DrRich has now read large portions of the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” i.e., Obamacare. He finds in it the very essence of Progressivism.  To understand Obamacare, then, we must understand the basics of Progressive thought.

DrRich has always found American Progressives to be a bit enigmatic. He has found much of their behavior to be persistently, almost defiantly, illogical and counterproductive to the rights Americans hold dear, rights which Progressives themselves also insist they revere – in particular, our inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

As long as 20 years ago, DrRich had developed a sneaking suspicion that Progressives, their protests to the contrary notwithstanding, never really bought into the “inalienable” thing. On this point, he concluded, they were prevaricators. Since by then it was beginning to look like the Progressives were going to be running things for a while, it occurred to DrRich that it would be a good idea to understand what they really think, and what their agenda really was. And so, after much time and study and contemplation, DrRich developed his theory of Progressive thought, which he is now pleased to share with his readers so that they, in turn, might better understand Obamacare.

The Roots of Progressivism

When DrRich began his study of Progressives he did not quite know where to begin. So he decided to proceed, like Descartes before him, from the simplest and most irreducible of truths. Namely, that Progressives are really, really smart – or think they are. We know this because all the professors in all the best Ivy League schools are Progressives.

From this simple truth we can deduce that, whatever it is that Progressives are actually up to, it must have its roots in the writings of The Philosopher.

And sure enough, it was not at all difficult to discover the roots of Progressivism within the teachings of Aristotle.

Aristotle tells us that man is innately a political animal, an animal with an inherent propensity to gather into increasingly complex communities. The essence of man, according to Aristotle, is society.

The formation of complex societies is what defines mankind; it is what differentiates man from the rest of the animal kingdom. Hence, because man is defined by society, society is inherently on a higher plane of importance than the individual. Individuals are entirely beholden to and dependent upon and subservient to the society to which they belong. Indeed, they are defined as individuals by their place within that society. Without society, a man is just an ape (with a persistently infantile face).

In this sense, “socialism” is reduced quite simply to a philosophy in which society – the collective – takes precedence over the individual. Furthermore, the precedence of the collective over the individual is not something we can simply choose to accept or reject; it is the very essence of mankind. It is nature. It is just the way it is.

So, as you can see, Aristotle nailed Progressivism.

Clearly, while the name “progressivism” has only been around for a century or so (and we will shortly see from whence the name came), its roots are a very old idea. This idea, in fact, was the normal way of looking at the relationship between individuals and society until just a few hundred years ago, when humanists began to cautiously explore the radical notion that individuals (rather than the collective) constitute the fundamental unit of humanity. The new humanist heresy – which declared the primacy of the individual – was for a long time called “liberalism” (a term whose meaning has, recently, drastically changed, and is now a synonym for what had always been its opposite). Classical liberalism reached its zenith, DrRich thinks, a mere two and a half centuries after its painful birth, with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.

But to Progressives, classical liberalism has always been an aberration. Despite what America’s founding documents might say, society takes precedence over the individual. It takes this precedence by way of the very essence of mankind, as was taught by The Philosopher, and so it cannot be otherwise.

The Progressive Program

The Progressive Program – the thing that makes Progressives progressive – is to develop the perfect society. This program is not optional; it is dictated by the nature of mankind.

Since society is what defines mankind, it follows, as the night follows the day, that the program of mankind, the purpose, the work, the essence of mankind, is to create the perfect society.

The perfect society has two basic requirements. First, it must meet all the basic needs of the individuals within that society (such as food, clothing, shelter, sanitation, and health), without which individuals will always be tempted to engage in the counterproductive behavior of striving for things. Second, the social order must be of such a nature that it can persist, theoretically forever, without fundamental change. Indeed, the very notion of perfection implies that any change, of any type, is bad, since it will necessarily constitute a movement away from perfection.

The perfect society therefore requires complete stability. This would include (at a minimum) a stable population size, the preservation of natural resources and the earth’s environment (indeed, when one hears the word “sustainability,” one is listening to Progressive gospel), the careful management of the economy, and the careful control – if not suppression – of unplanned innovations. This latter refers both to material (or scientific) innovations, and innovations of thought, either of which will always threaten hard-won societal stability.

The perfection of society is the paramount work of mankind, so any method which may help in achieving this perfection is to be embraced; none discounted out of hand. The only considerations one must make in choosing methods of action are: Is this method practicable? And: Is this method more likely to be successful, or counterproductive? These two questions fully define Progressive ethics.

So that’s DrRich’s theory of Progressivism and the Progressive Program. While it is only a theory, DrRich hereby asserts that his formulation is correct.

He makes this assertion for the purpose of advancing the debate and inviting argument. If any of his readers have a better explanation of Progressivism, one that more successfully fits the facts and explains the otherwise difficult-to-explain behaviors we’ve seen from Progressives in recent years, why, DrRich will be delighted to hear it. If it is convincing, DrRich will cheerfully abandon his own theory and adopt yours.

But to accomplish this feat, your theory of Progressivism will have to offer a more successful explanation of the following Progressive behavioral phenomena than DrRich’s theory does:

Individuals and Groups Within Progressivism

While Progressivism by definition places individuals in a subservient position to society, this is not to say that individuals are merely interchangeable cogs in a great machine, or entirely analogous to worker bees in a hive. DrRich’s prior sarcasms aside, Progressive society is not the Borg.

Indeed, individuals within a Progressive society are differentiatable, and can be publicly celebrated or castigated as individuals. But to a great extent the potential worth of an individual is pre-determined by the group to which the individual belongs. Group identity in Progressive society is critically important, as it provides the only feasible means by which the leadership of Progressive societies can attempt to control and direct individual behaviors.

(Group identity is so critically important to Progressive thought that it has been given a special name – “Diversity” – and has been designated as the Cardinal Virtue, from which all the other, subsidiary, virtues – faith, hope, charity and the like – must necessarily spring.)

And so, to stand out as individuals, individuals must stand out as a member of their group, and the manner in which they stand out must fundamentally reflect the assigned essence of their group. So, for instance, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are celebrated individuals, whose accomplishments nicely reflect their assigned group identities. In contrast, Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell are not celebrated by Progressives, and indeed are castigated as abominations, because their individual accomplishments do not reflect their assigned group identities.

Therefore, while individuals within Progressive societies can achieve a certain level of importance, individual importance is merely of tertiary concern, rather than primary or even secondary concern. Individuals can become officially “important” only if their importance reflects the essence of their assigned group; and the importance of the assigned group (the secondary concern), in turn, is proportional to its ability to advance the Progressive Program in general (which, of course, is the primary concern).

While individuals have the potential of rising to a state of importance within Progressivism, the vast majority of individuals will never actually do so. The great masses of individuals will be regarded by society as featureless members of their group, and will be treated accordingly. And the status of a particular group is always subject to change, given the extant needs of the leadership class. Certain groups (e.g. labor unions) may be exulted by the leadership, while others (e.g. the elderly, the white males, or the fat) will be devalued. Yet other groups (e.g. illegal aliens) may be celebrated by the leadership at one point in time (when, for instance, it behooves Progressive leaders to acquire voting rights for them before 2012), but then may be dismissed at some other point in time (in 2013, for instance, after the critical votes have been gathered, and now the group just represents large volumes of mouths to feed and healthcare to consume).

Good and Evil In Progressivism

Many Progressive intellectuals are fond of saying there are no absolutes, and so there is no such thing as inherent good and inherent evil. These intellectuals are wrong, even from within the Progressive paradigm. Because the Progressive Program – which, again, is to achieve a perfect society – is the innate agenda for mankind, there indeed exists a standard by which one can determine good and evil.

“Good” is anything which advances the Progressive Program; and “evil” is anything which threatens it.

