Free Republic

Vermont doctors and health care professionals are pushing back against an interpretation of state law that they say requires them to help kill patients who wish to die. Members of two medical groups, the Vermont Alliance for Ethical Healthcare and Christian Medical & Dental Associations, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against officials in two state medical agencies responsible for the interpretation. The lawsuit says these agencies have interpreted a 2013 physician-assisted suicide law, Act 39, in a way that would require health care professionals to counsel terminally ill patients about the option to commit suicide. Additionally, under such an interpretation...

It’s estimated that at least 400 U.S. doctors kill themselves every year. Many are struggling with depression, anxiety, or addiction. Greg Miday was a promising young doctor with a prestigious oncology fellowship in St. Louis. He spoke conversational Spanish, volunteered with the homeless, and played the piano as if he’d been born to it. He had rugged good looks, with dark wavy hair and a tall, athletic build. Everybody—siblings, patients, friends, nurses, professors, fellow doctors, and above all, his physician-parents—adored him. On the evening of June 21, 2012, Greg drew a bath, lit candles, and put his iPod on speaker....

For more than a half century, residents of a tiny western Mississippi community have counted on Dr. Carrol Landrum’s house calls for their health care. The sight of Landrum’s dented, black, 2007 Toyota Camry pulling up has brought relief to countless shut-ins in Edwards, a town of about 1,000 about 28 miles west of Jackson. But the state medical board is probing the country doctor, an 88-year-old World War II veteran, because, he says, they don’t like him working out of his car. “I didn’t know there was any law against it,” Landrum, who grew up in Taylorsville, but has...

All youth football games would be required to have a doctor present to monitor possible concussions as part of legislation considered Friday by the New York City Council. The hearing focused on the safety of young players who are even more vulnerable to brain injuries than their counterparts in high school, college and professional leagues. “It’s too common that kids are taught that getting your bell rung is OK and you need to play through it,” said Councilman Corey Johnson, a Democrat from Manhattan. “Repeated concussions can cause lifelong health injuries especially when the brain does not have time to...

Newly Insured Struggle to Find Primary Physicians "When Olivia Papa signed up for a new health plan last year, her insurance company assigned her to a primary care doctor. The relatively healthy 61-year-old didn't try to see the doctor until last month, when she and her husband both needed authorization to see separate specialists. She called the doctor's office several times without luck. "They told me that they were not on the plan, they were never on the plan and they'd been trying to get their name off the plan all year," said Papa, who recently bought a plan...

New York Ebola doctor 'LIED to police about his travel': NYPD discovered he rode subway, ate at restaurant and went bowling after cops checked his MetroCard Dr Craig Spencer diagnosed with Ebola six days after returning to New York During that time he rode subways, caught a cab, and went out bowling But when officers quizzed him he said he was at home, it has been claimed When police pulled MetroCard and bank data they learned the truth The doctor currently being treated for Ebola in New York lied to police about travelling around the city for six days before...

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — International aid organization Doctors Without Borders said that 16 of its staff members have been infected with Ebola and nine of them have died. Speaking at a press conference in Johannesburg Tuesday, the head of Doctors Without Borders in South Africa Sharon Ekambaram said medical workers have received inadequate assistance from the international community. "Where is WHO Africa? Where is the African Union?" said Ekambaram who worked in Sierra Leone from August to September. "We've all heard their promises in the media but have seen very little on the ground." Four of the organization's medical workers who...

Finding a doctor who takes Obamacare coverage could be just as frustrating for Californians in 2015 as the health-law expansion enters its second year. The state's largest health insurers are sticking with their often-criticized narrow networks of doctors, and in some cases they are cutting the number of physicians even more, according to a Times analysis of company data. And the state's insurance exchange, Covered California, still has no comprehensive directory to help consumers match doctors with health plans. This comes as insurers prepare to enroll hundreds of thousands of new patients this fall and get 1.2 million Californians to...

Following the death of a young elementary school teacher, Jennifer Morbelli, I had the sad duty of speaking at a press conference in Germantown, MD, in February 2013. Mrs. Morbelli died from complications from a late term (33 week) abortion performed by Dr. LeRoy Carhart. She experienced complications in between office visits, but neither her family nor the ER to which she was eventually admitted was able to locate Carhart. Her cause of death was determined to be an amniotic fluid embolism; the same condition that killed Christin Gilbert, another of Carhart’s patients in 2005. Maryland, does not have a...

