Jane M. Orient obtained her undergraduate degrees in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Arizona in Tucson, and her M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1974. She completed an internal medicine residency at Parkland Memorial Hospital and University of Arizona Affiliated Hospitals and then became an Instructor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. She has been in solo private practice since 1981 and has served as Executive Director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) since 1989. She is the author of YOUR Doctor Is Not In: Healthy Skepticism about National Healthcare, Sutton's Law (a novel about where the money is in medicine today), and the second through fourth editions of Sapira's Art and Science of Bedside Diagnosis. She coauthored two novels published as e-books, Neomorts and Moonshine, and books for schoolchildren, Professor Klugimkopf’s Old-Fashioned English Grammar and Professor Klugimkopf’s Spellling Method, published by Robinson Books. More than 100 of her papers have been published in the scientific and popular literature on a variety of subjects including risk assessment, natural and technological hazards and nonhazards, and medical economics and ethics. She is the editor of AAPS News, the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Newsletter, and Civil Defense Perspectives, and is the managing editor of The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
Dr. Jane Orient
The Feds Are Out of Money: Healthcare Is Their New Bank
by Dr. Jane OrientIt is mentioned, almost in passing, that the “healthcare reform” on the verge of becoming law starts collecting premiums and taxes immediately, and promises benefits only in about four years.
What kind of emergency is that?
It’s not a healthcare emergency. It’s what might be called a Madoff emergency.
Whether starry-eyed utopians or cynical malefactors, the unnamed, possibly unnameable they have high ambitions for Washington to achieve their objectives. The stars are aligned for their coup d’etat, but there is one little problem: the country is out of money.
This problem threatens to stop not only their agenda, but the whole game. Washington has 2 million employees on the payroll, earning on average twice as much as those in the private sector. And probably more than a hundred million dependents—recipients of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and grants and subsidies of all types. What happens if the checks stop coming?
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Is it Always Better to Have Health Insurance?
by Dr. Jane OrientUninsurance is portrayed as being like a disease; it has even been called an epidemic. At a minimum, it puts you one medical bill away from bankruptcy, and you might even die from it, they say.
Yet some people I know, even doctors, do not want to buy health insurance.
And I know of at least one person who was very lucky to have had hers cancelled.
Here’s her story. She told an acquaintance, who happened to be a physician, about her eye symptoms. “Wouldn’t you know! I lost my insurance a couple months ago, and now this!”
The physician happened to have an ophthalmoscope in her truck, and took a look in the patient’s eye. Then she called a retinal surgery practice and told the receptionist the patient’s history, and the results of the limited examination she could do. She thought the patient might have a detached retina.
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Is Medicare the Real Target of ‘Health Care Reform?’
by Dr. Jane OrientNobody outside the inner halls of Congress really knows what’s going on in the negotiations on health care “reform. Every now and then, someone emerges from the formerly smoke-filled rooms and throws another 2,000 or so page “bill” out into the public and then disappears to continue talks to carve up one-sixth of the nation’s economy.
But we do know some of the critical unforgiving numbers. And we have strong reason to suspect that radical changes to Medicare Part E (as in Medicare for Everybody) is the real endgame, whatever the interim steps are called: public option, cooperatives, or mandated Insurance Exchanges.
We have the unmentionable truth that Medicare is insolvent. And the common dogma that Medicare is efficient, popular, and impregnable. Is it a Hegelian thesis and antithesis? With the synthesis being to throw the whole rest of the system, which is also allegedly bankrupting the country, into Medicare?
Are our leaders stark, raving mad? Or diabolically clever?
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