Anyone who doubts the existence of good and evil within the Progressive Program need only observe the scores of behaviors and figures of speech which are condemned as unrelentingly evil by Progressives, with all the certainty and fervor of a Jonathan Edwards.

Accordingly, individuals who hinder the Progressive Program are a danger to mankind’s very essence. They are evil, and must be rehabilitated or eliminated.

Progressivism and the Leadership Class

Despite its lip service to the contrary, Progressivism is not egalitarian, even in theory.

The duty of mankind is to strive for the perfect society. The chief tool by which mankind is to achieve this program is man’s intellect and logic. It is axiomatic that only a minority of people will have the intellect and logic necessary to direct the program of mankind. Therefore, Progressivism fundamentally relies on an elite corps of individuals to guide our progress toward a perfect society. The perfect society will not just happen, it must be engineered by those who are gifted enough to lead.

The lack of egalitarianism in Progressive thought is illustrated by the special treatment accorded to the elite corps. The leadership class must be nurtured and valued by society. Furthermore, it must be given special privileges which others in society do not have. Because their work is so critical to the essential program, the elite must be removed from worry over the mundane necessities of life. That is, providing the leadership class with certain luxuries and privileges, and even freedom from having to follow all the rules that apply to the masses, is therefore not hypocrisy, but is an essential good. It redounds to the benefit of the Program.

Anyone who has not noticed recent glaring examples of this “different standard” for the Progressive elite should consider activating their “durable power of attorney” forthwith, so that a more alert individual can manage their affairs.

Progressivism and the Unwashed Masses

It goes without saying that, if left to their own devices, the populace would devolve into some primitive societal arrangement (such as capitalism) in which individuals would spend all their time striving to improve their own individual situations, even at the expense of others.

This means that the great unwashed masses must be “managed.”

Ideally, the best way to manage the population is through education, and so all efforts must be made – through formal education and by controlling the public media – to indoctrinate the population to the great benefits of the Progressive agenda, to the natural duty and obligation of all men and women to work within society to realize the Progressive Program, and to the inherent evil of all the alternatives. Since education will never be sufficient, the unwashed masses may need to be controlled through pacification (i.e., attempting to meet all their basic needs, so as to eliminate their impulse to strive). If this fails, they must be controlled through coersion, intimidation, peer-pressure, or (as a last resort or to serve as an object lesson) violence.

Fundamentally, the Progressive Program relies on all members of the great unwashed to subsume their own individual needs to the needs of the collective. That is, the Progressive Program requires a fundamental change in human nature. This change will never be forthcoming, and so Progressives are apparently doomed to be frustrated in their efforts. (However, as we will see shortly, Progressives ultimately have the answer to this problem, as well.)

So, despite their frequent hymns of praise to the worthiness of the common man, Progressives invariably develop an underlying contempt toward the unwashed masses. It is not difficult to spot this contempt if one is alert to it.

Progressivism and Politics

Under the Progressive Program, just like Aristotle says, mankind is essentially a political animal. In fact, the Progressive Program can only be achieved by political action. This means that politics – and to be clearer, political control – is the fundamental work of Progressives. Without politics, without political control, there is nothing. To lose political power is oblivion.

This attitude toward politics is in stark contrast to the attitude of conservatives, for whom government (and therefore politics) is merely a necessary evil, with which one must occasionally contend, when it cannot be avoided, as a part of life. For most conservatives politics is an afterthought.

For Progressives, politics is everything, the essence of human behavior. And it is worth any cost, any desperate measure, to maintain political control. Indeed, to fail to lie, cheat and steal in order to keep political control would be unethical.

Progressivism and Religion

Progressives have a natural adversity to organized religion. For one thing, religions tend to give a higher priority to some supernatural entity (and worse, to an afterlife), than to mankind’s “true” imperative, which is to achieve a perfect society right here on earth. However, since religious leaders can be readily coerced to serve the needs of the state (and always have been), this is not an insurmountable problem.

The real difficulty with organized religion is that the major ones stress the importance of the individual (since individual salvation, or individual enlightenment, is the major theme of the big religions). Under progressivism the inherent importance of individuals is necessarily subsumed by the importance of the collective, so by focusing the ultimate meaning of life on the individual, traditional religions become a major threat to Progressivism.

Apparently realizing that abolishing religion is far too difficult a task, Progressives have adopted the long-term strategy of infiltrating and co-opting religious establishments, and by means of introducing new ideas – such as group salvation, and the concept of social justice as a religious imperative – rendering religion, this “opiate of the masses,” less incompatible with the Progressive Program.

Progressivism and Eugenics

Since World War II, the enthusiasm with which Progressives publicly embrace the idea of eugenics has become muted. But eugenics is, in fact, inherently bound to Progressivism. One way or another, a perfect society will require far more perfect citizens than we have today. Indeed, the seething contempt with which Progrssives regard the current genetic pool that comprises the unwashed masses is often difficult for them to suppress.

To a large extent, modern Progressivism was born as an offshoot of Darwinism. The idea that society could be perfected, and the idea that mankind could be perfected, were two sides of the same notion. And early Progressives unabashedly embraced both of these ideas, such that the idea of “culling the herd” became extraordinarily attractive to them – and they said so. Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, and Margaret Sanger (the founder, as it happens, of Planned Parenthood) are only the most well-known Progressives who extolled the idea of eugenics.

But public support of eugenics among Progressives has become quite subdued, ever since the Nazis committed their atrocities explicitly in the name of achieving societal perfection.

One can argue, of course, whether the recent Progressive support of such activities as late-term abortions, or creating human embryos for experimentation, are partially aimed at desensitizing the public for future efforts to “guide” a more favorable genetic makeup for the population. Either way, DrRich reminds his readers of the history of Progressivism in this regard, and of the inherent attractiveness of eugenics to the Progressive Program, and urges them to remain alert.

Progressivism and Environmentalism

Radical environmentalism and the Progressive Program are not perfectly compatible. But they are close.

Radical environmentalists believe that humanity is a plague upon Planet Earth. Everything man has done since the day he first learned to cultivate crops (and thus for the first time became a different kind of animal) has been bad. And anything which delays, halts or reverses the sins mankind has perpetrated upon sacred Gaia, since that day he first departed from Nature, is a good thing. So the radical environmentalists are in favor of strong central governments which will control the behaviors of individuals (and which might ultimately drastically reduce or eliminate the human population).

Progressives are certainly on board with controlling man’s effect on the environment, but (in most cases) they are not in favor of returning mankind to a hunter/gatherer condition (since most Progressives do not view this condition as the embodiment of a perfect society). Rather, they view the environmental movement – in particular, the Global Warming Theory – as a good way to get the populace to give them the power they need to carry out their Progressive Program. So Progressives have completely embraced the Global Warming Theory as a means to their own political end. Accordingly they have declared man-made global warming to be settled science, and they suppress any efforts to study it further.

DrRich is very sorry about this. He suspects that global warming is happening, and concedes that human behavior may be playing a role, and is saddened that this scientific question has been absorbed into the Progressive agenda in such a way that we are not allowed to find out what’s really going on.

Progressivism and the Great American Experiment

Unlike any other nation in the history of mankind, the United States was not founded because of geography, race, religion or ethnicity. It was founded on an idea. It was founded on the still-radical idea that individual autonomy – the individual’s God-given right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – is the chief Fact of humankind, and that the only legitimate role of government is to create an environment in which individuals can enjoy those rights to the fullest extent possible.

One can see immediately that the Great American Experiment – which awards primacy to individual autonomy – is fundamentally incompatible with Progressivism. But because a majority of Americans still like the ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Progressives need to play their cards close to their chests. They need to proceed carefully – but relentlessly.

