experienced is dependency, for which I quit the profession. This phase, which began about 1998, is the one this article is about and the dilemma we find ourselves in. Doctors have been captured by a tyrannical government and disabled by completely waivering their skills and judgment to bureaucrats like Barack Hussein Obama. They have completely given up their rights to practice medicine and surgery the way they learned it and have become government employees who do what their new leaders tell them to do in our new and hopeless world of shared decision making. Shockingly, the teachers of medicine and surgery in this third phase have replaced the teachers I learned from. Many college professors today are woke communists! They are not dependent on patients for their paycheck but are salaried by bad people. They do what they are told to do, and what they do is not what the covenants of the Hippocratic Oath say to do. So now there are no ethics. None.
Not only are the phase three doctors duped, but they are dependent, thus dangerous. But the real danger is in what they are told to do by the bureaucrats, like Obama and Newsom. When Obama pitched his legacy Obamacare, he said his vision was about hope and change. He said, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor”. He said his “Care Act” was affordable. He said his “Care Act” was all about patient protection. When asked why he wouldn’t allow a pacemaker in a 90-year-old woman, who had a very reasonable quality of life, his answer was, “We can’t afford it.”
In retrospect we ask, was that hope and change for the better or worse? Doctors were and are dangerous because they follow unethical and illegal orders. The bottom line with Obamacare is to provide as little substandard medical care as possible because that would hurt profits. And neglect of the medical needs of dying patients is murder.
But another reason the duped doctor is dangerous is because he or she now motivates the welfare state. Here is a simple question for you. Who do you think authorizes “disability” for those people out there who possibly can’t afford to pay for medical help or for people who can’t get off their butts and get a job? If you think it’s the doctor you absolutely correct. “Can’t” get off their butts is a diagnosis to explain “why” they don’t get off their butts. The bureaucrat uses the doctor to justify paying out taxpayer dollars to bureaucrat engineered “easy money deadbeats” thus crippling the workforce of our beloved nation. The doctor, wittingly or not, is a menace to the economics of the USA and to the medical profession, let alone our national security in the world.
Doctors are meant to vigorously and honestly encourage their patients to get back to normal, back in the workforce, earning a living like everybody else and contributing to society. But now they encourage rest and prescribe disability. Doctors are duped dirty disablers, and that is wrecking our economy.
Here is a splendid definition of the fake science of our present-day medical profession per the beloved Thomas Sowell….
“Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true, but many others are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence”.
The standard of care of the ultra-essential need of healing the American citizen is at rock bottom, and the ratio of male to female physicians is equal. To these points, our USA culture has moved from “doctor knows best” to “government knows best” to phase three “government knows nothing” when it comes to the operation of our medical system. The government is an absolute LGBTQ loser, so beware of false teachers.
The fourth and final phase of my experience is well underway. This phase began in 2016. This is so exciting, and I am extremely pleased to give you excellent news. It is a phase that is developing right in front of our eyes, and it will become increasingly more apparent to you every day. Our culture is shifting, and our medical system is now remembering the covenants of the Hippocratic Oath, and we are talking about God again. Remember that the USA and our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, penned by our founding fathers, emphasizes our dependence on God and His Son Jesus Christ, also known as “The Great Physician”! Doctors mend; Jesus heals! Healing is miraculous. Show me a doctor in the USA today that doesn’t honor this statement, and I will show you an LGBTQ killing, lying, stealing, wimpy, cowardly QUACK!
Our present-day ratio has now flipped, three to four females to one male physician. That is a disgraceful metrosexual dilemma, and the conduct of medicine and surgery is broken. The Spirit of medicine is broken. Proverbs 17:22 says “A merry heart does good like medicine, but a broken spirit dries the bones. We need male doctors to step up and help our nation! Why? Good doctors are SOLDIERS. They kill disease. You need killer instinct to do that. The male physician no longer has killer instinct. And our amazing female doctors are carrying their freight! It is time to man up, male doctor!
Fairness in the business of medicine and surgery should be just like described in phase one of this document, save one profoundly significant tweak. Remember our example of the plumber? Herein lies the secret. The deal is struck, the work gets done, and the worker gets paid. It’s simply good faith and well-being activity, the kind you want to repeat, with excellent arithmetic, top notch accountability, and with competence, competition, and merit involved. What one pays for services or goods is what the market will bear, that is the highest price that the consumers are willing to pay and for the producer to remain competitive! That’s what defines great product, and God smiles.
And that profoundly significant mandatory tweak is to expand the establishment clause of the first amendment of the US Constitution. There are two papers in my series here at California Globe called The Solution to the Political Pollution of Medical Freedom and The Inflection Point: California Medicine is Communized, which go into detail regarding the addition of an establishment clause for medicine among other ideas, thus expanding Freedom of Religion to Include Freedom of Medicine. The motto of phase four and beyond becomes “God Knows Best”!
In summary, we need free enterprise, accountability, excellence, safety, ethics, affordability, satisfaction, contentment; it’s all there. Just do it! The notion not of “hope and change” but of “exceptionalism” in who we already are as our goal is in order, as quoted by one of my heroes (like Trump and Reagan) by the name of Rush Limbaugh.
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Author: Patrick Wagner, MD
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