Dear Ozark:

• A guy named Ozark jumped all over me in TruthDig for punching out Ellen Goodman and the evil family docs. You can read it at http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090401_the_care_in_health_care/
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• I am not going to get dragged down into your Stuff Ozark. I do not write hit pieces for a living. I do it for sheer enjoyment and for delight in truth. This is for anyone else who may have misunderstood:

1) Nonsense is for Ellen Goodman who is peddling the media rap of the week.

2) I am a frequent flyer in the health care system in New York, so I know when someone hasn’t a clue about what’s actually going on and is merely repeating whatever Stuff they have heard. People are making a lot of money for that lately.
The money is coming from medical services that take care of sick people. And the plan is to finish the hit job the HMOs have been doing on the real docs and the public for too many years.

3) I have nothing against “family” doctors who practice within bounds. I have a problem with the fams who don’t like their limits and won’t recognize them. New York has laws about that and the fams violate them constantly in a propaganda campaign designed to brainwash the public into thinking the fams are the ultimate MDs. On the way home from a meeting trashing the people I consider to be the good guys, I once asked a fam how famdocs differed from plain general practitioners. She got very angry, foamed at the mouth briefly, then said “I SEND POSTCARDS TO MY PATIENTS IN OCTOBER REMINDING THEM TO GET FLU SHOTS!” (wow ... and what do you do the rest of the year?)

4) I am definitely part of the specialist medical conspiracy to keep people alive and well despite bad genes, bad luck, bad habits and age. I am very connected to specialists. Seven of them to be precise. They are all board-certified in internal medicine and also in one or more specialties. Things like cardiology, infectious disease, gastroenterology, ophthalmological surgery, psychopharmacology and endocrinology. One of them is my principal .. not primary .. care provider . She is triply credentialed: internal, pulmonary and critical care.

The lack of respect shown to these people by the HMOs is really quite amazing. They end up treating many patients free when these patents can’t get referrals or revisits from their HMOs. My PCP (principal care provider) does not get paid for keeping up with me, let alone with what my other six docs are doing. And they do not get paid for keeping up with her. I fired all the others long ago. I assume they are back in the Slow Class.

5) At this particular time, we here in the US are in a considerable and unavoidable political battle. I respect my enemies for what they are, and they had better respect me too. A few special interests are trying to keep control of the system they have dominated for so long. But they can’t. Because this is about universal health care. Equality, Fairness. Equity. Diversity. Pluralism. Democracy. The special interests, including the unethical family docs, are going to lose. Lose big. If you can’t stand the heat, Ozark, get out of the kitchen.