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Over-lording by the medical system elite

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Contributed by: Fran Miller on 11/27/2007

Last Sunday, the Denver Post published an editorial that suggested patients be protected from themselves by necessitating doctors control drug prescriptions. The logical extension is that access to laboratory tests and MRI's be similarly controlled by the doctor-guild.

The Institute of Medicine has found that every year around 200,000 people die in hospitals from iatrogenic disease; that is illness caused by the medical system itself. This includes 80,000 infections, often because health workers do not wash their hands, and 7,000 medication errors.

In outpatient settings such as physician offices it is estimated that as many as 77 million prescriptions might be unnecessary. I have found my own primary care physician attends Broncos games in a box section paid for by a drug company and my wife's OB-GYN, who is also involved in setting up physician PPO networks, annually travels to the Caribbean on drug company junkets.

Add to all of this the fact that medical practitioners, including specialists, misread X-Rays, do unnecessary surgery and misdiagnose at inordinately high rates that threaten to turn health care into a casino. All of this costs billions and is economic dead-weight loss in a health system out of control.

We want patients to be more involved and take more responsibility, yet we force them to go through a gatekeeper system that is set up to give the physician guild and the drug company cartel virtual control.

You can get a prescription from a doctor for Prozac merely by suggesting you feel depressed but then you have to return month-after-month for $80 office visits to keep a $4 Wal-Mart prescription going. It is becoming common practice to take drugs for cholestrol control, but people have to pay physicians tribute for the prescription.

If our founding fathers had followed the Denver Post's suggestion we would not be voting in a republic. We would be over-lorded by a cultural, professional elite that treats us as too stupid to choose schools for our children, medical procedures for ourselves or even the car or house we buy.

Everything would be deferred to some expert who is supposedly our loyal agent. Our founders had the belief that the common man could pick his representatives, serve on juries and make informed decisions. And, they didn't even know about medical information sites on the Internet.

I would suggest that today they would argue we should have not only the right but the responsibility to self-prescribe far more of our medical care. Even socialized Europe allows people to get most drugs over the counter. I do not see why I cannot get a blood test or an MRI scan without incurring the unnecessary expense of a Roman-guard who wants to exact tribute and yet will not guarantee me an outcome.

That is, if the journalistic elites at the Denver Post agree.

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CONTRIBUTOR INFORMATION

Fran Miller

Parker , CO

Fran Miller has posted 120 stories and 15 comments since joining on 9/28/2007. Fran Miller 's average story rating is 4.78.

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