America has the best health care in the world, however, the physician/patient relationship is being politicized and is under attack.
About 100 people showed up to hear Greenville family physician Tom Kendall speak this past Saturday at the semi-annual luncheon of the Americans for Constitutional Government study group. The ACG usually meets every fourth Monday of the month at the Symmes branch of the Greenville County Public Library on Pelham Road. The next meeting will be on the 4th Monday in February at 10:00 a.m.
Dr. Kendall began his remarks by greeting those in attendance “in the name of the Great Physician.” His topic was the current state of health care in America. He said that God was stirring him to be more vocal in the public arena about the trends he sees in health care and how government is adversely impacting these trends. He said that he felt compelled to speak out.
“The beauty, the esthetic of medicine, is being disfigured,” he said. He lamented that the physician/patient relationship is being politicized and is under attack.
Dr. Kendall informed his audience that the government is encroaching more and more on the liberties of physicians. He said that the government is working to make the physician merely an instrument of the state. He warned that physicians have been sent to prison for not following government regulations.
“America’s got the best health care in the world, it really does, but something is working hard to change that,” he said.
Dr. Kendall told of a physicians’ luncheon he attended at the Poinsett Club. One of the speakers told the audience of doctors that they would have to change the way they think. The speaker also mentioned Charles Darwin, the evolutionist, in his speech. Perhaps this was in reference to the concept most associated with Darwin – survival of the fittest.
All is not doom and gloom, however. Dr. Kendall told his audience not to just curse the darkness but to light a candle. A colleague had suggested that he attend an upcoming meeting in Nashville of a group of physicians called the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), an organization with which he was not familiar.
At that meeting, Dr. Kendall met a physician who emigrated from Canada because he was tired of the government tyranny over health care. He said that all Canadians have health care but that not all have access to it. He pointed out that regular doctor appointments can take weeks while the wait for an MRI can be nine months. He warned that health care rationing is in the legislation being currently deliberated by Congress.
Dr. Kendall also met a doctor at that meeting who had attended Harvard Law School with Barack Obama. The law student turned doctor told him that everything that people have heard about Obama’s socialism and Muslim beliefs is true.
Dr. Kendall said that he was blessed for having attended the meeting. He said that this particular group, which he described as an alternative to the American Medical Association, wants to take health care back. He noted that it was this group that was instrumental in stopping Hillarycare during the early days of the Clinton administration. He further said that he knows many physicians who do not want to go the way of socialized medicine.
“We’ve been drinking at the well of socialism for a long time,” he said.
During the question and answer period the doctor was asked what else can be done. He told the members of the audience that when they see their doctors they should ask them if they belong to the AAPS. He said that not all doctors are members of the AMA. In fact, according to him, only 18% are. As for himself, he said that he will continue to speak out on the subject.
According to the AAPS website, the organization is “dedicated to the highest ethical standards of the Oath of Hippocrates and to preserving the sanctity of the patient-physician relationship and the practice of private medicine.” The website even features a “Physicians’ Declaration of Independence,” which is modeled after the original.
