While the Old Media has been ecstatic over recent job numbers, claiming that some 200,000 jobs have been added to the economy, we should note that while Obama giveth Obama also taketh away. The media may be trying to claim the President has “created or saved” jobs (the latest weasel word is he’s created job opportunity) but his policies have also cost jobs. In particular his policies are costing jobs in the medical field.

Last week, layoffs were announced at the University of Mississippi Medical Center due in part to the 80 million dollars that it will cost to implement a new computer system named EPIC Systems, Obama’s newly mandated electronic medical records system.

Naturally, the system Obama is forcing on an entire nation of medical professionals and hospitals is the same system owned and operated by Judith Faulkner, one of his own big donors. Faulkner is also a big donor to the Democrat Party. Not surprisingly, besides affording her the lucrative, crony capitalist business deal, Obama also put Faulkner in a key role on the Health Information Technology Policy Committee, the committee responsible for implementing the President’s e-records policy. She has become known as Obama’s medical records czar.

As hospitals and doctors are forced to launch their own EPIC Systems portals, the costs are forcing hard choices for administrators. All to implement what many call a flawed system.

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Rep. Tom Price (R-Georgia) took the time to chat with us for a brief podcast today regarding his impressions of Don Berwick’s fractious testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee. A physician himself, Price pressed Berwick, the controversial head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, on questions regarding the rationing of care, whether it was a falsehood for the White House to claim “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it” and other key matters.

This line of questioning led to a side-by-side moment that is really made for TV — Berwick today saying: “I abhor rationing. My entire life has been spent fighting rationing.”

Compare that to a quote from Berwick in 2009: “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”

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Attempting to enact his big-government health care scheme, President Obama and his supporters frequently claimed that a “majority” of doctors supported his health-care plans.  When the American Medical Association – which had opposed HillaryCare – signed onto Obama’s plan last year, the organization seemed to make the President’s case.  Most people assumed that the AMA represented most of the doctors in the country.  But in fact, the AMA represents less than 20 percent of all physicians in the United States.  And yet as the organization’s leadership moved more to the left, it held a near monopoly on media attention on issues pertaining to public health.   No longer.

As the AMA has become increasingly politicized in recent years – issuing a statement in support of climate change, for example, in 2008 – a new group of doctors has risen to challenge them.  Like other anti-statist groups that have risen in opposition to the Obama-Reid-Pelosi agenda, Docs4PatientCare are challenging the AMA’s stranglehold on health care matters, just as other groups once challenged the right of the left-leaning American Bar Association to determine what judges are and are not qualified for the United States Supreme Court.  How Docs4PatientCare managed to barge its way into the closed-door meetings of Washington offers a lesson to other groups seeking to have a voice in their federal government.

Founded by Dr. Hal Scherz, a prominent Atlanta physician, the group of doctors expressed concern that like so many other professional groups, the AMA’s leadership have been  thoroughly “Washingtonized” – caring more about the pleadings of other lobbyists on K Street, White House invitations and Capitol Hill committee appearances than the professions they are supposed to represent.  As doctors have taken a battering over several decades from insurance companies, HMOS, and government agencies, Scherz says the AMA was a bystander.

“As the insurance companies become more and more impossible and government intrusion keeps growing, we’ve seen our delivery of care to our patients compromised and our incomes decrease,” he said.

But it was the AMA’s support for ObamaCare that really troubled Scherz and others in his field.

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As Congressional leaders debate omnibus health insurance reform proposals, American consumers face the threat of dramatic changes to health care delivery that 100% misses the point. The entire debate is a quintessential study in “lipstick” on a pig.

The “pig” is the federal government intrusion into health insurance at all.   Let me restate, the health care marketplace is so fouled up BECAUSE of government involvement, not because of too little government involvement.

Americans are frustrated and the tea partiers are an expression of this because people see both parties as totally tone deaf, failing to limit the central role of the federal government.  So while the statists want to expand the role of government into a total single-payer plan, the rudderless GOP proposes a “market-based” government role in which government empowers people.  Huh?

The fact is, there is no more proper Congressional role in health insurance than there is in car, home or life insurance.  Insurance regulation is properly handled at the state level.  So how did we get here?

The fateful machinations happened in the forties, when price and salary controls put in place by an increasingly socialistic government forced businesses to look for creative ways to attract and compensate their employees.  The result, a loophole of sorts where employers could gift their employees with health insurance and deduct the premium as a cost of doing business.   Voila!  Just like that, the camel’s nose was under the tent and the negative ramification have perplexed patients and policy-makers ever since.

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