By slowly re-interpreting the Constitution, and slowly addicting a critical mass of Americans to an array of government programs, Progressives are certain they will ultimately prevail. They have been at it for over 100 years, and have come a long way. DrRich cannot tell whether or not we have already passed the Event Horizon, the point beyond which restoring the Great American Experiment will become impossible. But we are at least very close.

In fact, one plausible theory for President Obama’s headlong pursuit of programs and policies which anger the majority of Americans, and which gravely and immanently threaten the political control which is the center of the Progressive universe, is that he sees America as being at the very cusp of that Event Horizon, and believes that one last, small push will gain it, and make the Progressive Program irreversible, whatever might happen in the next election or two.

Progressivism and Healthcare

DrRich does not need to say much about Progressivism and healthcare right now. Many of the posts in this blog have pertained to this very question, as, undoubtedly, will many more.

But to really understand the current American healthcare system, and to understand Obamacare (the future American healthcare system), it is necessary to understand Progressivism. DrRich sincerely hopes that this current post will help a few of his readers understand, if not Progressive thought itself, at least DrRich’s conceptualization of it.

In a remarkable article that somehow* was accepted for publication in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the White House offered some friendly advice to American PCPs who may be wondering how Obamacare will affect them. That advice, to summarize, is: “We are the Borg. Prepare to be assimilated.”
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* DrRich is forced to wonder whether yet another group of medical editors is auditioning for the death panels.
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The article was written by Ezekiel Emanuel from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, and Nancy-Ann M. De Parle, who is Mr. Obama’s Czar of Healthcare Reform. (A third author was from the McKinsey Group.) After reminding physicians of their moral obligation to the collective, the White House authors rhapsodized about all of the wonderful changes inherent in Obamacare that will help physicians to realize this obligation.

There’s actually no need to read the entire article, assuming you heard any of the 400 speeches President Obama delivered in his unsuccessful attempt to convince the public that his healthcare reforms ought to displace the holy writ as The Good News. The meat of the article, if you’re a physician, appears at the end:

These reforms will unleash forces that favor integration across the continuum of care. Some organizing function will need to be developed to track quality measures, account for and manage shared financial incentives, and oversee care coordination….These coordinating functions, to the extent that they currently exist, traditionally have been managed by hospitals or health plans….As physicians organize themselves into increasing larger groups — patient-centered medical home practices and accountable care organizations — they are, out of necessity, investing in information technology tools that are becoming both cheaper and more capable and investing in the acquisition or development of management skills that could provide these organizing functions efficiently for physicians groups….For physicians, this means a profession that is more rewarding, more productive, and better able to realize its moral ideal.

DrRich translates this message thusly: “Physicians! You have been neglecting your moral obligation to the collective, in favor of your archaic devotion to the individual patient. Under Obamacare you will need to join organizations which are devoted to the collective goals of Obamacare, and which therefore will guarantee the proper moral ideals. You must function not as individual decisionmakers, but as integrated cogs in a vast healthcare continuum, which will stretch from the centralized bastion of gleaming moral authority (from which we pen this message) all the way down to the humble tip of your stethoscope. You will be rewarded for your cooperation, or suffer for your resistance (resistance, of course, being futile).  So rejoice for the health of the collective, and for your own well-being, and prepare to be assimilated.”

Ostensibly this message is for all American physicians, but it was submitted to the Annals of Internal Medicine for a reason. The Annals is the journal of record for doctors who practice internal medicine, and who comprise the largest group of PCPs. The White House in this article is speaking directly to American PCPs.

This is because PCPs pose the greatest short-term threat to Obamacare.

Most medical specialists have already been “assimilated.” Because they require lots of expensive stuff to practice their specialties – things like gamma cameras, operating suites, catheterization laboratories, hordes of highly trained medical technicians, &c. – it is very difficult for most specialists to function as independent operators. If you want medical specialists to follow the rules, all you have to do is make following the rules a requirement for keeping their access to all the technology and the complex infrastructure they need to practice their specialties.

Only PCPs can fairly readily make themselves independent from the collective.  And more and more PCPs are choosing to do so.

The White House does not like this.  The Annals article, DrRich thinks, is the administration’s first official attempt to curtail the PCPs’ fledgling independence movement. The threat is veiled – the article instead appeals to the PCPs purported moral obligation to the collective, and emphasizes the rewards that will follow when PCPs allow themselves to be assimilated into the Borg.

So this first attempt, for the most part, is merely creepy. The next step will not be as benign.

DrRich urges his PCP friends to take heed. If you have any thought of striking out on your own, and starting a direct pay practice – thus reasserting your profession’s real moral obligation, which is to your patients – you had better act now, before it becomes a federal crime to do so.

DrRich entered medical school 40 years ago with every intention of becoming a general medical practitioner, and indeed he became one. But after only a year in practice as a generalist, he found himself so frustrated with the frivolous limitations and the superfluous obligations that even then were being externally imposed on these supposedly revered professionals, that DrRich altered course and spent several years re-training to become a cardiac electrophysiologist.

(Electrophysiology is a field of endeavor so arcane as to be mystifying even to other cardiologists. DrRich hoped that the officious regulators and stone-witted insurance clerks would be so confused – and possibly intimidated – by the mysterious doings of electrophysiologists that they would leave him alone. Happily, this ploy worked for almost 15 years.)

Still, DrRich has always held general practitioners (now called PCPs) in the highest regard, if for no other reason than these brave souls – unlike DrRich himself, who cut and ran at his earliest opportunity – have stuck it out.

But, as we all know, the practice of primary care medicine is today in crisis. Today’s PCPs are mostly looking to get out as soon as they can afford to do so, and today’s medical students are avoiding primary care in droves.

But not for the reasons most often claimed.  DrRich’s contention is that doctors are abandoning primary care medicine for reasons that actually have relatively little to do with low pay and high educational debt. The real reasons have much more to do with the fact that primary care medicine has been systematically and purposefully demeaned and diminished, to the point that it has become nearly an untenable choice for most doctors.

Accordingly, every now and then DrRich likes to point out – for the edification of his readers – some of the ways in which this fundamental devaluing of primary care medicine is being accomplished.

And so, here’s another reason it sucks being a PCP:

PCPs whose patients fail to quit smoking are now at risk not only of being publicly labeled as low-quality physicians, but also of being sued.

To see how this works, dear reader, DrRich asks you to place yourself, for a few minutes and for the sake of empathy, in the position of a modern American PCP.

As a PCP, one of the major banes of your existence is the struggle you must make during each and every “patient encounter” to get through a long Pay-for-Performance Checklist (different checklists for different patients, depending on their insurer). Completing these checklists, within the 7.5 minutes that have been graciously allotted to you for such encounters, is of course critical in order to demonstrate to the appropriate healthcare accountants the adequacy of your performance as a modern, high-quality American physician.

One item that invariably appears on each of your mandatory checklists, doctor, has to do with counseling your patient on smoking cessation. It’s likely you may have thought this to be one of the less objectionable mandates you must accomplish during each patient visit. After all, you can get through your well-rehearsed pitch on smoking cessation in 20 seconds or less (unless you are dealing with one of those rare patients who is actually serious about trying to quit), and thereby make up some of the precious time, from your 7.5 minutes, that you have already spent achieving some more challenging check mark (trying, perhaps, to talk a diabetic patient into taking the extraordinary steps necessary to get his hemoglobin A1c down that last 0.5% to target).

So: 20 seconds spent on smoking cessation. Check.

But whoa. Not so fast there, Dr. Welby.

Did you know there are guidelines for physicians on smoking cessation? Did you know that these guidelines were devised under the auspices of the federal government, by a committee of individuals who are anti-smoking zealots (not that there’s anything wrong with that)?

