“Gifted Hands” Surgeon Rips Obamacare

As the House of Representatives passed their version of healthcare reform late Saturday night, there are still some people who doubt that the steps that our U.S. Congress is taking to reform healthcare are the right steps. In fact as the Senate Finance Committee completed its work on a bill that would greatly expand the government’s role in health care – requiring nearly everyone to buy insurance, and designing that insurance through subsidies and mandates – President Obama is trying to rally doctors to his side. At an event a couple of weeks ago at the Rose Garden, phalanxed by doctors wearing their white coats (as well as some that White House staffers had handed out), Obama declared, “nobody has more credibility with the American people on this issue than you do.”

Yet one of the nation’s top surgeons, with credibility and acclaim the world over for the pioneering surgeries he has and his personal story of overcoming hardship, recently ripped the dominant health care legislation before Congress in a critique similar to that of conservatives and libertarians. Benjamin Carson, director of pediatric neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore, Md., and recipient of numerous awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, criticized in a recent interview the approach of the current bills for their mandate, creation of a “public option,” and lack of malpractice liability reform.

“My biggest problem is I feel it’s going in the wrong direction,” Carson told reporters at TV station WLOS in Asheville, N.C. (Video here.)“It’s giving us more government and less autonomy. And I think we should be going in exactly the opposite direction. We should be having more autonomy and less government. And that is the kind of thing that brings the prices down.”

Considered one of the best neurosurgeons in the world, Carson gained acclaim in the ’80s and ‘90s for his pioneering operations separating conjoined twins joined at the head and other procedures that have saved children from epilepsy and brain cancer. But Carson is also celebrated for his personal story of overcoming poverty and prejudice. An African-American, Carson grew up in a single-parent home Detroit ghetto, but his mother pushed him and his brother to achieve excellence. He is the author of the popular autobiography “Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story,” which was made into a TV movie this year with Cuba Gooding Jr. portraying Carson. And he does much philanthropic work through charities such as his “Carson Scholars” fund.

Over the past few years, Carson has been writing and speaking more about public policy, including health care reform. He has railed against excessive litigation, pointing out how much malpractice insurance and other forms of “defensive medicine” to protect against lawsuits add to medical costs. In the interview with WLOS, Carson insisted that tort reform must go “hand in hand” as part of any true health care reform. “We have to bring a rational approach to medical litigation,” he said. “We’re the only nation in the world that really has this problem. Why is it that everybody else has been able to solve this problem but us? Simple. Special interest groups like the trial lawyers’ association. They don’t want a solution.”

Carson also blasted proposals backed by Obama and most Democrats that would create a government-backed “public option,” saying it would inevitably lead to a “single payer” system like that of Canada, in which the government as the sole insurer would end up calling all the shots for patients. He pointed to how the Canadian government itself crowded out private insurance. “What happened to the private insurance companies in Canada? Just like that, they were gone, because they couldn’t compete with it (the government). Now, why would it be any different here? That’s one of the things that disappoints me about the lack of honesty … We can’t really debate when there’s all this subterfuge.”

Carson said that despite the problems with American health care, Canada and European countries were not models to emulate in their health insurance financing systems. “All we have to do is go to other places and see what’s going on. See how long people have to wait. Very, very long waiting periods. Why do you think so many people from Canada come here when they have a problem? I know a young man in England who has a problem with his knee. He needs an operation, and the waiting list is so long. … These are the kind of things that people in this country are not used to. But more importantly, it’s something that we don’t have to get used to. We can fix this without going to that kind of system that causes those kinds of long waits.”

As his main “fix”, Carson proposes a system of patient empowerment in which “individuals and families can own their own insurance; it doesn’t have to be through their employer.” Not all of Carson’s ideas expressed in the interview were free-market, though. He did propose that the government set insurance rates, and cover patients’ catastrophic costs above $250,000.

Above all, Carson was adamant that there transparency and deliberation, rather than a rush to force through a health care bill that no one had read. In fact, he proposed bringing health care to a national vote of the American people “I would say we should have a national referendum on it. People should be able to vote. That would really work, because now, people would have to explain it. They would have to know what was in it. When we do these big sweeping national things and just sort of jam them through and nobody even knows what’s in it, that’s not democracy. At some point, someone has lost their ideal of what democracy is.”

