Most people aren’t against Obamacare because they’re against
access to healthcare for all, or because they oppose the concept of ‘fairness’.
In fact, it’s usually the exact opposite. Healthcare professionals who are not
voting for President Obama the next time around are primarily tired of dishonest,
self-serving, back-room deals, and of the mediocre quality of the healthcare
reform law itself. In 2,700 pages, the ‘Affordable Care Act’ egregiously
expands government, distances physicians from their patients with onerous new
layers of bureaucracy, and guts benefits for seniors by slashing Medicare.

The fight to over-turn, rule unconstitutional, and otherwise
derail the ‘Act’ is not a simple ‘rich people’ versus ‘union-members’ argument.
The sad reality is that carrying an Obamacare card will not mean you are
guaranteed quality medical care by a doctor. What it will mean for millions of
Americans is long waiting times for a diminished number of participating
physicians.  Furthermore, access to care
by a medical school educated, residency-trained, board-certified doctor will
become a luxury, not a commonplace occurrence. Much to the consternation of the
die-hard left that believes everything in life should be equal and free for
everyone, Obamacare—in its best case scenario—will split the country into two
disparate patient groups: those who must settle for the lowest common
denominator and those who will still be able to buy first-class access to the
best American medical care available.

In Southern California, a core group of doctors, politicians, and concerned citizens are already working to re-write Obamacare’s replacement.

Stay tuned for an incredible assembly of experts, media coverage, media training, VIPs, Congressmen, and healthcare professionals as the First Annual National Doctors’ Coalition Meeting Gets Underway right here in San Diego on May 5th/6th, 2012. (…AMS is also collecting early registration for this Summer’s Second Annual Freedom Run San Diego, with 100% of all proceeds again going to the Wounded Warriors Foundation!! — date to be announced soon)

San Diego’s own radio personality Rick Amato will be featured as MC, and hometown money guru and radio show host, Bill Gunderson, will join us for a unique presentation on Obamacare’s disastrous financial and economic implications for everyday Americans.

Join the National Doctors’ Coalition effort by signing up at www.ApolloforLiberty.md

The Rick Amato Show

Bill Gunderson of the 'Positively Wall Street' Radio Show

EDUCATING PROFESSIONALS AND THE PUBLIC
More to come …
https://aaps.wufoo.com/forms/z7w8z9/

‘…bringing our ships together in this crucial time for American healthcare.’

Creating the Blueprint for True Healthcare Reform: Physicians First, Patients Foremost

Join us this May 5-6, 2012 in San Diego, CA for the first annual Take Back the Profession Conference. Seating is limited; you must register here to guarantee a seat. Once your paid registration of $100 has been received, you will be emailed a parking pass to please print. Plus directions to the White Paper Dinner that will immediately follow the panel discussion on Saturday, May 5. It will be at the home of Dr. Adam Dorin, President and Founder of America’s Medical Society. His home is just minutes away from the campus.

EVENT SCHEDULE (Subject to change)

Saturday, May 5
Zable Hall – Map & Directions

5:00 PM Meet and Greet
5:30 PM Introduction and DC Update with Congressman Duncan Hunter
7:00 PM The Economic Impact of PPACA with Sally Pipes, Pacific Research Institute; the impact on small business including small physician business
8:00 PM Insights of a Hospital System Medical Director on the impact of PPACA with Ron Kaufman, Tenet Hospital Systems

Sunday, May 6
California Room at the Town and Country Resort Hotel – Map & Directions

8:30 AM Healthcare Policy Rollout with Governor Mitt Romney
9:00 AM Republican Senate Candidate Debate
10:00 AM Congressional Doctor Caucus and other Invited Congressional Candidates & Member including Tony Strickland, Ed Royce, and Gary DeLong
12:00 PM Lunch
1:00 PM Media Training (Sponsored by MD VIP)

Have questions? Do you have anything else you’d like to see covered in this or a future conference? Let us know by emailing us at apollo@apolloforliberty.md!