COLUMBIA - Electronic medical records, or EMRs, have given some physicians joy and others nightmares. The federal government mandated all health care providers in the U.S. switch to EMRs by January 1, 2014. EMRs replaced the previous medical records systems done by hand on paper. The days of the 4-inch thick patient chart are over. "We knew it was coming, we knew we had to do it." said Tom Selva, chief medical officer at University Hospital. But University Hospital was always ahead of the game. It switched to an EMR provider 15 years ago when it started using Cerner, based...

For me and many other doctors like me, taking care of you has never been about the money. I have always considered it an honor and a privilege to be allowed personal entrance into the private world of your mind and your body. It is very satisfying for me to be able to offer my medical knowledge and experience to help you, my patient. This is why no matter how much or how little you or your insurance company pay me to see you, I will continue to do so. I will not abandon you because the reimbursement I get...

A Texas ophthalmologist and co-founder of AmericanDoctors4Truth tore down the curtain on Obamacare last week, describing President Obama’s “signature” legislative achievement for the con game of forced labor that it really is. When she wrote to the Aetna insurance company canceling her participation in its offerings, Dr. Kristin Held of San Antonio was informed she is contractually bound to care for the company’s patients for another year — as though Obamacare not only re-configured the American health care system, it repealed the 13th Amendment at the same time. In her letter dated Jan. 30, the long-time and vocal opponent of...

Over the last 12 months some 3,000 Cubans, mostly doctors, have arrived in the United States after deserting one of the Venezuelan government´s social programs they staff. This accounts for a 60% increase as compared with 2012. In 2012 there were about 5,000 refugee Cuban doctors and nurses in the United States coming from all over the world. Through December 1, 2013 this figure had surged to 8,000, 98% of them came from Venezuela. These are estimates by Dr. Julio Cesar Alfonso, head of the South Florida group Solidarity Without Borders Inc. (SWB), which helps Cuban medical professionals who try

Just as cars can’t go anywhere without drivers and employees can’t work without bosses, health care doesn’t happen when there are no doctors around. And when an estimated 70 percent of the doctors in the nation’s deepest-blue state are rebelling against Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act is forcing a critical decision: America will have to junk Obamacare and go back to square one on health insurance reform, or trash the last vestige of private health care in this country by forcing doctors to do the government’s bidding. The rebellion among California physicians was detailed earlier this week by Washington Examiner...

The rise of nonphysician providers will enable more team care. Skilled health aides will monitor patients at home and alert a doctor if certain medical parameters decline. Nurses will provide wound care to diabetic patients, adjust medications like blood thinners and provide the initial management of chemotherapy side effects for cancer patients. Pharmacists will provide more counseling and urgent care. Physicians will remain essential to the proper diagnosis and treatment of disease, but will be backed up by teams who will help manage the more routine features of chronic illness.

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...

The Jewish General Hospital’s crest — visible throughout the hospital — is a menorah. Its previous emblem, still visible on thousands of uniforms and lab coats, features the Jewish Star of David.Photograph by Marie-France Coallier, The Gazette MONTREAL — Calling Quebec's proposed secularism charter "patently discriminatory," the Jewish General Hospital has vowed to defy any provisions that would prohibit its doctors and other employees from wearing the kippah and other religious symbols on the job. This is the second time that the Jewish General has taken a public position against the charter since it was unveiled in September. Bill 60...

Not set-up for copy-and-paste, must read at source.

If you think Obamacare is bad for consumers and patients think about this: how would you like to spend between twelve and sixteen years of your life in grueling and expensive academic training, only to have politicians and bureaucrats dictating to you years later how you will practice your craft and how much money you’ll be allowed to earn? Let’s be clear about medical doctors. Any individual who can genuinely earn the title “M.D.” is worthy of significant respect, and one would hope that an entire association of M.D.’s would be equally as worthy. Unfortunately the American Medical Association –...

Last week we ran a story analyzing an op-ed piece that one-time Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean wrote for the Wall Street Journal in which the former Governor of Vermont conceded that the Independent Payment Advisory Board was “essentially a health-care rationing body.” ObamaCare has been controversial from long before it passed by the narrowest of margins and probably no facet has drawn more critics that the IPAB. National Right to Life laid out the rationing problems that are part and parcel of the IPAB from the very beginning (www.nrlc.org/HealthCareRationing/ObamaHCRationingBasicDOCUMENTATION.pdf). Thus it was helpful that Dean admitted there really was...