Care for the Vulnerable vs. Cash for the Powerful Trumps Pick for HHS

This was an editorial from the NEJM on the trump's HHS pick. The last two paragraphs of the editorial summarize it:

"Whereas Price’s actions to date have not reflected the tradition of the physician as advocate for the poor and vulnerable, they do harken back to an earlier tradition in American medicine: the physician advocate as protector of the guild. His Empowering Patients First Act would directly advance physicians’ economic interests by permitting them to bill Medicare patients for amounts above those covered by the Medicare fee schedule and allowing them to join together and negotiate with insurance carriers without violating antitrust statutes. Both these provisions would increase physicians’ incomes at the expense of patients. Price has consistently fought strategies for value-based purchasing and guideline development, opposing the use of bundled payments for lower-extremity joint replacements and proposing that physician specialty societies hold veto power over the release of comparative effectiveness findings. These positions reduce regulatory burdens on physicians at the cost of increased inefficiency and reduced quality of care — and reflect a striking departure from the ethos of his physician predecessors, Secretaries Bowen and Sullivan.

"The HHS Department oversees a broad set of health programs that touch about half of all Americans. Over five decades and the administrations of nine presidents, both Democratic and Republican secretaries have used these programs to protect the most vulnerable Americans. The proposed nomination of Tom Price to HHS highlights a sharp contrast between this tradition of compassionate leadership and the priorities of the incoming administration."

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1615714?query=TOC

Reading some of the letters from physicians on this opinion piece clearly demonstrate that some physicians put money ahead of patient care