Carson’s colleagues at Hopkins – ranked by U.S. News and World Report for 19 years as the nation’s best overall hospital and lauded for the millions it spends on charity care for the poor –have also voiced concerns about the direction that health care legislation is going. Citing the cuts to hospitals to pay for the goal of universal coverage – cuts of more than $150 billion in Medicare and Medicaid payments to hospitals, according to the Congressional Budget office “preliminary analysis” of the Max Baucus’ Senate Finance Committee bill – the Hopkins officials have been warning about severe stress on Hopkins and other hospitals that Hopkins and other hospitals would face.

At a Sept. 18 “town meeting” on the campus of the main hospital in Baltimore, Md., Johns Hopkins Institutions Director of Federal Relations Beth Felder was blunt about the cuts in reimbursements. “That is going to come out of hospitals and health systems,” she said. “I think that’s not a good thing for us.” Similarly, Johns Hopkins Medicine health system CEO Edward Miller told C-Span on Sept. 16 that cuts in the reimbursement rates for Medicare and Medicaid, “There are going to be less physicians that will care for these patients.”

Still Dr. Ben Carson, the first neurosurgeon to successfully separate conjoined twins was in Jackson Thursday evening. The recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom last year says everyone should be concerned about healthcare and healthcare reform. At the 13th annual Community Reinvestment Awards Ceremony was held at the Jackson Medical Mall. The ceremony focuses on recognizing groups and individuals who work with children. The guest speaker, Dr. Benjamin Carson, Director of Pediatric Neurosurgey at John Hopkins Hospital has devoted his life's work to helping children. "If we don't equip our children we probably only have another generation as a pinnacle nation," said Dr. Carson.

Dr. Carson said he grew up poor with what he once described as a violent and uncontrolled temper. He fell to the bottom of his class. "One of the key things that I try to get across to young people is that the person who has the most to do with what happens to you is you. It's not the environment, its not other people, its the choices that you make," Carson said. Dr. Carson recently appeared on CNN to discuss healthcare (http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/health/2009/10/29/ldt.health.care.carson.cnn). He says Americans can't afford to give up on making changes. "As a physician on the front line I see so much, incredibly so much waste. We spend plenty of money on healthcare, twice as much as the next closet nation, per capita, so it’s not that we haven't committed the resources, it's that we have too many hogs feeding at the trough," Carson said.

Nonetheless the House passed its version of healthcare reform with a public option but some people who voted for the House version say the bill they voted for is not perfect and needs to be fixed some more but it is a step closer to healthcare reform in America. "I think the majority of people support health-care reform, but this bill has flaws," New York Congressman Dan Maffei said. "You can move the bill forward and fix some things before it goes to the president." This is exactly what Dr. Carson was warning of but the reality is that now we as Americans must hope that the flaws that still exist in the House version of healthcare reform is fixed once the Senate passes its version.

Therefore, healthcare reform and the flaws that exist in both the House and Senate version must get fixed in the Compromise committee and we as Americans must hope that the solutions for fixing healthcare exist in bits and pieces of the House and Senate version otherwise, the type of healthcare reform we get in America will not be the solution to all of our problems but simply a solution to some of our problems which is better than nothing. Still Dr. Carson warns that there are many flaws in the House and Senate versions of the healthcare reform bills but if we the American people don’t watch what might come out of the compromise committee once the Senate passes its version of healthcare reform than we could have even more problems in America’s healthcare system than solutions.

So we as the American people right along with Dr. Carson must continue to fight for healthcare reform and hope that our Congressional leaders votes for a bill that solves healthcare problems rather than creates more and that President Obama signs a bill that will not add to the national debt of this nation as he stated during a joint session to Congress in September. Now more than ever, more Americans must watch how healthcare reform plays out and like Dr. Carson, I hope for the best but even I see many flaws in the House and Senate versions of healthcare reform that harm America’s future than solves it. Thus we might be closer than ever to having healthcare reform but what we can’t allow to happen is for healthcare reform to create newer problems that didn’t exist before. This is why like Dr. Carson, I want our Congressional leaders to fix what doesn’t work and leave what does work alone.

Sources:
Gifted Hands- Dr. Benjamin Carson
http://www.wlbt.com/Global/story.asp?S=11455111