Republican doctors running for Congress amid ObamaCare rollout fiasco

Eleven Republican doctors are running for the Senate, hoping that voters will see their medical expertise as an asset amid the administration’s botched rollout of ObamaCare.

“Doctors are in a very unique position to look at the financing of healthcare,” Rep. Paul Broun, a family physician running for the GOP nomination for Georgia’s open Senate seat, told The Hill.

“We go into medicine for one reason, and one reason only: Because we care about people, we want the people who we serve to have a productive, happy, healthy life,” he added. “That’s the kind of policymaker we should have in place in dealing with healthcare policy.”

Doctors running in Senate races from North Carolina to Oregon are all pitching voters on their experience in the medical field.

It’s not unusual for doctors to seek elected office. But it’s not necessarily typical for them to win, however. The Senate counts only three physicians in its ranks. Last year, former Surgeon General Richard Carmona, a Democrat who ran largely on his record in medicine, lost to now-Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.).

A 2012 Gallup survey rated medical doctors as the third most-trustworthy profession, below only nurses and pharmacists.

In contrast, members of Congress were second from the bottom, considered more trustworthy than only care salespeople.

That makes physician candidates well poised to hammer home a main Republican narrative that has emerged in recent weeks — that Democrats who pledged to Americans they could keep their insurance under ObamaCare are untrustworthy.

John McDonough, director of the Center for Public Health Leadership at Harvard University’s School of Public Health, said simply having an “MD” by a candidate’s name boosts their credibility.

“A physician license is almost always a plus in the public's mind in terms of one's credibility,” he said.

He noted that on the healthcare law, in particular, “people would probably listen more closely to an office holder or a candidate's position” if he or she is a physician or a nurse.

The physician candidates interviewed by The Hill touted personal skills they had acquired over years of medical practice.

Monica Wehby, a pediatric neurosurgeon running for Senate in Oregon against Sen. Jeff Merkley (D), said physicians’ problem-solving skills make them well suited for elected office.

“For doctors, instead of arguing about things, the whole goal is to find an answer,” she said. “We're trained to be logical thinkers, making our decisions based on evidence as opposed to ideologically, or based on emotion.”

Republican Annette Bosworth, an internist running for Senate in South Dakota, likened Congress to a team of doctors and nurses in an Intensive Care Unit, where communication among those caretakers is key to keeping a patient alive.

“The reason we are broken is the communication that should be happening on Capitol Hill isn’t. The country is in serious trouble because those leaders are stuck,” she said. “But what is the advanced skill of physicians? We’re master communicators. We’re always thinking, how can I navigate through this while still keeping my eye on the goal?”

Bosworth has an uphill battle for the Republican nomination against GOP establishment pick former Gov. Mike Rounds (R).

Rep. Phil Gingrey (R), an OB-GYN running in Georgia’s open Senate race, said that doctors are looking to elected office because they’re worried about the consequences of the Affordable Care Act.

“A lot of doctors are so frightened by ObamaCare, and if it gets roots, and if it becomes eventually a single-payer system, that these doctors would no longer enjoy the practice of medicine. They don’t want to practice for the government, they want to practice for their patients,” he said.

Bosworth said she was alarmed by her interactions with government health programs, such as Medicaid and Medicare, calling them“bureaucracy gone wrong.”

“The most powerful thing I have to understand now is the rules of Medicaid and Medicare — not the rules of medicine,” she said.

She said her experience with those programs taught her that government has little place in healthcare.

The physician dynamic is playing out in particular in Georgia’s Senate race, where eight candidates are vying for the Republican nomination in a seat left open by Sen. Saxby Chambliss’ (R-Ga.) retirement, and one considered a pickup opportunity for Democrats.

Both Gingrey and Broun have have made their opposition to the health care law central to their campaigns.

Gingrey’s campaign site reads in block letters across the front: “ObamaCare is bad medicine. Let’s send a doctor to the Senate.” He’s pledged he won’t run for a second term unless healthcare law is repealed in his first.