From this latter fact, of course, there are certain things you will already know about these guidelines before you ever see them. You will know that the guidelines must be very long and detailed and tedious, because a) they are federal guidelines, and b) they are devised by people whose one and only mission in life – a mission they clearly believe is far more important than, say, oil spills, terrorism, global warming, jobs, or achieving fine and durable erections upon demand – is to save the world from the scourge of smoking. And now, these zealots have been granted the authority (i.e., the federally-approved authority to generate medical guidelines) to make it your primary mission in life, too.

Now, doctor, have a peek at the actual guidelines, which you can find here. Notice, first, that the federal guidelines for physicians on smoking cessation are 196 pages long. Notice how they step you through the process of counseling, and then step you through each of the measures you must take in order to guarantee that your patient achieves total success. And notice that an early branch point in the process of counseling is the one where the patient informs you whether he/she is willing to go any further with efforts at smoking cessation; and notice further that when the patient concludes that he/she is indeed NOT willing to go any further, thank you very much for your concern, the guidelines do not relieve you of further immediate obligations – no – but instead specify additional interventions you must now, at this moment, embark upon with this unwilling patient, which are “designed to increase their motivation to quit.”

The brash sales techniques required of you by the federally-sanctioned smoking-cessation guidelines would embarrass even a telemarketer, or an annuity salesperson.

This, of course, is all to say: Your 20-second spiel on the evils of smoking just doesn’t cut the mustard, doctor. To really earn that smoking-cessation chit on your P4P checklist, you need to do a lot more than that. The 196 pages of deadly serious federal guidelines detail what that is.

Lest you are tempted to dismiss as an absurdity the expectation that you are actually supposed to cram 2 hours of anti-smoking counseling into a 7.5 minute patient visit, there’s one more thing you ought to know.

One John Banzhaf, Executive Director and Chief Counsel for Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), who bills himself as the “law professor who masterminded litigation against the tobacco industry,” is not taking lightly, doctor, your obvious laxity in following federal guidelines on smoking cessation. Accordingly, some time ago he sent letters to each of the 50 state health commissioners warning them that he will soon begin instigating medical malpractice suits, on behalf of smokers who continue to smoke as the result of their doctor’s refusal to follow federal guidelines to the letter.

Mr. Banzhaf informs the commissioners that “physicians are killing more than 40,000 American smokers each year by failing to follow federal guidelines.” That’s right, doctor, you’re killing them. (Cigarettes don’t kill people; people kill people.) Specifically he invokes your sacred obligation to “warn the smoking patient about the many dangers of smoking and provide effective medical treatment for the majority who wish to quit.” (Emphasis DrRich’s.) That is, it’s your job not just to counsel them and treat them, but also to see that they actually succeed in quitting. If you don’t follow this mandate, you’re killing them. And you must pay.

When the federal government takes the pains necessary to draft detailed management guidelines for physicians, guidelines that, if followed as written, will save tens of thousands of lives each year, then surely society has every right to expect you to follow those guidelines to the letter – and to save those lives.

This is such a brilliant scheme for ending smoking-related death and disability, one must wonder why it hasn’t yet been applied to other intractable medical problems. Just think of all the good that could be accomplished, for instance, by federal guidelines requiring PCPs to assure that each of their patients maintain an optimal body weight, follow an exemplary diet, exercise vigorously for at least an hour a day, maintain unfailingly positive attitudes, and work diligently at their allotted tasks each and every day (secure in the knowledge that adopting right thinking and right behaviors will be invaluable to our dear leaders, as they bravely go forth to assure the good of the whole).

In any case, doctor, consider these anti-smoking guidelines carefully next time you’re putting that little check mark next to “Smoking cessation counseling” on your P4P checklist, and ask yourself: “Have I really done all that I am obligated to do, under the law, to guarantee that this patient has lit up his last smoke?”

Making PCPs responsible for their patient’s personal choices and behaviors, of course, is a time-honored method of covert healthcare rationing. It gives doctors powerful incentives to invent mechanisms for avoiding patients who display obviously unhealthful lifestyles, thus making it relatively inconvenient for these patients to gain access to expensive healthcare services.

But more to the point of this post, it is yet another example of how micromanagement by politicians, activists and bureaucrats has come to infest the practice of primary care medicine, and to relegate PCPs to the diminished role of simply following the checklists continually produced by such as these. If this is what primary care medicine has come to at last, why would you expect anyone who has a choice to take such a career path?

DrRich, for one, does not believe the 10-15% increase in pay hinted at by Obamacare will change the calculus for PCPs very much, and in fact, if it does – given all that is being done to primary care medicine – we should all be very much distressed by the implications.

It is quite popular for certain medical bloggers who count themselves as scientifically sophisticated to disparage so-called “alternative medicine.”

Indeed, some have built entire websites to demonstrate (Penn-and-Teller-like) that various forms of alternative medicine – such as homeopathy, therapeutic touch, the medical application of crystals, Reiki, naturopathy, water therapy, bio-photons, mindfulness training, energy healing and a host of others – are completely devoid of any scientific merit whatsoever; are pablum for the uneducated masses; are, in short, irreducibly and irredeemably woo.

These same bloggers are scandalized into virtual apoplexy by the fact that the NIH has funded an entire section to “study” alternative medicine, and worse, that some of the most respected university medical centers in the land now seem to have embraced alternative medicine, and have established well-funded and heavily-marketed “Centers for Integrative Medicine,” or other similarly-named op-centers for pushing medically suspect alternative “services”.

(An astounding list of prestigious institutions of medical science now sporting Centers of Woo is maintained by Orec.)

Until quite recently, DrRich counted himself among the stalwarts of scientific strict constructionism. He was truly dismayed that the NIH and some of our most well-regarded academic centers (under the guise of wanting to conduct objective “studies” of alternative medicine) have lent an aura of respectability and legitimacy to numerous bizarre ideas and fraudulent claims masquerading as legitimate medical practices. To DrRich, such developments were yet another clear and unmistakable sign of the End Times.

Furthermore, DrRich (a well-known paranoid when it comes to covert rationing) saw a more sinister advantage to the official and well-publicized support that government-funded institutions were giving to the alternative medicine movement. Namely, fostering a widespread impression among the unwashed rabble that alternative medicine is at least somewhat worthwhile (and plenty respectable) advances the cause of covert rationing. That is, the more you can entice people to seek their diagnoses and their cures from the alternative medicine universe, the less money they will soak up from the real healthcare system. With luck, real diagnoses can be delayed and real therapy put off until it’s far too late to achieve a useful outcome by more traditional (and far more expensive) medical means.

So, for several years alternative medicine was seen by DrRich pretty much as it is seen by all of the anti-woo crowd – as an unvarnished evil.

But in recent days the scales have fallen from DrRich’s eyes. He now realizes he was sadly mistaken. Rather than a term of opprobrium, “alternative medicine” may actually be our most direct road to salvation. Indeed, DrRich thinks that far from damning alternative medicine, we should be blessing it, nurturing it, worrying over it, in the precise manner that a mountaineer trapped in a deadly blizzard would worry over the last embers of his dying campfire.

What turned the tide for DrRich was a recent report, issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, estimating that in 2007, Americans spent a whopping $34 billion on alternative medicine. That’s $34 billion, for healthcare (in a manner of speaking), out of their own pockets.

The implications of this report should be highly encouraging to those of us who lament the impending creation of a monolithic government-controlled healthcare system, and who have been struggling to imagine ways of circumventing the legions of stone-witted, soul-eating bureaucrats now being prepared (Sauron-like) to descend upon us all, doctor and patient alike.