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/medicine-and-politics-america/2012/mar/25/supreme-musings-obamacare/

SAN DIEGO, Sunday, March 25, 2012—Beginning this Monday 3/26 and continuing through Wednesday 3/28, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments both for and against the PPACA law; their decision on the challenges posed against Obamacare is expected to come down sometime this June, 2012, about four months prior to the presidential election.

Here are the main elements that will be presented over the next few days at the Supreme Court:

• The      Tax      Anti-Injunction Act states “no suit for the purpose of      restraining the assessment or collection of any tax shall be maintained in      any court by any person, whether or not such person is the person against      whom such tax was assessed.”

Question:  Is, indeed, the ‘penalty’ in PPACA a “tax” such that the Tax Anti-Injunction Act would prevent review of the law until after the ‘taxes’ are collected in 2014? Hence, must the Supreme Court case be deferred another two years down the road?

• Is      the Individual Mandate (i.e.,      that we must all purchase health      insurance or pay a penalty for not purchasing such insurance)      constitutional?
• Is      the mandate to purchase health insurance, or pay a      penalty for abstaining, ‘severable’ from the rest of      the two thousand-plus page law, in the event the mandate is found to be,      in fact, unconstitutional?
• Is      it constitutional that States must either expand Medicaid (or lose      federal funding altogether) under Obamacare?

The Media

The ‘Affordable Care Act’ is dangerous for America, and yet the pro-Obamacare Zeke Emmanuel’s and Michael Moore’s of the world should relish in the fact that media outlets rarely report on the meaty deficiencies which make this law egregiously detrimental to the doctor-patient relationship.

Shocking as it may be, politics is an insider’s game where pundits on both sides of the Obamacare debate are rarely jockeying for positions of principle as much as for platforms of power.

The ‘right’ despises MSNBC for its consistently pro-Obama stance, and the ‘left’ despises FOX News for its steadfast tilt in favor of Libertarian and Republican viewpoints. Both FOX and MSNBC, however, largely do a disservice to their viewers by missing the forest for the trees when it comes to the new healthcare reform law.

A well-known reporter for FOX told one of my colleagues that he “would lose his job” if he gave air time to the weighty and substantive rather than ‘talking points’ arguments against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act legislation.  How sad!

The Pivotal Role of the American Medical Association

Lying low now, the AMA sought a high-profile role in the run-up to the Affordable Care Act’s passage in March, 2010.  Such eagerness to be considered a dutiful ‘player’ (and to gain a ‘seat around the table’) even resulted in high-level meetings of AMA officials at the White House during the early months of the Obama presidency.

In and of itself, this is not news; it is merely democracy in action, right? Well, perhaps, if you consider democracy to be pay-offs and favors behind closed doors. Even the AMA’s own henchmen will now openly concede what the majority of doctors have been saying for over two years: their membership of “practicing physicians” is only at 15% of the total number of practicing physicians in the United   States. This means that 85% of American doctors are not, and have not been, members of this organization for some time, and the number is dropping as 12,000 private practice members alone quit the AMA in the year 2010.

Many believe that the AMA could have set the tone that other major state medical societies would have likely followed (e.g., California), and stopped the healthcare bill from passing if they had not lent their support for Obamacare.  Instead, the AMA supported the bill because it won them ‘security’ for their coveted contract with the government for exclusive copyright medical billing coding rights, which nets upwards of $70-100 million dollars annually for the organization.

Despite this, doctors who still enjoy their “seat” around the political table courtesy of the diminished, yet wealthy, AMA had this to say about the critics of the AMA’s exclusive billing revenue stream in the February, 2012 edition of the San Diego County Medical Society PHYSICIAN magazine, page 29:

“We will declare first what it was not: It was not some evil deal to protect CPT revenue or any other AMA business line. That one is right up there with the Sept. 11 “truthers” on the far left or the Obama “birthers” on the far right — great conspiracy theory and great physician lounge chatter, but an idea based only on the fantasies of people who have never been to an AMA meeting or who in some cases are trying to derive personal financial benefit by trying to tear down AMA.”

