Doctors For Trump

Let's get this straight. Not everybody who voted for Donald Trump for president is an uneducated disgruntled white male unemployed factory worker, as the liberal press would like to have you believe. Hundreds of thousands of doctors also voted for him. You can hardly call them uneducated.

For many physicians, their votes had nothing to do with Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee or the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton's careless handling of classified emails. No, the disastrous prospects of continuing Obamacare was probably one of their top priorities in sending Republicans into all federal branches of power.

We already know that President Obama lied when he promised that the PPACA would allow people to keep their insurance policies and doctors if they want it. His statements about Obamacare lowering healthcare costs have also proven to be false. The whole package was passed by hoodwinking Congress and the voting public. Now, insurance premiums have gone through the roof. My family's personal health insurance costs will increase almost 25% this year. If we switched to a cheaper plan we would lose our family doctor. Yet we consider ourselves lucky. Millions of people across the country will only have one insurance company to choose from thanks to the crippling costs mandated by the law.

Despite these drawbacks, I've been reading a lot of anger and frustration in medical forums like KevinMD about the potential demise of Obamacare as we know it. They predict doom and gloom for patients and medicine in general if Republicans dare repeal it.

Funny thing is, most of these prognostications were written by medical residents or faculty physicians in academic settings. These are hardly the unbiased views of what's really going on in the healthcare business. In fact, they are completely shielded from the real world of medicine.

They're not out there fighting for every penny from the insurance companies for proper reimbursements. These academics aren't dealing with losing long term patients because they are no longer part of the ever tighter insurance networks. As part of an academic institution, these big hospitals are usually included in almost all health plans. And if they did lose a few patients to insurance changes, how much did they really care?

How can medical residents be complaining about the demise of Obamacare when they haven't experienced how hard it is to make one honest nickel running a medical business? Have them come back in a few years when they've had the opportunity to implement all of Obama's expensive mandates like electronic medical records or alternative payment models.

So forgive me if I ignore all the whining and kvetching about an unfair Electoral College bypassing the will of the people. Millions of voters, thousands of doctors among them, voted for Donald Trump. Nobody said we had to vote against our own self interest in order to be good compassionate physicians. In fact, patients may find their doctors to be happier and more friendly once many of these Obama era rules are banished.