How weird is Obama’s view of man?
Right now, doctors a lot of times are forced to make decisions based on the fee payment schedule that’s out there. So if they’re looking and you come in and you’ve got a bad sore throat or your child has a bad sore throat or has repeated sore throats, the doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, “You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out.â€
Now, that may be the right thing to do, but I’d rather have that doctor making those decisions just based on whether you really need your kid’s tonsils out or whether it might make more sense just to change — maybe they have allergies. Maybe they have something else that would make a difference.
So — so part of what we want do is to free doctors, patients, hospitals to make decisions based on what’s best for patient care. And that’s the whole idea behind Mayo. That’s the whole idea behind the Cleveland Clinic.
He really believes this.
In Obama’s world greed so distorts a man’s thinking that doctors would lie to patients and recommend unnecessary surgery just to make a few extra bucks. Therefore the state must relieve doctors of the need to pursue a profit so that they can think clearly like platonic philosopher-kings, free of any self-interest.
In reality, when doctors are controlled by the state, they surrender their judgment to the state. They become bureaucrats who must follow regulations dictated by the state.
Who do you think would make a better decision about a child’s tonsils, a doctor whose reputation depends on his integrity or a bureaucrat afraid to do anything but follow regulations?
And how does the state determine how to allocate resources when it does not have the pursuit of profit to guide its decisions? Who is more likely to be corrupted, a doctor whose reputation depends on his integrity or a bureaucrat who can use under the table payments to determine who gets scarce resources?
Once again, Obama’s radical ideology puts him at odds with reality. It’s uncanny how he gets everything exactly wrong. Barack Obama is Bizarro #1 from the Silver Age Superman comics. Bizarros live on Htrae instead of Earth and get everything backward. They do the opposite of what rational humans would do.
 
UPDATE: Slight revision.
The President is a very superficial thinker, so it makes sense that this is his conclusion. The kind of thing he describes IS happening more and more in our economy. I’m not as familiar with health care as I am with other industries, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Obama’s problem isn’t that he’s a deep-thinking leftist ideologue with diabolical fantasies, it’s that what little ideology he does have tells him that the government is always right and the individual is always wrong. This is what makes him incapable of seeing that the reason why there is so much short-term, make-a-buck-while-you-can behavior out there is because of all of the government nosiness that’s already gone on.
Many people have their backs against the wall, and if not, they can’t they predict what whim from Washington will put it there the day after tomorrow – so this is how they behave. Obama’s onto something, he’s just offering as a solution more of the same poison that caused the problem.
Obama is admitting that he views other humans as essentially evil by nature, guilty of sacrificing others to themselves for profit (totally misunderstanding that this is not the way to make profits) and if we just force doctors to care for patients without concern for themselves, well what a wonderful world this would be. This of course is the maturity of a 6 or 7 year old child. But if he regards the men and women of medicine, one of the most demanding of professions requiring the highest level of integrity, in this contemptuous manner, what does that say about how he views the rest of the human race? With even more contempt obviously. We really do need to get this child out of the White House next election.
His choice for Surgeon General—a “good” kind of doctor who works in disaster-ravaged areas for minimal compensation—confirms this take on his world view. I always thought it was telling that when rattling off a laundry list of recommended occupations at various commencement addresses, you never hear any job that related to actual business.
We really do need to get this child out of the White House next election.
Just a short (*sigh*) 3½ years away…
I wonder what doctors think about that statement of Obama’s. So he thinks doctors routinely perform unnecessary surgery on children out of greed? Isn’t that rather insulting? How does he get away with saying these things?
“Isn’t that rather insulting? How does he get away with saying these things?” Because he considers everyone but himself selfish and greedy. Besides, he isn’t getting away with it with some people I do believe. I think those remarks have cost him some support among medical professionals. If I were a doctor I would be hot under the collar right now. Those kind of comments might be understanable coming from some uneducated Joe lunchbox. They are inexcusable coming from the president. It shows what an infantile mind he really has.
In the leftist’s view of existence, a doctor’s reputation does not depend on his integrity. In their view, a doctor, or any corporation, is free to run roughshod over his customers forever with impunity, unless, of course, he is reigned in by the government. Does anyone know what the source of this view is?
“In their view, a doctor, or any corporation, is free to run roughshod over his customers forever with impunity, unless, of course, he is reigned in by the government. Does anyone know what the source of this view is?”
It’s the notion that self-interest, that is, selfishness, is evil and the only way an action can be virtuous is if it is totally disinterested and selfless. It is the view that private corporations and workers are selfish because they seek their own self-interest and in so doing ignore the welfare of others. But government officials are not self interested we are told. This lack of self-interest is what makes their actions moral. Man’s desire to be moral therefore compels him to seek selfless government jobs so he can impartially decide what is the good for everyone else and force it on society with a legislative gun.
I don’t know the historical beginning of these ideas but they were institutionalized by religion a long time ago. The clergy are not self-interested therefore they are moral. The masses are self-interested therefore are sinners. Immanuel Kant and his followers substituted society for god but the self-interest is evil dogma was left untouched.
Ayn Rand called altruism an inverted morality. It is completely backwards and that is why it has never achieved peace, happiness and love of mankind on earth, and never will.
Barack Obama is more a Julius Caesar lite than a passionate leftist. He wants two things: to have power and to be thought a great man.
If he lived a thousand years ago, he would affect the most sincere piety; if a thousand years before that, he would affect the strictest stoical virtues. That he is a leftist is an accident of the times.
Obama’s comments remind me of part of a speech made by Dr. Rene Favaloro, the Argentine who performed the first heart bypass operation.
Favaloro was very much an advocate of government financed health care so that the doctors were not corrupted by the chase for money.
Ironically, Favaloro committed suicide in part over financial problems at his clinic arising from government’s delinquency in paying the clinic’s claims.
jimwoods.thinkertothinker.com/2008/12/08/death-by-altruism/