Republicon "family values." As usual. They really should shitcan their twisted anti-Biblical 'values', and take up some regular old American values like honesty, integrity, decency, community, and caring.

2) I would NEVER trust these students with my and my family's medical needs.
Clearly they would send us to our death for $$$$$$$$$$$$$.

about the discussion then....
Doctors would make much less, due to less from each patient...Republicans argued...It would hurt everyone..Care would be worse, not better..
Well, all that was wrong, completely. It turns out, doctors made much more because they had more patients then ever. Medicare has saved entire families from going broke cause children helped finance their parents care. Sadly, it took some time for people to realize how important this is to society's structure. The same will happen with the Affordable Care Act. Only when it makes these selfish assholes more wealthy will they be happy. ACA will also same many lives, and many families from going broke.

Hate to be an ass here but after 40 plus years of nursing behind me, well you too will be like the majority. Hope not but this too will pass.

what will happen to our poor med student?

Funny how human problems often boil down to greed.
Welcome aboard btw

To begin, congratulations on starting on the journey. No matter what you do in the future with this background you can help more people than almost anyone else in the country.

Honestly I think I began as someone that may have been a Republican med student. I figured I was some kind of gifted dude that shouldn't have to do any further service to my fellow man. I was in Canada but it was Alberta which is more or less the same as Texas.

It wasn't until I spent three months working in a really isolated village up in the Arctic that I actually witnessed actual poverty and became humbled as to my place in the world.

Don't judge your fellow students too harshly yet, life is just beginning to open for all of you and who knows where it might lead.

After my residency I went back for a PhD because I found I was more interested in the basics of Medicine than the clinical but it's allowed me to try and work through some of the most complicated disease pathways known.

Best of luck to you, enjoy it all.

"I was in Canada but it was Alberta which is more or less the same as Texas."

A very nice post with a great message!

their world will change.

Once they see patients and get a taste of real world medicine, they'll know what the hell they are talking about.

Medical students haven't a clue. They have a high school mentality and have yet to really grow up.

The only thing they know about medicine is what they see on Grey's Anatomy.

Where doctors are in full makeup after long shifts in the hospital hihi

Last edited Thu Sep 26, 2013, 10:12 PM - Edit history (1)

In almost every thing, it can be sickening.
I advice you to study very well.. try to be the best doctor and person the way you want to be in your heart, dont let them turn you into another arrogant clone.
BUT
dont be a passive doctor, you need to be firm.
Good luck and study very well, attend all lectures, etc

They used to call them "Headsman"

they literally live in Fox Nation and GlenBeckistan - they are completely decoupled from the real America

Unions are bad, the poor are lazy moochers, the rich create jobs, wealth trickles down. That has been the mantra since 1980. They are writing labor out of the history books. TPTB want a nation of uneducated serfs.

Welcome to DU

become human. Some will, some won't.

Given that you already have empathy, you have an edge on one of the actually important things.

"I don't support government handouts, I believe in pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, etc., etc.....Now, pay my tuition mom and dad and where is my Stafford loan!?"

Hypocrisy at its finest. I am a pre-law undergrad and I see it all the time. All the Young Republicans and members of the "Young Americans for Liberty" who criticize the government to no end as they go to a publically funded university.

I was just thinking about the aspect of support (or lack thereof) of Obamacare among doctors and others in the medical profession. I think that many doctors who are vocal against the law were just Republicans to begin with and want to criticize it, thinking they can speak of the law as some sort of expert. In that capacity, they are not speaking as a medical professional, but rather, as a right-winger.

My grandmother works as an ophthalmologist technician and she sees people all the time that come in and notice a change of policy or procedure, and they automatically blame Obamacare and the federal government. And people were doing this only months after the law was passed, and it had nothing to do with Obamacare. My grandmother, who voted for Obama, has to constantly correct them.

A LOT of misinformation out there!

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/prescriptions/2009/09/the_fix_is_in.html

The hidden public-private cartel that sets health care prices.
By Darshak Sanghavi | Posted Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2009, at 12:13 PM ET

Living in Massachusetts should, by all indicators, mean having access to good health care. Following the landmark passage of a health insurance mandate in 2006, the state today enjoys the nation's lowest percentage of uninsured citizens. Major cities like Boston have the nation's highest numbers of doctors per capita and anchor some of the world's largest and most prestigious medical centers. And Massachusetts isn't stingy—it spends more on health care per person than any other state. Yet, as a remarkable NPR documentary reported last year, patients calling Massachusetts General Hospital—ranked the fifth best in the nation by U.S. News and World Report—were informed that Harvard's massive academic hospital was no longer accepting new patients needing primary care. And that problem isn't limited to Massachusetts General—it's occurring throughout the state. Despite near-universal insurance, oodles of doctors, reams of cash, and no dearth of bright minds, the average person in Massachusetts can't find a new primary care doctor.

The nation soon may face the same fate. To have any hope of meaningful national health reform, therefore, we must address the perverse financial incentives that created and continue to inflame this problem.

