Flooding Along the Shore.

Here is a photo of the Belt Parkway. It is completely flooded and normally the water level is about 10-15 feet below the shore line. Now, the freeway is completely under water and I can hear ocean waves crashing near my window. I must say that overall, it is a very pleasant change when compared to honking and speeding cars, and  especially thundering motorcycles.

My main concern is whether the water will recede enough so that I can drive on this freeway to work tomorrow.

Essentials in Prepping for the Hurricane

I saw one of my neighbors post about her hurricane prepping and decided to contribute my 2c.

Here is what my fascinating neighbor plans on eating, on the eve of the storm.

National Disgrace

So Powell, how is that endorsement of Obama working out? This is the guy who let a couple of soldiers sit in harms way for hours, laser targeting a mortar that was firing at them, and he wouldn't even send a drone to take it out. It appears that the lives of American soldiers have become nearly worthless under your endorsed candidate. You Colin Powell is a disgrace to the uniform that you once wore.  All the honors bestowed on you were inappropriately given and should be removed from your possession. As far as your name is concerned, it is dirt. Why did you endorse Obama? Because of petty racist ties. So go and suck the zits out of Farrakhan's butt, because you are both the same type of trash.

It still surprises me that not one word about is mentioned about Benghazi on popular news sites like the Google news summary.  These stories are being scrapped off the main page by partisan hacks.  They are embarrassed of their president.  Everyone associated with Obama is a disgrace.

Cowards

How else do you describe a man who tries to blame others for his failures. At the beginning of this week, Obama tried to have Hillary take the blame for Benghazi. Hillary sort of took responsibility, but at the end of this week, it still wasn't clear exactly what she called herself responsible for.

It's like 2 adolescents getting caught after making a mess. When asked who is responsible, Obama quickly pointed to Hillary and she frantically tried to wave her finger in some other direction.

Later on in the week, at the town-hall debate, Obama shamelessly lied about his behavior after 9/11/2012.  While many saw him as a lying coward, the left were ecstatic about his performance at that debate. They see Obama as their own reflection.  That's half of the country - lying and sniveling cowards.

21st Century Medical Ethics.

I was discussing physician's responsibilities with some young doctors today, and started to appreciate that there is a great divide between myself and them when it comes to a central question in medical ethics. This question concerns whether the doctor should feel that his primary responsibility is to the patient in front of him, or to the community. When it comes to lawyers, this question has a clear answer: the responsibility is to protect your client.  When a lawyer betrays his client's trust and reveals client's secrets to others, that lawyer is disbarred.  In medicine, the answer used to be the same: that is, a doctor's first and foremost responsibility is to the patient in front of him. However, every one of my young colleagues thought that our main responsibility is to protect the community.  That seemed like such a foreign concept to me.

From a business perspective, if someone pays you for a service, you must honor that agreement. Therefore, if a patient pays a doctor a set fee to provide a service and that doctor accepts this fee, it seems ridiculous if the said doctor would then tell the patient that due to shortage of resources the service can no longer be performed.  If the deal is broken, at the very least, the payment must be returned and the other person compensated in some way for all the trouble.  Good luck on trying to obtain services through Medicare in 10 years.

We also talked about what I would want if a stroke left me incapacitated and I was no longer able to communicate, had to be fed through a tube, and breathe with the assistance of a mechanical ventilator. I said that if I could still observe my loved ones growing up, that this would be enough of a reason for me to continue to live. They seemed shocked.  To them it was a clear waste of precious resources.

I explained further that after many years of paying into a medical insurance system and not having utilized it one bit, I would not feel any remorse if such a scenario that I described above would mean that I would then withdraw all these deposited sums and have expensive medical services used on myself.  This was not an ethical dilemma for me.  It was a simple business transaction during which I payed into an insurance plan and then being able to utilize this plan if a need should arise.

So why do my colleagues see this so differently?

There answer has a great deal to do with money.  One thing that has changed from the time that I entered medicine is that the relationship between a doctor and a patient in which the patient pays for the doctor's service is no longer the standard.  Now it is far more likely that this payment comes from some form of government, be it city, state, or federal.  If the primary payer is the government, then the doctor must honor this payer's wishes.  Also, many of the patients I now treat have not contributed anything towards their treatment but demand a great deal. They often lie to obtain disability and home aid services. Sometimes they lie to get medications, that they later sell. It then becomes understandable to see such people primarily as burdens on the rest of us.

What will happen when the role of a fee for service physician is phased out and only a single payer-government medical service remains? The doctor will be an agent of the government and the doctor's sole responsibility will be to enforce government policies.  To me, this sounds terrible.

One of the selling points of a government run health care system is that it would make medical care less expensive.  There are voices calling for setting limits to physician salaries.

In the end however, this may not turn out as such a rotten deal for doctors.  There is an old story about a Greek physician by the name of Melampus. In that story, the king of Argos asks Melampus to cure his 3 daughters from an acute case of acquired insanity. Melampus asks for half the kindom as payment and the kings tells him to get lost. Later, when all the women of Argos become striken with insanity the king asks Melampus for help again, and this time he agrees to a payment of his entire kingdom and for his daughters to marry Melampus and his brother.

The moral of that ancient tale is: pay the doctor his fee, or else you will later pay twice as much. All  those who believe that American medicine is too expensive and that if only we could control doctors' salaries by making these doctors work for the government might wake up one day to realize that their doctor has taken control of their government.  What if you should become a burden to this new government?

To return to the question of ethics, we are all better off with the patient-doctor relationship being based on a small business model. That is something that we can all live with.