Imagine that it is 2016, and you are a 65 year old boomer. You have been admitted to your local community hospital with malaise, fatigue, vomiting and cloudy mental status. You have had blood pressure problems and diabetes for a few years, and have just been diagnosed with renal failure. As you drift in and out of consciousness, you are vaguely aware your old family practice physician, who had taken care of you for 20 years, is not around. A religious man, he quietly retired from medical practice in 2014, after the full force of the Obama administration‘s removal of conscience protection for physicians in February, 2009, came into effect.Read the whole article for a chilling look at the future and a concise review of how we got to this point.
Bravo, Dr. Davenport!
1 comment:
I sense scare tactics.
"The largest generational cohort in American history, the Baby Boomers, will be the first Americans to be denied available effective life-saving treatments for reasons of cost."
And what fantasy world has the author been living in? Many Americans are denied treatment for reasons of cost right now. Many more are able to afford, but only by spending themselves into poverty.
I already get the impression the writer worships at the alter of Capitalism, and is incapable of admitting a perfect free market could ever fail.
"A religious man, he quietly retired from medical practice in 2014, after the full force of the Obama administration‘s removal of conscience protection for physicians in February, 2009, came into effect. "
Those protections were only put in by Bush last december. If the removal of them is enough to prompt someone to retire, what were they doing in medicine before then?
" But the appropriate therapy, kidney dialysis, is not on the approved list of treatments for patients over 65, having been deemed too expensive."
The NHS does dialysis.
"His medical school was one of the last to retain the original Hippocratic Oath. It affirmed the covenantal relationship between the physician and patient, overseen by God, and that whatever the physician did would be for the patient's benefit."
Someone has not read the oath. It opens with an appeal to the Gods. Plural. Polytheism was the dominant school of religion at the time or writing. Many medical schools today alter the oath, either to christianise or secularise it, but that isn't the real oath.
He even links to the polytheistic oath! But, no... he is writing for a conservative audience, and it would anger that audience to acknowedge a non-christian could have any type of ethics.
"Back in 2008, in Benitez v North Coast Women's Care Medical Group, the California Supreme Court ruled against ob/gyn doctors who did not want to provide intrauterine insemination to a lesbian couple because of their religious beliefs."
'THE GAYS WILL DESTROY MEDICINE!!!!'
Everything else is just hypotheticals - citing future dates, saying various events will happen which vary from unlikely to almost impossible. It's just your basic slippery slipe argument: "If we allow A (healthcare reform) to happen, it'll lead to B, C and eventually to Z - the complete collapse of the medical system and murder of millions of people."
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