This is why DrRich has urged primary care physicians to break the bonds of servitude while they still can, strike out on their own, and set up practices in which they are paid directly by their patients. Such arrangements are the only practical means by which individual doctors and patients can immediately restore the broken doctor-patient relationship, and place themselves within a protective enclosure impervious to the slavering soul-eaters.

One reason so few primary care doctors have taken this route (choosing instead to retire, to change careers and become deep-sea fishermen, or simply to give up and become abject minions of the forces of evil) is that they do not believe patients will actually pay them out of their own pockets.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, this new report from the CDCP demonstrates once and for all that Americans will, indeed, pay billions of dollars from their own pockets for their own healthcare – even the varieties of healthcare whose only possible benefits are mediated by the placebo effect. DrRich believes that many of the people buying homeopathic remedies are doing so less because they believe homeopathy works, and more because they feel abandoned by the healthcare system and by their own doctors, and realize they have to do SOMETHING. The CDCP report, in DrRich’s estimation, reflects the magnitude of the American public’s pent-up demand for doctors whose chief concern is for them, and not for the demands of third party payers.

Perhaps more importantly, this new report implies that it may be somewhat more difficult than DrRich has thought for the government to outlaw private-sector healthcare activities. As DrRich has carefully documented, a government-controlled healthcare system will require the authorities to make it illegal for Americans to spend their own money on their own healthcare, thus rendering direct-pay medical practices illegal, and putting the final stake into the heart of the doctor-patient relationship.

But the rousing success of the alternative medicine universe will make such laws difficult to enact.

To see why, consider just how encouraging this new CDCP report must be to the third-party payers. Thanks in no small part to the efforts of the government (and the academy) to legitimize alternative medicine, Americans are spending $34 billion a year on woo. This amount indicates tremendous savings for the traditional healthcare system. The actual amount saved, of course, is impossible to measure, but has to be far greater than just $34 billion. Some substantial proportion of patients spending money on alternative medicine, had they chosen traditional medical care instead, might have consumed expensive diagnostic tests, surgery, expensive prescription drugs, and other legitimate medical services. Furthermore, those legitimate medical services (as legitimate medical services are wont to do) often would have generated even more expenditures – by extending the survival of patients with chronic diseases, by identifying the need for even more diagnostic and therapeutic services, and by causing side effects requiring expensive remedies. (While alternative medicine is famous for being useless, it is also most often pretty harmless, and tends to produce relatively few serious side effects – except, of course, for causing a delay in making actual diagnoses and administering useful therapy, but if you’re a payer, that’s a good thing.) So the amount of money the payers actually save thanks to alternative medicine must be some multiplier of the amount spent on the alternative medicine itself.

What this means is that payers (which, let’s face it, will soon mean the government) will be loathe to do anything that might discourage the success and growth of alternative medicine, and this fact alone may stop them from making it illegal for Americans to pay for their own healthcare.

Still, we musn’t be too sanguine about these prospects. Under a government-controlled system, the imperative to control every aspect of healthcare (in the name of fairness) will be very, very strong, and it will be very tempting to the Feds to declare at least some varieties of alternative medicine to be covered services.

But the alternative medicine establishment (bless it) will be largely impervious to government control. Practitioners of alternative medicine are expert at designing vague products and services whose techniques, theories, processes and protocols are fluid, nebulous and ill-defined. So if the Feds declare, say, homeopathy and therapeutic touch to be legitimate, covered services under the Fed’s health plan, why, the alternative medicine gurus will simply come up with entirely new forms of alternative medicine, specifically to remain outside the government plan. (New varieties of alternative medicine already appear with dizzying speed, and can be invented at will. No bureaucracy could ever hope to keep up.)

Therefore, as long as the central authorities depend on alternative medicine as a robust avenue for covertly rationing healthcare, the purveyors of woo will always be able to flourish outside the real healthcare system. And this, DrRich believes, represents the ultimate value of woo, and establishes why we should all be encouraging and nurturing woo instead of disparaging it.

DrRich has speculated on various black market approaches to healthcare which could be attempted by American doctors (and investors) should restrictive, government-controlled healthcare become a reality. But now, thanks to the success of alternative medicine, there is a direct and straightforward path for American primary care physicians to re-establish a form of now-long-gone “traditional” American medicine, replete with a robust doctor-patient relationship, right out in the open – the kind of practice where patients pay their doctors themselves.

Simply declare this kind of practice to be a new variety of alternative medicine. Likely, PCPs will need to come up with a new name for it (such as “Therapeutic Allopathy,” or “Reciprocal Duty Therapeutics”), and perhaps invent some new terminology to describe what they’re doing. But what’s clear is what they will be doing is so fundamentally different from what PCPs will be doing under government-controlled healthcare as to be unrecognizable, and nobody will be able to argue it’s not alternative medicine. In fact, it will seem nearly as wierd as Reiki.

The success of medical woo, in other words, can provide American doctors who want to practice the kind of medicine they should be practicing with the cover they need to do so. And this is why we must support medical woo, and celebrate its continued growth and success.

________________________________

Now, read the whole story.

DrRich explains it all in, Fixing American Healthcare – Wonkonians, Gekkonians and the Grand Unification Theory of Healthcare.

Now on Kindle!

Recently, DrRich wrote a series of posts detailing how the American healthcare system – even before the new reforms kick in – is taking steps to prevent individual citizens from being allowed to spend their own money on their own healthcare. Part of that effort, of course, is to restrict physicians from offering direct-pay medical services to their patients.

DrRich may have given the impression that only primary care doctors are affected by efforts to restrict their practices in this way. If so, he apologizes.

He particularly owes an apology to his friends the dermatologists. Indeed, DrRich has been reminded of an article that appeared in the New York Times a while back, which castigated dermatologists for the sin of establishing direct-pay practices, and in particular, for creating their own brand of a two-tiered healthcare system – one for patients with skin disorders, and one for “cosmetic dermatology.”

As the Times describes it, patients who wish to see a dermatologist for, say, possible skin cancer are put on a waiting list, and when their appointed time finally arrives (generally several months later) they are subjected to modern medical hell. To wit: Upon arriving in a lackluster office, the patient is shelved for a while in an unattractive, poorly lit waiting room equipped with a broken TV, fuzz balls on the floor, old magazines, the unruly children of other patients, and surly office personnel. Eventually the now-even-more-disheartened patient’s name is called by an indifferent nurse practitioner, who, operating from a checklist of questions, will “triage” her to the appropriate patient-category (e.g., acne, fungus, cancer, warts- you know, dermatology stuff), then have her strip in order to fully expose the large organ (i.e., the skin) for which she has sought assistance, hand her a scratchy yellow paper gown to cover her nakedness, and have her wait for some time in a chilly exam room to see His Holiness, the actual doctor. At last the dermatologist arrives, mutters a greeting (or some other ritual uttering), glances at a clipboard, and announces, “Show me your [acne, fungus, cancer, warts];” whereupon, having regarded the cause of cutaneous concern, and having made a professional determination, he either signs the prescription that has been pre-written for him by the nurse practitioner, or schedules a procedure. Then, placing her bundle of clothing into her arms and wishing her a good day, the doctor shoves her out into the hall to finish dressing, as the formal interview is completed, and the exam room is at a premium.

Presumably, one hopes, some dermatology practices not visited by the New York Times might not be quite so bad. Still, anyone who’s been seen by an American PCP lately will nod sympathetically at the dermatology patient’s ordeal.

Now observe what the Times observes when the patient, instead of having an actual skin problem, merely is sagging here and there and wishes to be shorn up. That is, the patient has a cosmetic issue. That is, the patient wants Botox.

