Excuse me. I am an evangelical pro life mother who happens to be a physician. I am not a mercenary - I could make a much better and certainly more comfortable living in the corporate world. I am not a mercenary, and am tired of having my integrity smeared by people who would run away screaming if they tried to spend a week in my shoes let alone a longer period of time.
Yes, I get paid (sort of) for what I do. To make the amount I do (which is less than other professionals I know and even the guy who sanded my deck) I paid for 8 years of post high school education. I then worked for 3 years in residency approximately 110 hours a week for a princely 23k/yr - with student loans to repay. Now that I make the “big” bucks, I work nights, weekends, holidays, my kids soccer games and dance recitals, etc, all for patients and families who are increasingly ungrateful and demanding. Then to top it of I get a smart mouth like you pontificating that I deserve the cuts in pay because I am a mercenary.
Thanks! You are making my decision to retire early much easier. Good luck with the foreign medical graduate mercenaries and nonphysician providers that will be taking care of you and yours after the rest of us are driven out of the field.
Here here! Some folks are just ignorant with their class warfare crap.
yes RJR generalized too much too much, but at some level the criticism is valid—physicians abandoned that oath. we should have never accepted abortionists or pro-homo shrinks, but even more to your point, we probably never should have accepted medicare. The health care profession should have figured out a way to do this without govt. IF we had really been as committed Christians as we should have been, once govt took over schools, individual locales should have pulled out and set up something private. If there is a will, there is a way.
Not only do I have wonderful doctors, the nurses are also great. It's these corporate holding companies that are messing up the system.
Never have I had a social worker visit me until 2009. I told two of them to get out. I'm not on welfare and they have no business dictating to me. I have paid for private insurance for over 40 years.
Tort reform is what all of us need.
Mom MD,
Thank you for your dedication to the medical profession, in spite of the ingratitude you increasingly face. I work in the billing department at a hospital and do the billing for Medicaid patients. I certainly understand this lack of gratitude that you speak of.
I really don’t wish to challenge your assertion of being pro-life, and not knowing what type of medicine you practice, it may or may not be an issue with you, but in the medical field, as well as society in general, there seems to be a giant blind spot among otherwise pro-life people. I’ll probably get flamed for this, but I must ask, do you prescribe birth control pills, IUDs, Depo-Provara, Norplant, etc., which either can, or do act as abortifacients?
From his book, “The Facts of Life: An Authoritative Guide to Life and Family Issues,” researcher Dr. Brian Clowes has said:
“Millions of women in the United States and all over the world use oral contraceptives. Many women who would never even consider a surgical abortion now use low-dose birth prevention pills that cause them to abort a new life an average of once or twice every year. A large number of women who say that they are pro-life use these pills, many at the urging of their husbands. These are usually the women who are ignorant of the pill’s abortifacient mode of action, those who think that their way of life requires that they use the pill, or those who cannot mentally make the connection between contraception and abortion.”
“Some researchers (using very conservative figures) have calculated that the birth prevention pill directly causes between 1.53 and 4.15 million chemical abortions per year in the United States - up to two and a half times the total number of surgical abortions committed every year!”
“This means that “pro-life” women who are using an oral contraceptive, or some other means of abortifacient birth control, are committing abortions themselves on a frequent basis. These abortions are “silent” and unseen, but they are no less abortions in the eyes of God than are gruesome third-trimester D&X abortions. There are many “pro-lifers” who are using these pills and who are involved in their promotion and distribution. These people must consider whether they can, in good conscience, criticize women whose action differs from their own only in that they have to drive to a “clinic” (mill) to commit it (pp. 74-75).”
If you do not prescribe abortifacient forms of contraception, I especially commend you. If you do, I ask that you please give this some thought as to whether as a pro-life physician, that you should continue to do so. God bless.