The root of the shortage can be traced to 1985, when a Harvard economist named William Hsiao developed a scale to measure the relative value of every single one of the thousands of services provided by doctors, a job later compared to measuring "the exact amount of anger in the world." For example, Hsiao's team deemed that a hysterectomy required 3.8 times more mental effort and 4.47 times more technical skill than a psychotherapy session. In 1992, Medicare formally adopted Hsiao's concept; private insurers followed suit. Today, this relative value-based system sets the prices—and therefore drives the priorities of American medicine.

Here's how it works. Doctors do a job—like placing a coronary artery stent, reading an EKG, or spending an hour examining and diagnosing a patient with a complex problem like insomnia—and earn something called "relative value units." In 2009, according to Medicare, the stent guy scores about 24 units for his relatively quick procedure, the EKG person gets 0.5 units for the 10 seconds his job requires, and the poor internist gets only 2.5 units for his hour of time. Figuring a doctor's total take per task is straightforward: Medicare adds up a doctor's total RVUs, multiplies the total by a fixed amount (roughly $40 right now), and writes the check.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/how-one-small-group-sets-doctors-pay/

September 22, 2011, 7:00 am
How One Small Group Sets Doctors’ Pay
By PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D.

Despite decades of warnings of a primary care crisis and the fact that some 60 million patients are without primary care doctors, the medical profession has continued to produce legions of specialists.

When asked, most of my colleagues will point to the system that determines how medical charges are reimbursed by insurance, and how doctors in different areas of medicine are paid.

Put simply, our payment system pays more for procedures performed by specialists. Specialists, therefore, have greater earning power, so more doctors choose to train to be specialists. Careers in specialties like radiology, dermatology and neurosurgery offer lifetime earnings several million dollars higher than those in primary care. It is no surprise that medical students emerging from the educational mole hole saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt choose more lucrative fields.

But simply blaming the reimbursement system and accepting the perverse payments as immutable is inadequate. It’s like believing that the current situation can only be repaired by the magical intervention of some Wizard of Oz.

Hard to add much to it. That is in fact, exactly how these people think. They've been carefully and deliberately trained to think this way. There has been an intentional, well organized, well funded effort to make it happen. They've managed to create in the minds of conservatives a coherent moral system where the poor are morally deficient and deserving of whatever hardship they experience. The wealthy and powerful are wealthy and powerful because of their inherent virtue. They (the wealthy and powerful males) deserve our obedience and we share their scorn and contempt for the lower class. It's quite a system they've worked out.

Coherent moral system...yes you're right.

They've been operating in a closed loop. Once they start getting contradictory input, it'll be interesting to see who has functioning critical and self-assessment skills.

and tried to make sense of the seeming endless contradictions in the typical conservative mind; "pro-life" yet pro-death penalty, mostly lower class yet against public nutrition programs, etc.

Their morality has been corrupted. They've been conditioned to think in terms of "deserving" and "undeserving". Wealth is inherently a sign of "deserving". Poverty is inherently a sign of "undeserving".

People's natural empathy and sociability has been methodically and deliberately buried.

Thanks!

Many go to med school to make money not help the sick just like law school not looking to defend or seek justice just big pay but you are the real deal !

Not saying the money hungry do not work their asses off and long hours but it is often with a new Mercedes as the goal, at least what I have seen from the fringe
and yes a disdain for poor people regardless of color or country origin seems to be the trend with these types

The worst are pompous and narcissistic too = everyone is an idiot except them
Really not sure with them if it is money as perhaps ego driven even more........

Hope they do not get you over to their side - keep it real and you are not alone
I have seen others who have a passion to help and are concerned about people in both professions and never stop caring(and often very successful)

Fascism cannot exist without cruelty and intolerance.

blood pressure medicine over the phone. Hell no, he wants me to make an office appointment ($$$) to come into the office then he will give me a prescription that's good for only three months.

because the HMOs were cutting his time with his patients. He had been a doctor for a long time and was in his 60s.
He got a job working at the VA part time working towards retirement and enjoyed it much more.

I'm a nurse and I see both sides. I see the dedicated doctors putting in extra time and caring and the arrogant ones who make me
all jumpy when I have to call them.

and they bragged about their token 'volunteering' experience during their interview.

But if these Republican baby docs are only in medicine for the profit motive, and lack the empathy required of a true professional as I am sure you will become, they've chosen the wrong line of work.

clinic. Out of 21 doctors only one cared more for patients then the money. He was a surgeon. If he hhad a patient who needed surgery and could not pay he did it gratis.

It is an exceptionally high bar for a non-wealthy person to become a med student. The barriers at every level of the education system are so hard to overcome. I would think most of the OP's classmates come from very comfortable homes where studying was encouraged and survival not a problem. They simply don't have enough life experience to have met the very poor or the chronically afflicted. They probably think all their patients will be just like them - disgustingly healthy and needing only routine preventative care. Watch closely what happens when an indigent off the street needs emergency care. I expect some will not survive that kind of reality when it comes come crashing in.

it keeps the medical profession from being another aristocracy, gets some real americans in there.