The same dermatologist will often have an entirely different setup for these patients. This time the patient is seen immediately, possibly the same day, as dermatologists are sensitive to the needs of their clients who have an impending public engagement, and thus need to look their best. If this patient is to wait at all, she will wait in a modern, tastefully decorated private room. She will then be seen not by a mere nurse practitioner but by an aesthetician, who will do a careful assessment of the sagging parts, and, aside from suggesting more injection sites than the patient might originally have had in mind, will offer a complete program for long-term cosmetic maintenance, which naturally will include quarterly Botoxification. At just the proper moment the dermatologist comes in, greets the patient warmly and reassuringly; then reviews the recommendations of the aesthetician and discusses those recommendations at length with both the aesthetician and the patient, studying the patient’s face in depth as he does so, pointing, nodding, studying, adjusting, all the while smiling confidently. Yes, he indicates, we will all be very happy indeed with the results. Finally the doctor begins to make the now-thoroughly-discussed-and-agreed-upon injections, doing so with the greatest solicitude and sensitivity. The patient is then given as much time as she needs to collect herself, and is invited to “recover” in a room set aside for this purpose, with flattering lighting, soft music, a cappuccino machine, and perhaps a glass of wine. She leaves the office a new person. And, just as the dermatologist has promised, all are indeed very happy with the outcome.

Naturally, the New York Times is scandalized by the dichotomy which its discerning readers will note here. Why should a patient with a mere cosmetic issue be treated so well, when a patient with an actual medical problem, possibly even skin cancer, is treated so shabbily? How can dermatologists openly encourage such a two-tiered system?

DrRich has a word of advice for the scandalized reporters of the New York Times, and any other concerned Americans who are worried that dermatologists, by setting up separate-but-not-equal practices for their two kinds of patients, are moving us one step closer to the dreaded two-tiered healthcare system we all abhor. That word is: Chill.

Allow DrRich to support this friendly recommendation with two observations.

1) We already have a multi-tiered healthcare system, and little or none of it is the fault of dermatologists. It is the fault of human nature. All countries have at least a two-tiered healthcare system, including countries (like Cuba and China) that have specifically embraced egalitarianism (rather than individual autonomy) as the fundamental operating principle. A second tier is necessary if for no other reason than political leaders and other individuals critically important to the collective effort must have somewhere to go for their healthcare.  The second tier, like the poor, will always be with us.

2) When a dermatologist spends Tuesday afternoon in her run-down office, treating people who come to her for bona fide skin disorders like they’re not really patients but widgets on an assembly line, then spends Wednesday in her other, much more amenable offices, treating the merely cosmetically-challenged like they are minor nobility, she is not really engaging in two-tiered healthcare. Not at all. Instead, on Tuesday she is practicing real, true, prescribed-by-society, by-the-book American healthcare, just as our leaders (in their wisdom) have carefully set it up for us, and on Wednesday she is doing Something Altogether Different.

Injecting Botox is officially and formally not part of American healthcare. How do we know this? Because it is not covered by Medicare or health insurance. If you want Botox you’ve got to pay for it your own self, just as you do if you want a TV or a car. So by all that is sacred, injecting Botox is NOT American healthcare.

Furthermore, when one looks at it objectively, injecting Botox is not even really practicing medicine, at least not in any true sense. In actual truth, it takes very little training or expertise to inject Botox. There’s no reason one must go to college, graduate from medical school, or do several additional years of training in dermatology (or any other specialty) to do this. Anyone with a needle and syringe, an alcohol wipe, and access to Botox could do as well. Just find the wrinkle and stick it. If they made the materials available over-the-counter, most folks would do just fine with it.

The sheer arbitrariness by which injecting Botox is deemed by the authorities to constitute the practice of medicine can also be illustrated by considering a somewhat different, equally well-known cosmetic procedure, one that also involves injecting substances through the skin via needles, and that has much more to do with the actual skin itself than Botox injections (which do not really affect the skin itself, but only the muscles under the skin). DrRich speaks, obviously, of the tattoo. But unlike making Botox injections, tattooing requires real skill, knowledge, training, expertise and artistic talent. Most dermatologists simply could not manage a highly technical skill like that.  The point being, of course, that if you were to describe Botox injections and tattooing to a visitor from Mars, then ask him/her/it which of these two dermatological procedures ought to require a medical license and board certification, the Martian would get it wrong every time.

DrRich understands, of course, that while administering Botox is, in practical and objective terms, no more practicing medicine than is applying an ice-pack to a bruised knee, legally it is indeed deemed to be the practice of medicine. Accordingly, doctors in general (and dermatologists in particular), relying on this nonsensical designation, have legally cornered the market on Botox injections. So it’s not like you could just set up a booth at the Mall and hire high school students to do this (as you can for, say, ear-piercing – which, in contrast to Botox injections, is an actual surgical procedure which is intended to result in a permanent structural change in a body part). If you set up a chain of Botox Booths, you would be practicing medicine without a license, which is a serious crime.

But fundamentally, while performing Botox injections may have a certain legal status, in any true sense it is not really practicing medicine.  Not when ear-piercing and tattooing are not. Rather, in real life, injecting Botox is simply an activity some dermatologists may choose to do when they’re not doing real dermatology.

To say it another way, when the dermatologist goes to her “other office” to cater to a self-paying variety of clientele, she is practicing medicine only from the most arbitrary and strictly legalistic viewpoint. In real life, she is doing Something Else. She is engaging in a Pastime.

Doctors, of course, often have Pastimes. That is, they partake in activities other than practicing medicine when they could, in fact, be seeing more patients. Some have taken up golf. Others have started side businesses such as restaurants or software companies. Some do charity work, or go to graduate school for an MBA. Still others have opted to work part time in order to raise their families.

Society generally finds such activities acceptable, and – to this point – does not insist that all doctors forgo all other human endeavors in order to see as many patients as humanly possible, during all their waking hours. While society seems to be moving closer to declaring that doctors owe this duty to the collective, it has not reached this point quite yet.

Until society sees fit to legislate otherwise (which, DrRich supposes, could happen really very soon now), doctors will continue to spend some of their time engaging in hobbies and business or family activities outside of the formal healthcare system. Some may even leave the formal healthcare system altogether in favor of these other activities. DrRich himself has done this. And until society renders it officially illegal for doctors to do so, DrRich respectfully asks that doctors be left alone to celebrate their individual autonomy as granted to them under America’s founding documents, whether it’s by establishing authentic Indian restaurants, setting up Botox clinics, or even becoming direct-pay practitioners.

One last word of advice for DrRich’s dermatology friends: Have fun with your Botox clinics for now, fellas and ladies, but please don’t become too invested in them.  This is definitely a shallow-moat line of business, and the only thing that gives you any protection at all is your aura as highly trained specialists, with special and secret knowledge about an organ (i.e., the skin) which visibly droops when the underlying muscles become lax with age and gravity. A single action by forces entirely out of your control – say, Congress or the FDA – could render your monopoly entirely moot overnight, and you will be instantly priced out of business by hordes of PCPs, nurse practitioners, Botox booths in Walmart, and even home Botox injection kits. So please remember to at least keep your hand in genuine dermatology, or get your MBA, or perfect your long iron shots, or even learn a real skill, like tattooing – but do something that will provide you with a Plan C. Because Plan Botox is definitely a high risk endeavor over the long term.

________________________________

Now, read the whole story.

DrRich explains it all in, Fixing American Healthcare – Wonkonians, Gekkonians and the Grand Unification Theory of Healthcare.

Now on Kindle!

