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HMOs/Lawyers vs.
Doctor/Hospital/Patients
Thursday, July18, 2002
By Gordon Bishop
An increasingly immoral and unethical society is sowing the seeds of its own self-destruction when everyone starts suing somebody in what amounts to a scandalous lottery for the winners.
When lawyers start suing doctors and then doctors start suing the insurance industry, medical care in America becomes a maddening and costly nightmare of litigation.
That’s what’s happening in New Jersey and several other states when anger and frustration turn into an all-out legal war between the lawyers and insurance companies, and doctors, hospitals and patients.
Billions of dollars in legal costs will be wasted in this immoral, unethical war between these national economic giants.
The losers are all of us: the working, taxpaying patient who simply wants to be healed, to survive in a hostile environment of selfish and senseless litigation.
Who’s responsible?
All of us!
In a word, Greed.
“Greed is good,” according to today’s high-stakes CEOs, stock and money managers.
Greed has become a social sickness, pitting family against family, neighbor against neighbor, employee against employer, politician against politician, bureaucrat against bureaucrat.
Lost in all of this self-consuming greed are two important ingredients of a sound society, a functional civilization.
Those two words are Truth and Sacrifice.
Lies, cover-ups, incompetence are ruining the America Dream on Wall Street, Main Street, and our nation’s Capital Street, where politicians and the self-interests play a ruthless game of winner-take-all!
All of these money-driven fools must stop this relentless exploitation of “the system” they blame for everything.
But we are “the system.” We, the working, taxpaying voters of America are “the system.”
We created this nightmare by not voting and then voting for the same politicians serving the special interests instead of the common good.
We must begin to remove the corrupt operators and overseers of America’s health care system one by one, getting rid of politicians who won’t represent those who vote, shutting down the self-interests one by one, and putting an end to frivolous lawsuits that are spreading like a cancer throughout our socio-economic-political process.
We need fairness, balance, and most of all, honesty.
But can a corrupt and broken society cure itself of these self-concocted diseases?
FACT: The cost of malpractice insurance in New Jersey has increased an average of 152 percent in the last three years.
FACT: The United States used to have 4,000 medical students applying for surgical residency positions. Today, only 750 students from the United States are applying for surgical training throughout the Nation. New Jersey has only 28 slots for candidates seeking to become surgeons. By comparison, some 4,000 law students pass the New Jersey Bar each year to become attorneys.
FACT: America needs more good doctors, nurses and entrepreneurs who create real jobs and clean revenue, and not “cook the books.”
Finally, each citizen must accept the responsibility for their own behavior and failures. Stop government from expanding the unproductive and destructive “Welfare State.”
But, first, we all must vote with our conscience for those with a conscience, if we still have one after more than 40 years of liberalism.
Until that happens, America will continue to be a dysfunctional jungle of selfish immoralists.
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