Greedy Trial Lawyer
Pity The Enslaved Emergency Doctors?
Category: In Your Face
GruntDoc is billed as the Ramblings of an Emergency Physician in Texas. Based on the following post, the only conclusion we can draw is that emergency physicians are slaves working in a wreck of a service and depriving emergency room patients of something. [Certainly not medical care.]
Health Insurance is not a "Right"
It's a reprint of a 1993 article, and its main points are still valid, in Frontpagemag.com, by Leonard Peikoff:Just one of the quotable quotes:
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As with any good or service that is provided by some specific group of men, if you try to make its possession by all a right, you thereby enslave the providers of the service, wreck the service, and end up depriving the very consumers you are supposed to be helping. To call "medical care" a right will merely enslave the doctors and thus destroy the quality of medical care in this country, as socialized medicine has done around the world, wherever it has been tried, including Canada (I was born in Canada and I know a bit about that system first hand).
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The last time I checked, it is mandatory for emergency rooms to treat everyone who enters regardless of their ability to pay. ER patients might be forgiven if they assume it is their right to be treated.
I have not seen Free The ER Docs placards carried by picketers outside emergency room departments so, apparently, the enslaved docs are relatively satisfied with their enslavement (including salary and fringe benefits).
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Comments
Yes, patients have a right to be seen in the ED, to be stabilized and treated for their emergency condition.
I, and every other emergency physician provide this service, often with no reimbursement, as a consequence of having to do so for my ability (and the hospital's ability) to bill medicare for their qualifying patients. (Yes, that's the medicare that pays about 50 cents on the dollar for medical bills). SO, for the privilege of getting 50 cents on a dollar for those patients covered by medicare I am required to see anyone and everyone, 40% for free.
How you can get, from my post, that patients aren't getting good care is, to me, your hallucination. No post of mine, and no knowledgeable commenter on my site has ever intimated not doing their best for every patient who presents for care.
I look forward to the "Free the ER Doctor" marches, though. Someday. That doesn't make their "Right" correct; it is wrong to require me, and my ED colleagues, to work for free.
Posted by: GruntDoc ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.greedytriallawyer.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at January 27, 2007 10:46 PM