Most Americans may be shocked this morning following the cataclysmic victory of Scott Brown to the people’s seat in Massachusetts, Boson’s second biggest tea party.  You would be shocked, that is if you have never attended a Tea Party or a Liberty Group meeting.  We Americans are not that much different, whether we are from Ohio, California or Massachusetts.  We know a bad deal when one is put in front of us.  Health care deform, with its smarmy deals, its collectivist theme and its blindness to the needs of American citizens just doesn’t (didn’t) make sense.

Join me in my office on a typical day as my patient and I try to identify their unique complaint or work out a plan for bettering their medical condition and to help them make lifestyle adjustments to carry it out.  They first tell me, when I want to start them on a promising new drug that will control their sugar better or a new technology that will lighten the load of their chronic condition, that their insurance plan will not pay for it, or that Medicare has denied them in the past.  One patient was told that a special scan that identified a rare tumor and allowed that surgeon to remove it, was not available to follow up to see if any recurrence was present – a full year after a successful excision of the cancer.  Do I or my colleagues suspect, then, that diagnosis, treatment and counseling our patients will be any easier or better when the government is more involved, setting up committees of disinterested bureaucrats to decide, in effect, whether they will live or die.  Further, sit with me just a moment while I make sure that I am not violating the Orwellian HIPPAA regulation that may prevent me from sharing valuable information with the relative of a patient, or watch over my shoulder to be sure that I am not violating OSHA regs that have little to do with patient care or safety, but just cost more time and money to my overstretched overhead.  But just a moment, our national representatives at the AMA, our friends in the pharmaceutical & insurance industries surely know that all health care begins and ends between doctor and patient in the office or between doctor, nurse and patient in a hospital setting.  Unfortunately, they are more interested in being at the table of collectivist health care reform and in preserving their lobbying capital. It’s time to start over, this time changing the system to introduce true transparency in price, individual ownership of healthcare insurance and keeping the government out of the examining room. Scott Brown’s election to the Senate is a lesson not only to overreaching democrats in Washington, but also to those whose major interest is their own special interest than to preserve and improve what is best about the planet’s best health care system