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When you're sick, do you call your insurance company?
Of course not. Do you trust your insurance company to really care
about your health? Probably not. Whom do you trust? You trust
your doctor and his staff, of course. When you need medical help
or advice, do you call some impersonal clerical robot you finally
reach after navigating a series of prompts from your insurance
company's voice mail system; or would you rather talk to the pleasant
receptionist in your doctor's office? Which person do you think
will be more responsive to your needs? Do you want your medical
care to become rushed and depersonalized? Well, that's exactly
what's going to happen if patients don't join forces with doctors
to fight against what the powerful insurance companies are trying
to do to your health care.
Most of today's best doctors didn't go into medicine for the money. Becoming a doctor was not about money, it was about helping people.
Anyone bright enough and driven enough to get into and through
medical school could almost certainly make more money in many
other occupations.
American doctors are dedicated people who genuinely care about the welfare of others. Even when we were
kids, most of us wanted to become doctors and help people. We
have devoted our entire lives to excellence, first to medical
training and then to trying to improve the health and the lives
of our patients. The fact that medicine was a pretty good way
to make a living for our families was always secondary.
Doctors are the kind of people who have made it their life's work
to do their best at anything they undertake. Everything in our
training and experience reinforces, even demands, that kind of
commitment to excellence and integrity.
Over many generations, American doctors, nurses, hospitals and
other committed health professionals have woven together what
is, without doubt, the foremost and most accessible health care
delivery system in the world.
Now our wonderful, caring system of health care is being rapidly
and systematically dismantled and corrupted by powerful insurance
corporations; and yet there are no organized voices being raised
in anger and protest against the process. No one is telling the
public the truth about what these changes are going to mean to
them on a personal basis. All our best doctors are becoming controlled,
financially crippled, burned-out, and then devoured by the insurance
company juggernauts; yet the process is so slow and insidious
that it's like being eaten to death by ants, one little bite at
a time.
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