This is an odd statement, considering that the AMA’s once secretive deal with the government was only revealed to the public by the diligent work of Andy Schlafly, counsel for the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (and one of the few attorneys privileged to have petitioned the Supreme Court on PPACA), and AAPS Executive Director, Jane Orient, M.D. Interestingly, Doctor Orient, and many others in the non-AMA physician (majority) category, have been or are members of the AMA’s inner working circle.

More information on the work of AAPS before the Supreme Court can be gleaned at their dedicated anti-Obamacare legal website.

Basic Premise to be Argued in Favor of State-based, rather than Federally-mandated, Health Reform

Section 36 of the 11-398 February 13, 2012 Counsel for Amici Curiae Supreme Court Brief:

“Although many States have made this case in challenging the individual mandate, several have filed an amicus brief supporting the Government. In support of the Government’s position, State Amici argue that the ACA is a blueprint for model cooperation between the federal government and the States. See, e.g., State Amici Br. at 29-36. This portrayal ignores the unconstitutionally coercive Medicaid expansion the Act foists on States, as well as the fact that the ACA imposes a particular purported solution—the individual mandate and associated insurance reforms—to attempt to solve a complex problem that States have attempted to address in diverse ways. The fact remains that the States within our constitutional system have both the traditional power and the practical ability to enact meaningful healthcare reform. Accordingly, a decision by this Court to reaffirm the traditional constitutional boundaries on Congress’s power to regulate commerce will encourage and promote State-sponsored and -administrated solutions that reflect the appropriate workings among the laboratories of democracy in our federal system.”

The Supreme Court ruling this Spring/Summer 2012 will have profound implications not only for the upcoming presidential election cycle, but for the United States in general for the foreseeable future. Many see this argument about federal vs. state power, and the rights of individuals to live and work in a free-market-driven economy, to be paramount.

It is regrettable that money and positions of perceived importance have pitted physician against physician in the run-up and aftermath of the new healthcare reform law. It is even more profoundly tragic that, to this date, no explanation of reason can be offered by the American Medical Association for their egregious behavior in posturing on the East Lawn of the White House in ‘white coats’ that were offered to them by political staffers for their disingenuous display of doctor ‘unity’ in support of Obamacare.

We can only hope that the National Doctors’ Coalition Meeting in San    Diego this May 5^th/6^th, where non-AMA medical groups will assemble to write their blueprint for true patient/doctor-centric healthcare reform, will help reassert medical-political influence back in the hands of the 85% majority of American physicians on this matter. (Registration and portal for doctors coalition meeting)

… another recent article by Doctor Dorin in The Washington Times:

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/medicine-and-politics-america/2012/mar/19/diagnosing-healthcare-reform-crisis/

SAN DIEGO, Monday March 12, 2012—When Samuel Shem published his famous book The House of God four decades ago, no one would have thought that American medicine could fall so far from its elevated position in society.

Doctors once stood as pillars of medical decision making. Now, they are now mere “providers”; hospital administrators need medical doctors, but only to serve quietly in their schemata to keep onerous regulators and government officials at bay. As one health system CEO arrogantly announced to her chief of staff committee, “you give the care and then stay out of our way.”

Today, doctors are rarely considered important in the sense of true democratic input and leadership. As the federal government assumed greater power and influence over the practice of medicine over the past two decades, physicians became increasingly marginalized as ‘necessary baggage’ to the healthcare equation.

Despite an average of 11 to 17 years of education and training after high school, with arguably the most arduous and demanding academic curriculum and graduating with as much as a half million dollar debt from the cost of their education, physicians are chided about their ‘elevated’ income levels.  Many bright students are dissuaded from pursuing the noble profession of medicine because of such misplaced stereotypes and negative connotations associated with the current health care reform law.

While the knowledge and skill of physicians is irreplaceable, it is an inconvenient truth which many hospital CEOs would like to keep hidden from sight. They would rather focus on government-mandated surveys, cumbersome computer system dictates, and (largely meaningless and often falsified) ‘pay for performance’ statistics that show their compliance with Uncle Sam’s guidelines. If the right paperwork is presented to their bureaucratic overseers, then hospitals get more money from the taxpayer coffers. Likewise, attention to government mandates insures that penalties and fines are avoided.

