Posted on 03/29/2009 3:36:43 AM PDT by hocndoc
the rule could cause health care to grind to a halt.
When I see quotes like the above in a "science" journal, I realize that the article isn't about science - it's about politics. They posited a worst case scenario which has already empirically been shown to not have happened - did the health care system grind to a halt under this ruling? No - posit disproved based on empirical evidence. But what's empirical evidence to such an august journal as the NEJM, (that also ran a gun control article with logical flaws in it big enough to drive a tectonic plate through)? Believe, peasant - we're the authority.
They can change their "opinion" until Kingdom come, that won't change a silly thing because:
"Right is right if nobody is right, and wrong is wrong if everybody is wrong. " -Bp,Fulton J. Sheen
The medical profession had better start bracing for the next round of government control.
Your fee schedule will be mandated by Obama, and you will embrace it or: lose you license to practice and/or lose all government payments.
I agree. I’m predicting an underground life-centered (and likely religious) medical community. One willing to go to jail for the First Principles (and for the First Cause).
The question should be whether what we are doing is good medicine: The right medicine, procedure or advice for the patient’s condition? Then it is the right thing. Elective abortion is never the right thing.
Remember last summer when we all thought we weren’t going to be paid for seeing Medicare patients for a while? We kept going to work and took care of these patients.
Infact, doctors take care of people we *don’t like* all the time: patients with borderline personality disorders and even lawyers. If the first told us that an event didn’t happen until we wrote it down or that right is wrong, we’d look into prescribing antipsychotics for them. And yet we let the latter change how we follow our calling when *they* say tell us how to practice.
#6: Flawless, deep insight.
Absolutely! Brilliant point!
The target is to eliminate ethical/religious physicians. The National Socialists did exactly the same in Germany 1933-1939. This evil NEJM article is transparent propaganda for the socialists who just seized power in the USA, and who plan to (cost-effectively) murder vast numbers of elderly government health insurance victims by neglect or by active euthanasia.
Concerning euthanasia, every doctor knows he or she is morally obliged to act in favor of the health of the patient. How could a patient be healthier dead?
Concerning physician-assisted suicide, everyone who has paid attention to the record in the Netherlands, Oregon and elsewhere, knows that most suicide-requests are occasioned, not be intractable pain, but by fear of pain, fear of degrading dependency, and the depression inevitably associated with chronic fear. Why would an ethical physician not attack the pain, the fear, and the depression, and instead collude in an attack the patient?
Hippocrates had this all covered in the 5th century BC.
This author, no doubt with the most impeccable academic and professional credentials, would drag us so far below the ethical standards of the ancient pagans, down the the level of the witch-dctor, who could be depended on to serve up life or death, a remedy or a poison, thriving childbirth or sterility and stillbirth, a blessing or a curse, sanity or madness, depending on who was paying.
And as you said so well,Mad Dawg, this attack on conscience is in fact an attack on reason. Conscience itself is simply reason in its capacity to assess evidence and experience, logic and sensible inference, and make a sound moral judgment. This is a judgment which is equally accessible the minds of Jews, Christians, Buddhists, agnostics, pagans (e.g Hippocrates) --- all ---because of our shared nature as rational beings.
Indeed, when Gentiles,
who do not have the law,
do by nature
things required by the law,
they are a law for themselves,
even though they do not have the law.
They show that the requirements of the law
are written on their hearts,
their consciences also bearing witness,
and their thoughts now accusing,
now even defending them.
Romans 2:14-16
Mine at 29.
#29 ANOTHER great post on this tiny thread.
So I should leave my conscience at the "view from the door"...
Evidently, the editors at the NEJM believe that your conscience is a selfish burden on your patients and interferes with the desires of both the editors and patients, everywhere. There is no objective right and wrong, only what your patient desires and what is legal.
How soon will the government declare that the only limit is what is legal?
Note that there is no pretense of objectivity or of publishing any opposing view. This has been the policy of the editorial staff of the NEJM for as long as I’ve been reading it. Case in point, Alta Charo’s “Celestial Fire of Conscience” commentary in 2005. http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/extract/352/24/2471 (Let me know if you want a copy and can’t access it.)
The Rule is dismissed as a last ditch effort by the Bush Administration, and an arbitrary one, at that. However, in 2005, ACOG proposed a Bill requiring all doctors to refer for abortion. http://www.lifeethics.org/www.lifeethics.org/2005/09/mandatory-abortion-referral-bill.html We have multiple other examples of rulings and laws that impose new requirements to violate the integrity and conscience of professionals.
Our problem is that this administration claims to be transparent and responsive, but has proven not to be. We have no assurance that we can affect this rescission or prevent the “review” of the Church, Dickey and Hyde Amendments.
http://www.freedom2care.org/learn/page/faq
BUMP!!!
thanks, bfl
Thanks for the bumps!
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