Dr. Diastolic's blog

Science fiction has a pretty good record of predicting the future. So the quote from Robert A. Heinlein's To Sail Beyond The Sunset rightly predicts where we are heading. Think about the culture of entitlement, gov't giveaways, free health care, world wide whining, and how democracy ties it all together.

"A perfect democracy, a 'warm body' democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally has no internal feedback for self correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens...which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it...which for the majority translates as 'Bread and Circuses'

  "Bread and Circuses is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader--the barbarians enter Rome."

  (To Sail Beyond the Sunset, 227)

Here's my plan in a nutshell. I will stop taking extra calls, weekends, and locums to keep my family under $250,000 per year. That's simple. And you better believe, that if I'll do it this way, millions of other intelligent, hard working people, who actually contribute something to the economy, will do it. Joe Biden and other politicians have to understand that screwing people who achieved something in life, who worked hard, who are the foundation of this economy, is just plain wrong. It is not patriotic!

(please note how freely Joe Biden says "we want to take money")  cont...

Call me old fashioned, but I am not alone. I often believe that patients don't have the capabilities to make proper decisions about their clinical options. When the issue is childbirth, excuse me, patients
are often nuts. Just witness the epidemic of home childbirths!

S.W. McFee, M.D. from Parkville, Missouri goes even further. Read the
following letter from this clinician to the latest American Society of
Anesthesiologists Newsletter:

I am not a policy expert, but I know a thing or two about medicine. So
consider the following case I recently did. (The reader should realize
that this is a pretty typical case, more common than not. Number$ below are all approximate.)

83 year old Mexican woman with end stage renal disease, on dialysis 3
times a week. She has  also hypertension, diabetes,  obesity (5' 6'';
92 kg), hypercholesterolemia, and much much more. She doesn't speak
English, and probably Spanish, because she is demented. So now she has
sick sinus syndrome. The cardiologist and family want to implant a
pacemaker.

Consider the cost of what we did for her, for the family, and for you,
dear taxpayer. We have implanted a $6000 device. Then we had a $600
anesthesia charge, $1500 surgeon's fee. $2000 OR fee, $400 radiologist
fee. All that was followed by one day of ICU, then telemetry, then
regular hospital stay ($10,000 or more). Then rehab, nursing care, etc,
etc. So, we are talking $50,000 - $150,000 total charge for a
person who is not really a person anymore. (And who did not work a day
in this country to pay into the system, but that is a different matter.)

The questions are:

Would the family do the same if they would be required to pay at least
10% of the total charge? Or would they put grandma in the bedroom and
give her comfort, like people have done for thousands of years?

Do we really need that universal healhcare thing, or do we need more
personal financial responsibility on the part of patients or their families?