President Turns To Doctors To Get Health Care “Fixed”
Doctors and medical professionals from all 50 states converged on the White House Rose Garden for an event with President Obama designed to show broad support for the goal of health care reform.
The president sought to highlight this support from people that he says know what needs to be “fixed” in a “broken” health care system and also continued to fight back publicly against what he called “crazy claims” coming from Republican opponents of his proposals.
We have now been debating this issue of health insurance reform for months. The United States Congress has been working on it for better — for the better part of a year, and last week the final congressional committee involved in shaping legislation completed their proposal and will soon vote on it. At this point, we’ve heard all the arguments on both sides of the aisle. We have listened to every charge and every counter-charge — from the crazy claims about death panels to misleading warnings about a government takeover of our health care system.
But when you cut through all the noise and all the distractions that are out there, I think what’s most telling is that some of the people who are most supportive of reform are the very medical professionals who know the health care system best — the doctors and nurses of America.
These men and women here would not be supporting health insurance reform if they really believed that it would lead to government bureaucrats making decisions that are best left to doctors. They wouldn’t be here today if they believed that reform in any way would damage the very critical and sacred doctor-patient relationship.
Instead, the reason these doctors are here is because they have seen firsthand what’s broken about our health care system.
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So these doctors know what needs to be fixed about our health care system. And they know that health insurance reform will do — that it will go a long way towards making patients healthier and doctors and nurses to be able to perform that — those tasks that are so important to them and led them into medicine in the first place.
Not wanting to let an opportunity to take a shot at the president go to waste, Republicans instantly hammered Obama for implying a “hand-picked” group of doctors who support reform indicated a wider stamp of approval for his plans from the medical community.
GOP Congressman Tom Price of Georgia introduced his own “hand-picked” doctor to attack the president’s reform plan and mocked the doctors who appeared at the White House for supporting a “government takeover of health care.”
The doctors summoned to the White House to lend support to healthcare reform don’t accurately represent physicians’ views, one Republican doctor-turned-lawmaker said Monday.
Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), the chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC) and a former orthopedic surgeon, argued that the 150 doctors providing a backdrop for President Barack Obama’s Rose Garden event this morning were “hand picked” by the White House.
“I’m kind of surprised that a hand-picked group of physicians that were brought to the White House today were applauding a government takeover of healthcare,” Price said during a conference call organized by the Republican National Committee (RNC).
“I would suggest that a real cross-section of doctors would not be applauding a government takeover of healthcare,” he added.
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The RNC included Dr. Donald Palmisano, the former president of the American Medical Association (AMA), to rebut claims that doctors back the health reform efforts in Congress. (The AMA has endorsed the House healthcare reform bill.)
Palmisano said that Congress should look more toward using a model of health insurance provided to federal employees, instead of a public option model for consumers.
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Obama and a phoney phot op with lib dem Doctors. 45% of all Doctors say they will leave practice if the govt takes over healthcare ( my Doctor has already told me he is gone if it happens). Don’t you just love the lab coats !.. Biggest joke Obama and the Doc’s never address the shortage of medical personnel or the fact that the shortage will even be bigger with an extra 40 milllion running for “free” medical testing.