Healthcare Reform Explained – An Updated Guide For The Perplexed

PCP’s: Here’s All You Need To Know About Our New Healthcare System

Why the Health Insurers Saved the Day

The Individual Mandate Will Stand

The Audacity of Perpetuity

Some Powers of the Immutables

DrRich has decided it is time to begin studying the 2700-page healthcare reform bill that the Senate passed on December 24, as that is the bill which will actually become the law of the land. In the fall, DrRich had spent quite a bit of time with the House bill. This was such a painful and useless exercise that DrRich decided he would not waste any more of his time with proposed legislation, but instead (as Nancy Pelosi has wisely suggested) would wait until Congress passed a bill so he could find out what’s in it.

Now, DrRich does not have the stamina to study the new law all at once, as a whole. He must bite off little pieces. And the first thing he sought in embarking on his study of our new healthcare system was evidence of how the new law would rescue the Primary Care Physician.

This is important, since everyone acknowledges that we have a severe shortage of PCPs already, and when we add 32 million Americans to the rolls of the insured, that shortage will become extremely acute. Further, we know that very few medical school graduates are deciding to become PCPs, and further, that the PCPs who are in practice today are becoming older rapidly, and many may not be around in 10 years (or even in 10 months, once this reform bill passes).

As we all have heard, our President and his Congress have explicitly recognized the problem, and have frequently explicated on the need to build up and support our beleaguered primary care workforce. They have promised that their healthcare reforms will aggressively address this issue. And it is largely due to this promise that prominent physician organizations, like the AMA (which really represents a relatively small minority of the medical profession) and the American College of Physicians (which represents a large proportion of internists, of whom many are PCPs), have come out in support of the President’s reform efforts.

DrRich believes, of course, that for the Feds to suddenly make themselves the champions of PCPs, after spending nearly two decades systematically rendering primary care medicine a completely untenable proposition for American physicians, would be an unlikely outcome for any reform bill. Just to remind his readers, here’s what DrRich has previously observed about the carefully engineered plight of the American PCP:

“Their pay is determined arbitrarily by Acts of Congress, not by what they’re worth to their patients or to the market, and indeed in this way PCPs have a lot in common with workers in the old Soviet collectives.

They are directed to “practice medicine” by guidelines and directives which are handed down from on high; guidelines which, being forcibly based on what is called “evidence-based medicine,” necessarily address the average response of some large group of patients to the treatment being considered and do not allow much if any latitude for an individual patient’s needs; and which are often promulgated less to assure the excellent care of patients and more to further the agenda of various and competing interest groups, professional, governmental and otherwise.

They are limited to between 7.5 and 12.5 minutes per patient encounter (depending on the third party that controls a given patient’s medical care), and the content of what must occur during those 7.5 minutes is strictly determined by sundry Pay for Performance checklists, so as to strictly limit any interchanges between doctor and patient that do not meet the approved agenda for such encounters.

Their every move must be carefully documented according to incomprehensible rules, on innumerable forms and documents, that confound patient care but that greatly further the convenience of healthcare accountants and other stone-witted bureaucrats who are employed specifically to second-guess every clinical decision and every action the PCP takes.

They are expected to operate flawlessly under a system of federal rules, regulations and guidelines that cover hundreds of thousands of pages in immeasurable volumes that are never available in any readily accessible form. If they do not operate flawlessly according to those rules, regulations and guidelines, they are guilty of the federal crime of healthcare fraud. Furthermore, the specific meanings of these rules, regulations and guidelines are not merely opaque and difficult to ascertain, but indeed they are fundamentally indeterminate – that is, no individual or group of individuals in existence can say what they mean. So, PCPs operate under a massive quantum cloud of rules as best they can, but their actual status (regarding healthcare fraud) is, like Schrodinger’s cat, fundamentally unknowable – until the “box is opened” (typically through criminal prosecution), whereupon the meaning of the rules is finally crystallized in a court of law, and doctors who had been practicing in good faith find that they have at least a 50- 50 chance (like the cat) of learning that they are actually professionally dead.

Worst of all, PCPs have been charged with the duty of covertly rationing their patients’ healthcare at the bedside, and they have been pressed to nullify the classic doctor-patient relationship, by the healthcare bureaucracy that determines their professional viability, by the United States Supreme Court, and by the bankrupt, new-age ethical precepts of their own profession.”

How does our new healthcare law propose to “fix” these problems? DrRich can find two proposed solutions in the Senate bill.

First, the new law promises to address some of the pay discrepancy which punishes doctors for going into primary care specialties. It is unclear to DrRich how much this new pay fix will bring to PCPs. He will merely observe that, until now, the Feds have intentionally rendered primary care medicine such a soul-wrenching, personally and professionally demeaning endeavor that it has pushed most PCPs beyond mere anger, frustration, or resignation. Many of them are desperately looking for any practicable exit strategy. And to DrRich’s thinking, since it is not primarily their relatively low income that has caused all this anguish, a mere boost in income cannot overcome it.

But, of course, that’s for the PCPs themselves to decide.

Second, the new law proposes to fund new training opportunities for PCPs. This also sounds nice. But DrRich wonders what effect these new training programs will have, when the training programs that already exist cannot come close to filling their slots.

DrRich contends that these two stated “fixes” for manufacturing more PCPs cannot possibly provide an actual solution to the PCP shortage, and further, that the authors of the Senate bill cannot possibly believe they will. And so, DrRich decided to look a little deeper.

The answer to the PCP shortage – at least, the answer our political leaders are actually relying upon – is revealed deep in the Senate bill, in Section 5501, where the definition of “Primary Care Practitioner” is actually provided. Note, first of all, that once this bill becomes the law of the land, “PCP” will no longer mean “primary care physician,” but rather, will mean “primary care practitioner.”

And here’s how the new law defines Primary Care Practioners:

The term ‘primary care practitioner’ means an individual who —

(I) is a physician (as described in section 1861(r)(1)) who has a primary specialty designation of family medicine, internal medicine, geriatric medicine, or pediatric medicine; or

(II) is a nurse practitioner, clinical nurse specialist, or physician assistant (as those terms are defined in 9 section 1861(aa)(5))

And so, to his readers who are primary care physicians, DrRich must report that the real “fix” your political leaders have envisioned for the PCP shortage has been to declare you and nurse practitioners to be functionally (and legally) equivalent. This, DrRich submits, is all you need to know.

Having painstakingly reduced you unfortunate practitioners of primary care medicine to tools of the state – whose job is to follow the guidelines and place chits on the checklists which are handed down from on high, and to fill out the electronic forms which are designed not to advance patient care but to convenience the healthcare accountants who will thereby judge your “quality” – it is only natural for the central authority to eventually notice that you really don’t need all that training to do the kind of job they have invented for you. Nurses – who can be “trained up” much more rapidly than you, who will work for much less money than you, and who (they think) will be much less recalcitrant about following handed-down directives than you – will fill the gap. And you, doctor, can go pound salt.

DrRich must hasten to add, by the way, that, regarding the nurse practitioners, he believes the Feds have miscalculated. DrRich knows a lot of nurse practitioners and greatly admires their professionalism. He believes that “PCP” has been so successfully demeaned that many fewer nurse practitioners than our political leaders think will actually jump at the opportunity to become one (especially when you take into account the liability you assume when you become a PCP in a non-tort-reform paradigm like the one our leaders have made for us). Trusting in their common sense, DrRich will leave the nurse practitioners to their own wise counsel.

To his primary care physician friends, who have bravely held on, clinging to the promises made by our political leaders that their noble efforts will not go unrewarded, and to the assurances made by their own professional organizations that all will be well once the system is reformed, DrRich is forced to say: Told you so.

He also reminds you that it is still not illegal to opt out, and urges you to consider that it soon might be.

The New Ethics was explicitly born of the frustration felt by physicians as a result of the multitude of coercions the payers have thought up to force them to place the needs of the payers (the proxy for “society”), ahead of the needs of their patients. Thanks to the New Ethics, doctors can now bend to this coercion without violating their ethical standards.