All of this comes down to the simple truth of hospital politics in today’s era of big government and the current healthcare reform law: quality and outcomes are secondary to political whims and trends. Today, billions of dollars are spent annually in the United States instituting and maintaining computer networks, and in preparing for ‘joint commission’ surveys that may do more harm than good for patient care.

Any honest member of the healthcare profession will attest to the fact that preparation for government surveys is merely a dog and pony show. Unannounced surveys are rare; most are planned in advance and involve temporary fixes and facades to give a false impression of how care is actually delivered. Once the survey is complete, processes and practices are converted back to the norm. Surveyors know this, and so do doctors and nurses; it’s all part of a game that wastes time, money, and precious resources.

Aside from data storage, transfer, and retrieval, the vast majority of hospital computer systems take attention away from patients, focusing the user instead on the monitor and keyboard. Patient data can be accessed easily, and in bulk, from remote locations, but privacy concerns remain significant as data is vulnerable to unauthorized access from anywhere in the world.

Furthermore, the clinical data bank is only as valid as the integrity of data entry performed at the bedside or ward. A dark and secretly held concern of hospital-based information technology (IT) specialists is that a significant percentage of data logged into the system may actually be inaccurate or attributed to the wrong patient.

You won’t find a large scale study that attempts to quantify this problem, but IT workers will off-handedly report a disturbing number at around 5% for incorrect data entry (i.e., reported by doctors, nurses, and lab technicians at some point after the time of entry). How many mistakes in the digital patient record are actually never caught or corrected? Is this figure actually closer to ten or even twenty percent?

How many clinical decisions have been made based on false data? How many patient injuries have occurred due to this system-based vulnerability? Why is the government silent on this issue?

Herein lies the dilemma we face in the modern age of government-controlled medicine: decisions to purchase software, hardware, clinical tools, and supplies are no longer based on across-the-board sampling of physician and nurse judgments or preferences. Instead, they are pushed downward from politicians and bureaucrats whose primary concern is not quality but conformity... Once mandates become ‘top-down’ instead of ‘bottom up’ in the medical delivery system, all bets are off when it comes to the end result. The ‘result’ will often be manipulated to insure that government dollars continue to flow, regardless of true clinical outcomes.

Like America’s military fighting force, medical professionals in the United States are the best of the best. The quality of nurses and medical doctors in America is unrivaled the world over.  Similar to the military’s inefficient and often incongruous layers of administrative rules and procedures, the civilian hospital system is anything but ‘creative’ or ‘innovative’.  The accountants, nurses and doctors who rise to the top of their local hospital boards today seem more concerned with avoiding the wrath of their government taskmasters than anything else. Driven more by fear than incentives to streamline and innovate, today’s hospitals are cauldrons of waste and stifled talent.

If you take partisanship out of the debate on the ‘Affordable Care Act’, many medical professionals will tell you that their biggest professional angst is centered on their role in giving good care. The government’s involvement in the healthcare system should be one of limited observer and protector of patient and ‘provider’ rights—i.e., preservation of the doctor-patient relationship.   Instead, the government’s inflexibility, and its adherence to oftentimes ill-conceived mandates, has become a burden and a liability to quality.

When hospitals stop becoming mere thugs, who blindly enforce often wasteful and meaningful ‘reforms’, and start becoming true partners to doctors and nurses, patients will benefit.  The free market is anything but irresponsible when it comes to quality, and healthcare is no exception.

Ask any doctor or nurse what they love the most about working in the ‘house of God’ and they will say it is helping patients.  Find a way to put patients—not the government—in the driver’s seat, and you’ll find that the highest quality, most affordable medical care is well within our reach…and you won’t need 2,700 pages of laws to achieve it.

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/medicine-and-politics-america/2012/mar/14/house-god-2012/