Broun broke with his party to oppose a recent Republican-backed bill that would allow insurance companies to keep offering current plans to customers under ObamaCare. He said it wasn't enough to fix the law — any Republican answer to the law must seek to dismantle it.

Rep. Bill Cassidy, a doctor and the GOP establishment pick to challenge vulnerable Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu (La.), uses his medical background to speak out against the law. But Democrats have managed to somewhat diffuse that advantage by pointing out Cassidy backed a law similar to ObamaCare during his time in the Louisiana state Senate.

“The Republican position, which is almost universally shared by GOP Senate candidates, is to allow insurance companies to go back to a time where they discriminated against patients. Polling shows that position is problematic,” said Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesman Justin Barasky.

“I don't think it matters your profession, I think it matters your position on the issue. And the Republican position on the issue is not the right one.”

I fear that many of our problems today stem from the fact that far too many of our legislators are LAWYERS. Further, I believe that we need more DOCTORS – and engineers, accountants, shop-keepers, small business owners, etc. in those positions – and FAR FEWER LAWYERS!!

Lawyers as legislators pose a very, very serious problem for an ostensibly free people: They LOVE making laws and the more complex and incomprehensible the better. Think about it: In the private sector – to which many of them return (hopefully in HUGE NUMBERS in the next election) – they, and their buds who remain behind in the private sector, earn their often obscene incomes (in addition to the obscenely generous, COLA congressional pensions and tax subsidized HEALTH CARE!) wading through that Byzantine labyrinth of rules and regulations they love to construct. It’s a process that prompted Otto von Bismarck to remark that “Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.” Can I get an “AMEN?”

Yes, it’s true that many of the Founders were lawyers or studied law. But that was a different time peopled by men of deeper character and integrity. Sadly, we have become a far different people. With a tip of the hat to Henny Youngman, for proof, take Barack Obama – please! It’s also true that a number of the Founders were physicians, merchants, tradesmen and farmers. It goes without saying that we desperately need a more representative cross-section of our population.

While there ARE exceptions (Bill Frist toward the end of his term, Phil Gingrey — who strays from time to time) my rule that physicians and engineers make better legislators than most lawyers generally holds true. I attribute that to the fact that doctors and engineers are trained in the SCIENTIFIC METHOD and rely more on FACTS and EMPIRICAL DATA for their decisions. Ron Paul, Rand Paul, Larry McDonald, Paul Broun, John Linder, Tom Price are (or were) all doctors. I’m sure you can think of other examples/exceptions. The poster boy for the exceptions is “Screamin’ Howard Dean, MD.

Unfortunately, far too many of these guys are ATTORNEYS.

Our late friend and author, composer, conductor, Nashville music producer, lover of Bach, pianist and all-around Renaissance man, Tupper Saussy, who somehow dodged the family tradition of becoming one, traced the term “attorney” back to the Sanscrit word “torwa.” And what does “torwa” mean? TO TWIST! And twist they do. Unfortunately, it’s not in the wind.

While SOME of these attorney-legislators are conservatives, their law school moot court training forced them to argue BOTH SIDES OF THE SAME CASE. I rather suspect that experience allows them to rationalize voting against the Constitution when expediency and/or their political survival/favor with their party leadership dictates. It is textbook moral relativism and we all pay for their perfidy.

Let me tie that attorney-legislator problem into the current health care debate: I might have missed it but I don’t believe there was one mention of TORT REFORM from the lawyers who cobbled together that 2,000+ page monstrosity now dividing the nation.

I’ll give you three guesses as to why — and the last two don’t count!

And here’s something to think about for the next election cycle: If the attorney-legislator representing your district does not pass muster at www.gradegov.com, if you can, find a NON-LAWYER for whom to vote after grilling him on the first principles near and dear to those who cherish freedom and the Constitution.

Too hard, say you?

No. SLAVERY is hard.

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