#jane orient

Riding in to rescue the victims of Obamacare and other government healthcare schemes are guess who?  The legislators?  The regulators?  Don't make me laugh.  It is the growing group of healthcare free marketeers.  The celebration following the receipt of an Obamacare insurance card or qualifying for Medicaid is short-lived once patients realize that "coverage doesn't mean care," as my friend Dr. Jane Orient has famously said.  

Leading the way on the primary care front are Atlas MD (http://atlas.md/wichita/), Epiphany Health (http://www.epiphanyhealth.net/) and Medlion (http://www.medlion.com/).  I apologize if I have left anyone out and this is likely as more are entering this space even as I write this.  These are all primary care subscription programs where a patient or family pays a small amount each month to cover their primary care needs.  When I say small, I mean less than what it costs to administer Medicaid primary care needs, or as my friend, Dr. Lee Gross (founder of Epiphany) has said, "...less than a cell phone bill each month."  

Take a look at the above websites for a glimpse at what the subscription fee includes.  Keep in mind also that self-funded businesses are increasingly intrigued with this concept of primary care delivery for what it doesn't provide:  entrance and exposure to the overpriced world of hospital employed physicians and specialists and care at their bosses' establishments.

What is the reaction of the healthcare industry to the efficient, fairly priced and high quality solution to the delivery of primary care?  Bribed bureaucrats and legislators as a favor to their corporate pals want to regulate them out of business, treating them as "insurance."  Several states (kudos to them) have passed laws specifically designating Direct Primary Care (DPC) practices as immune to such destructive regulatory attempts.  The absence of such crony-limiting laws invites the very orgy of bribery and corruption you would suspect.  While it is sad it is not surprising that we have for some time been in a place where any oasis of liberty requires a statute protecting it from the predatory state.  

The growth of the DPC practices and industry is key to the continued delivery of health care in this country, particularly as the effects of federal intervention wreck havoc on patients' ability to afford basic care.  More basic healthcare needs are declared ineligible for payment every week while at the same time insurance deductibles and premiums skyrocket.  DPC practices are not only the life raft, they are the key to bringing healthcare costs under control, particularly for those requiring care for conditions such as diabetes and vascular disease (to list just two examples) that require chronic and continuous disease management.  

As the federal government and their crony accomplices attempt to make off with an even greater percentage of GDP for healthcare, I believe it is important to understand, recognize and support the tenacious underdogs (like the DPC practices) standing in stark defiance.  Here is the Journal Record article by  Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs President Michael Carnuccio appealing to the power brokers in the state house to ensure that these DPC practices remain unmolested.

G. Keith Smith, M.D.

www.surgerycenterok.com

New Post has been published on http://www.brianbrown.net/2014/10/16/doctors-chief-cdc-curbs-secondhand-smoke-more-than-ebola/

Doctors Chief: CDC Curbs Secondhand Smoke More Than Ebola

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more safeguards against secondhand smoke than it does regarding Ebola, Dr. Jane Orient, director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, said on Thursday.

“If you look at the precautions against secondhand smoke, they are absurd,” Orient told “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV. “The hazard from secondhand smoke, unless you’re just sensitive to it and it bothers you, are really nonexistent.

“And yet, we have all these … expensive restrictions against these non-hazards — and a pathogenic, lethal organism that can infect you with one to 10 particles, we’re so cavalier about?” Orient asked. “This just really does not make sense.”

Story continues below video.

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She told Malzberg that CDC Chief Dr. Thomas Frieden skated around answering key questions about the crisis as he was grilled by Congress on Thursday.

“Frieden evaded a lot of very important questions or pretended not to know,” Orient said.

“Certainly, he evaded, despite really intense questioning, whether the White House was telling him they were not going to do a ban, whether he was in communication with the White House or whether the CDC was going to recommend a restriction in travel.

“The CDC claims not to know how those two nurses [at a Dallas hospital] got infected, despite their protective gear, because if the nurses did not breach the protocol, there’s something wrong with the protocol,” Orient said.

She disputed Frieden’s claims that Ebola could not become airborne. It could, Orient said, through germs via “aerosols” that are created by sneezing or coughing.

“Your body fluids have to go through the air, unless you touch somebody,” she told Malzberg. “You generate an aerosol if you cough or sneeze or vomit or have explosive diarrhea — and it makes droplets of different sizes.

“The ones that are really, really tiny can get through your mask, around your mask, down into your lungs,” Orient said, adding that these droplets could infect “target cells down in your lungs.”

The physician surmised that Frieden’s thinking is based on a premise that the Ebola virus “does not survive being dried down to a particle of that size, but there’s experimental evidence that it can survive for as long as 90 minutes on one of those drops down there.”

When asked by Malzberg whether Ebola could, as such, is transmittable by air, Orient responded: “Theoretically, it certainly is. We cannot rule it out.”

Orient is author of the book, “Sapira’s Art and Science of Bedside Diagnosis,” published by LWW.

Related Stories:

Rep. Pete Sessions: ‘Liberal Mindset’ Cripples US Ebola Response

CDC May Add Ebola-Exposed Health Workers to No-Fly List

Link to this story: 

Want to know what the "new" health care will look like once Obamacare is fully implemented?  Read this.  Those of you excited about the health care your new card purchased in the "exchanges" will get you may want to think hard about this.  Remember the saying of my friend, Dr. Jane Orient:  "coverage doesn't mean care."  Health "care" in Canada, with waiting lines so long that patients come to Oklahoma City for their health needs is validation of her point, as is the "care" described in this article.

It is of little consolation to the poor families of the victims of the VA medical system that "an action plan" to deal with this was considered, or that the "VA will take appropriate corrective action immediately." Health care is far too important to leave to the bureaucrats and their doublespeak.

