4. If your young doctor wants to be anything more than an internist or family practitioner, then the additional residency years or fellowship years begin. Again, almost no pay and no sleep.

This means that the surgeon diving into your abdomen, or heart, or brain is someone who is (a) in the top two percent of our academic population and who (b) sacrificed up to 12 years of his/her life plus tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege of making that cut " and doing it right, so that you don’t bleed out or die of an infection, and so that you have a minimal scar and maximum comfort.

If medicine is no longer remunerative, there is no incentive for good people to make these kinds of sacrifices. I’ll remind you that, in the former Soviet Union, medicine was a very devalued profession. It was harder work than most other jobs and, because it was essentially uncompensated, no one wanted to do it.

Let’s talk about the doctors under Obama Care

bookworm room