Coercion by the payers was, of course, quite effective even before the New Ethics made capitulation ethical. This is because the third party payers – both private insurers and the government – have long had a stranglehold on the individual physician’s professional viability. Nonetheless, the fact that the New Ethics now formally divides the physician’s ethical obligations between their patients and society has very practical implications. By eliminating the remaining (relatively low) hurdle of ethical nicety, the New Ethics clears the way for even more sophisticated, more “official,” and more enforceable methods for achieving bedside rationing. (We have even seen the phenomenon, DrRich submits, of professional organizations going along with – and even assisting with – the development and implementation of such methodologies.)

As DrRich has described before, it is the primary care physicians who, so far, have borne the brunt of payers’ efforts to force bedside healthcare rationing. And to the very great credit of PCPs, despite the New Ethics aimed specifically at “curing” their sense of guilt and frustration, a majority of them remain very disturbed by the increasing pressure to make the needs of their patients their secondary concern.

Indeed, if anything, their frustration has grown. In the past, when they were torn between laying out an expensive but likely beneficial medical option for a patient, and not offering it because doing so would anger (say) the government, they could at least rely on classic medical ethics to back them up if they chose the less expedient path. Today, they have ethics as well as expediency pushing them, in such a case, to remain silent about that more expensive option.

To many PCPs with a strong sense of obligation to their patients, the coercive nature of the payers, combined with new ethical standards that virtually obligate them to give in to the coercion, have made modern primary care medicine a nearly untenable proposition.

Thus has the New Ethics rendered the practice of retainer medicine a matter of transcendent importance.

DrRich here uses the term “retainer medicine” as shorthand for any practice arrangement in which the doctor is paid directly by the patient, and not by third party payers. In some of these arrangements, patients actually do pay their physician a retainer fee of a few hundred to several thousand dollars a year. Such formal retainer arrangements – often called “boutique” or “concierge” practices – first began to pop up a decade or so ago. More recently, practices have begun appearing in which there is no actual retainer fee, but instead, patients pay their doctors the same way they pay their plumbers – on a fixed payment schedule according to the time the doctor spends with them. These pay-as-you-go practices generally are inexpensive enough to be affordable to any family that can afford cable television, or cell phone service.

Many retainer practices also provide amenities you often don’t get when your doctor is paid by Medicare or an insurer, including access to the physician’s cell phone, e-mail correspondence, same-day appointments, and plenty of face time during appointments. But whatever the specifics of a particular practice may be, the key that defines “retainer medicine” (as DrRich is using the term here) is that the doctor works for the patient, and nobody else.

Retainer medicine has been under steady attack, from the moment it first appeared, as being elitist, unethical, and divisive. The argument goes: While retainer medicine may be good for individual selfish doctors, and individual wealthy patients, this style of practice threatens to do much harm to the greater good. Critics maintain that retainer medicine threatens to create a two-tiered healthcare system (one for the wealthy and one for the poor). Plus, they say, if any substantial number of physicians were to adopt this odious new style of practice, there wouldn’t be enough PCPs to go around. Many critics have even called for making retainer practices illegal, and some states have already taken action to do so. The rationale for banning retainer medicine, boiled down, is: It is bad for doctors, patients and the public good.

To DrRich, the vociferous objections being raised against retainer medicine strongly suggest something deeper. DrRich believes that critics would simply find it far too “inconvenient” to have a bunch of wild retainer practitioners running around, disclosing to patients ALL their healthcare options, when the more well-behaved doctors are disclosing to patients only the healthcare options approved by government-assembled panels of experts. Retainer practitioners, in other words, will make covert rationing much more difficult. However, this is not a point of view which critics have been willing to express publicly, so DrRich will let it lay.

But even the publicly-expressed objections to retainer medicine – the notion that it is bad for doctors, patients, and the public good – are wrongheaded. Indeed, thanks particularly to the New Ethics, the opposite is true. Retainer medicine is perhaps the only pathway toward rescuing patients and the medical profession – and thus for best serving the public good. For PCPs to continue practicing under what has become the “traditional,” third-party-payment system is, in fact, the far greater threat.

It has become impossible – both in practical terms and now, in ethical terms – for “traditional” PCPs to fight the pervasive pressures being visited upon them to ration healthcare at the bedside. To escape this fate, they must either become specialists, deep-sea fishermen – or a retainer practitioner. That is, PCPs must choose between remaining in a system that ruthlessly pushes them toward a practice of bedside rationing (which many find an unethical, demeaning, and harmful style of practice), or, one way or another, getting out of traditional primary care medicine altogether.

To argue that retainer medicine is unethical is completely backwards. Retainer medicine restores the professional integrity of medical practice, and re-establishes a doctor-patient relationship in which the physician can again assume the duty of a true advocate. It is perhaps the only remaining means to restore the foundational (but now officially obsolete) medical ethic of always placing the patient first.

To argue that retainer medicine somehow threatens patients completely ignores reality. Retainer medicine may be the only remaining viable pathway toward restoring protections that patients are supposed to have when facing a healthcare system that is utterly bent on avoiding spending money on them.

To argue that retainer practitioners are creating a two-tiered healthcare system is ridiculous on its face, in a society that gives mere lip service (though, to be sure, plenty of it) to the problem of 47 million uninsured, and in which physicians already cannot afford to care for patients on Medicaid (or increasingly, on Medicare), because they lose money each time such a patient walks in the door.

To argue that retainer medicine will create a subpopulation of elites (because it provides a mechanism by which some individual patients can escape the deadly obstacles that have been intentionally laid before them), is as absurd as arguing that George Washington was wrong to free his slaves upon his death (or even that New York State was wrong to abolish slavery at about the same time), because it created a subpopulation of “elite” (i.e., free) African Americans; that until all slaves were freed, no slaves should have been freed. Rather, freeing at least some slaves – and forthrightly stating why it needed to be done (see: Declaration of Independence) – was not only ethical, but also showed what was possible, and over time created an expectation that eventually could no longer be ignored.

Finally, we should recognize that any innovation that can potentially spare patients from some of the harm the healthcare system has in store for them will necessarily be applicable to only a minority of patients at first. That’s how disruptive processes work. They begin as niche products or services, attractive only to a few high-end users; too expensive or too marginal for the vast majority; ignored, ridiculed or castigated by current providers and by most experts. But if at their core they’re offering something fundamentally useful, they will slowly demonstrate their worth – and eventually all the potential users will see the light, and demand for the product will become explosive. When that happens, the means are found to make the new product affordable and available to meet the demand – often by making significant “adjustments” to the original concept, that nonetheless preserve the core benefits. And when that happens, the traditional providers (who never saw it coming) are suddenly out of business.

It may not be that retainer-style medicine plays the personal computer to the traditional healthcare system’s mainframe. But it is inarguable that what retainer medicine offers to patients – at its core – is every bit as vital and every bit as indispensable. And if a critical mass of the public can be made to understand what is really being offered here, there will be no holding it back.

There never has been anything even slightly unethical about retainer medicine. The arrangement by which patients pay their doctors directly was, after all, how Marcus Welby practiced medicine, and how nearly every PCP practiced until the 1970s.

The problem began when third party payers were interposed between doctors and their patients, and it became progressively more difficult for doctors to honor their primary ethical obligations. The New Ethics has escalated the problem, however, from one where basic ethical precepts were merely being violated, to one where the precepts themselves were abandoned.

And by so doing, the New Ethics has elevated retainer medicine from something that was merely an ethically justifiable curiosity, to the last refuge for classic medical ethics, and the last best hope for patients, the profession of medicine, and the doctor-patient relationship.