If you are having trouble with the idea that politicians would sell everyone down the river in order to line their pockets, you probably need to read more history.  If you are having trouble with the idea that politicians wouldn't also rip everyone off using our "health care" as an excuse I think you should re-examine the amount of skepticism you employ when listening to politicians speak about this issue.  Remember the great Albert Camus quote:

"The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants."

Below are some links to articles that may help those of you lose what I'll  call the straightjacket of naivety.

Article by Dr. Jane Orient

Article by Richard Pollock

Article by Paul Bedard

Editorial, Washington Times

I once wrote about how happy one of my mother’s friends should have been when Medicare decided to no longer pay for her B-12 shots, as the private sector would figure out a way to make sure there were no shortages of B-12 injections. Ever.  Central planners, on the other hand, those in medicine in particular, who assign pricing to products and services always get it wrong.  This is the fatal conceit, about which Hayek warned us.  A bureaucrat can never discover a market clearing price (that price at which there are neither surpluses or shortages) because this price must emerge from market interactions, not be imposed on an economy.

  Thousands of Medicare patients with cancer are getting their first glimpse of what the death panels will look like.  In this article by Sarah Kliff of the Washington Post, thousands of Medicare patients are reported to have been turned away from their usual cancer treatment centers because the government has decided on a different price these centers are to be paid.  If you guessed that they got it wrong on the low side, you go to the head of the class.

  The real story actually has a sinister side.  Kliff touches on it but doesn’t know and probably can’t even imagine the mercenary tactics at work here by the big hospitals and Uncle Sam.   Remember that hospital-employed physicians are paid 40% more by Medicare for the very same service as physicians that are in private practice.  Likewise, hospitals are paid more by Medicare for the administration of chemotherapy than private clinics.  Keep this in mind when you hear some government apparatchik moaning about the impending bankruptcy of Medicare.  These Medicare cuts, affecting only the private clinics, will not only put them out of business, but that is the intent, the goal, the very purpose.

  Remember the lesson from Jim Epstein of Reason Magazine:  “industry consolidation is the smoking gun of government corruption.”  Or apply Murray Rothbard’s penetrating question: “cui bono?”…who benefits?  If you said the big hospitals, you get a gold star. 

  The short term solution, of course, to save Medicare money on chemotherapy, is to insure that no Medicare patients are treated in a hospital!  This is far too logical, though, and the private clinics don’t have the money to throw at lobbyists that the corporate hospitals do.

  This is a great example of Jane Orient’s quote that “coverage doesn’t mean care.”  These thousands of Medicare patients are getting a feel for what this president means by a “right” to health care, aren’t they?  What they really have is a right to hope for chemotherapy.  The current regime doesn’t care if you have “coverage.”  They don’t care if you get care.  What they want is control of your healthcare.  Collecting premiums from the taxpayers while simultaneously denying care is a recipe for a profitable “insurance” enterprise, no?

  Welcome to Obamacare.  We haven’t begun to see the worst.  I remain hopeful, however, that this tyranny will usher in a market economy in medical care.  I remain hopeful that rather than be corralled into health camps and clinics, the American people will take matters into their own hands and seek alternative sources of “coverage” and “care.”  These patients with cancer really haven’t been given much choice though, have they?

A very interesting article by CATO's Michael Tanner about Obamacare is here.  He's wondering if Obamacare is about to fall flat on its face.  How popular is this plan going to be, after all, when many young people find that their insurance premiums have increased 169%?!  The most incredible part of this article is the revelation that the number of folks who were supposedly uninsured prior to this law's passage will not change after this law is fully implemented, as many will lose their insurance due to the bill and many others will simply be dumped into Medicaid. 

Ah.  But there's the rub.  The feds and their health cartel thought that the governors couldn't resist the federal money.  This was the part of the decision by Chief Justice Roberts (removing the teeth of the feds to retaliate against states who chose to reject Medicaid expansion) that left this "president" so glum-faced in his press conference following the ruling.  Now that many of the governors (Oklahoma's Governor Mary Fallin, included) have rejected the Medicaid expansion of Obamacare, more people will be without insurance coverage than prior to the bill's passage!

If, as Dr. Jane Orient has famously coined, "coverage doesn't mean care," what consolation is "no coverage" for those who had it, who now don't because their employer dropped them or the premiums became unaffordable?  Thank you Uncle Sam! 

In one section of his article Tanner writes: "That's become a theme for Obamacare:  costs more, does less."  Kind of like a postal service that increases the price of stamps and stops delivery on Saturdays.  This is the story every time, isn't it?  Any area in which the government at any level (but the federal government, in particular) becomes involved, the crowding out of any private sector competition inevitably results in higher costs and watered-down, rude service.  I wonder if in the not-too-distant future, Obamacare supporters will figure out that the best thing that ever happened to their health was the melt-down of Obamacare, a meltdown which Tanner believes to be inevitable.

I always learn something valuable when around fellow AAPS (Association of American Physicians and Surgeons) members.  Dr. Jane (of Arc) Orient's analogy for states considering Medicaid expansion:  "...embracing Medicaid expansion is like taking delivery of a baby elephant with a 2 year supply of hay."  

I love this.  I am going to expound on it, however.  The honest truth is that if you take delivery of the elephant and the 2 year supply of hay, you not only are responsible for feeding this gigantic animal after the hay has run out, but you actually bought the hay that showed up with the elephant!

When you read some fool editorial by a supporter of the expansion of this failed government program, watch for them to say something like, "..'it won't cost anything the first two years...it's paid for with federal dollars," or some such variation.  Dr. Orient's analogy helps break this down, making it easier to see the source of all tax dollars, federal and state, very simply the looting of the wages of all who play the host to the tick.