Come Down To My Basement…I’ve Got Candy Down There…
Organized medicine is certainly facing a little bit of a faith crisis. From those they’re supposed to represent come cries that the AMA, specialty and state societies do not do enough for [put individual specialty here]. From the interested public and other interest groups comes cries that the AMA, specialty and state societies move to benefit the physician over the patient.
Throw amongst those pragmatic concerns the intellectual and long held criticism that organized medicine suppresses the supply of physicians and the scope of non-physician practice and is thus inherently anti-free market.
I’ve ignored this topic for long enough considering my considerable involvement in leadership roles within organized medicine and my libertarian leanings.
The clamoring from far right wing free market speakers like the late Noble Laureate above (who I respect considerably, despite the little joke above) and crazy think tanks like the Ludwig von Mises Institute is that the AMA is essentially a guild whose will the government has succumbed to. In a publication titled “100 Years of Medical Robbery” the think tank has this to say about the history of the American Medical Association and its goals:
In the days of its founding AMA was much more open–at its conferences and in its publications–about its real goal: building a government-enforced monopoly for the purpose of dramatically increasing physician incomes. It eventually succeeded, becoming the most formidable labor union on the face of the earth.
To accomplish the twin goals of artificially elevated incomes and worship by patients, AMA formulated a two-pronged strategy for the labor market for physicians. First, use the coercive power of the state to limit the practices of physician competitors such as homeopaths, pharmacists, midwives, nurses, and later, chiropractors. Second, significantly restrict entrance to the profession by restricting the number of approved medical schools in operation and thus the number of students admitted to those approved schools yearly.
The emphasis is my own.
I’ll offer a candid response to this. Through it’s history the AMA appears to have focused largely on improving physician income. Perhaps not as single minded or nefariously as the Ludwig von Mises Institute would have you believe but it remains. And the AMA has had considerable success doing such. The allowance of self goverance that medicine enjoys and the sway it holds over the scope of practice for other providers is incredible. I think there are some real issues of ‘patient safety’ buried in those issues, as the AMA would argue, but it is hard to argue that physician income did not, does not play a role in the AMA’s focus in securing physicians influence over who practices “medicine.”
Organized medicine was responsible for the Flexner Report and continues to hold the greatest sway over the number of physicians this country will (or will not) have by controlling the LCME and ACGME. To argue some conspiracy to suppress the number of medical students (and thus number of future physicians) through these entities is baseless, but it does display how much control organized medicine has wrested for physicians. As does the limiting of the scope of practice of all other medical practitioners. Indeed, that aspect of the AMA’s success (getting state governments to agree to follow their rules on who should be allowed to perform certain procedures or write perscriptions) may be the most marvelous.
It is clear that the ‘thinkers’ and ‘economists’ who criticize the AMA are far removed from the practice of medicine. Some of their rails simply show a lack of understanding of how medicine works. For instance, the article above tries to criticize the AMA’s restriction on who can practice medicine in the name of ‘patient safety’ and ‘quality,’ by saying,
A final challenge to the Lexus standard is the number of accidental deaths occurring in U.S. hospitals every year. Harvard University’s Lucian Leape estimated that there are approximately 120,000 accidental deaths and 1,000,000 injuries in U.S. hospitals every year. To understand what staggering figures these are, imagine a Boeing 777-200 with its maximum of 328 passengers crashing every day for an entire year with no survivors. This would add up to 119,720 deaths, still not as many as are killed through medical error in hospitals every year. UCLA Professor of Medicine Robert Brook, M.D., told the Associated Press, “The bottom line is we have a system that is terribly out of control. It’s really a joke to worry about the occasional plane that goes down when we have thousands of people who are killed in hospitals every year.”
In anycase, the point is there are questionable assertions like this throughout the works of the libertarian thinkers who criticize organized medicine. Despite that, there is some validity to their points. As another Ludwig von Mises paper, “Bring Back The Guild System?” says,
Government regulations on the chiropractic profession, lay midwifery, and on the freedom of nurse practitioners to offer services within their competence, all of which make perfect sense from the point of view of the medical guild that lobbied for them, make no sense at all from the point of view of consumer wishes (as repeatedly expressed in polling data) or from economic considerations. In many cases, such people can provide health services far more cheaply than can licensed physicians (or, in the case of chiropractors, can provide services that licensed physicians do not provide at all), but consumers are prevented from making their own decisions regarding their medical care. Given the logic of the guild structure, no one has the right to be surprised to find that the AMA has put so much effort into undermining its professional opposition.
There is nothing wholly unique about physicians’ efforts towards this. Other professions do the same and also limit their membership through limiting education spots but medicine is certainly one of the most successful at it.
I will accept the blows Milton Friedman lands against the American Medical Association but let me make an argument on why the AMA’s actions are reasonable despite violating the libertarian ideal.
Let us call what the AMA and the rest of organized medicine does a necessary evil. It might not have been through all of its existence granted but today it is. It is because physicians are not playing on a level, free market playing field.
That is the question the thoughtful should be asking; not whether guaranteed access for all can work. Let us be honest, if you goal is improving utilitarian public health measures - life expectancy, infant mortality, time to treatment for diseases, access to care - then a single payer system could work in the United States, provided enough funding. Complaints and nay say against such a system by providers is nonsense and nothing but protection of self interest. There are tradeoffs with such a system, but there are trade offs with any health care system. Look at our current one. If you want to improve what the public would consider ‘health’ then a well funded single payer system would be far superior to our current system, no matter America’s ‘uniqueness’.
But should we do that? The real debate is should the government fund access for those who cannot afford it themselves. Who has such a right?
The Miller Center of Public Affairs tried to do that recently with a panel debate. On the transcript at times the talking heads fall short in defining the debate and staying on course, but it still something worthwhile to look at.
While You Were Busy Watching Dancing With The Stars A Little Bit More of Your Right To Privacy Died
So this 9th Circuit Court decision looked a little more outrageous when I first saw it, but it still remains a fine excuse to bring up the political topic most important to me. Civil liberties.
I’m sure it will come as a surprise to many but Border and Customs Agents can essentially seize any electronic device you are transporting into the U.S. and hold it for as long as it takes them to ’search’ it. And such is what they’ve been doing more of late.
Laptops may be scrutinized and subject to a “forensic analysis” under the so-called border search exemption, which allows searches of people entering the United States and their possessions “without probable cause, reasonable suspicion or a warrant”…
The 9th Circuit Court recently reaffirmed the legality of data on electronic devices being scrutinized under the border search exemption to the 4th Amendment. What I really disagree with is the breadth of the border search exemption, but ruling it extends to data on electronic devices is nothing new. As Wired and Yahoo! blogs point out such searches of computers has been upheld since at least 2004. But the claim that searches of US citizens at the border “are reasonable simply by virtue of the fact that they occur at the border,” (as the Supreme Court has put it) and current U.S. Customs law are far too broad of a mandate for current U.S. Customs.
Some discretion is being used in determining who gets searched and who does not. Allowing Border Agents such authority has some benefits, they are the ones on the front line, but it also has major pitfalls in terms of our privacy.
Let me frame the the security versus freedom issue. These are on a scale. We could always be safer at the expense of further rights. We could all renounce our right to privacy further and have cameras in our homes and renounce our right to property further and have the taxes to pay for people to monitor those cameras. True, the yield for each further bit of privacy we forfeit is probably less but the maxim holds.
That might seem like an obvious definition of the debate but I’m currently annoyed by arguments such as those claiming that if you’re not a criminal you have nothing to fear or asserting that the U.S. has to protect its borders. Such are ridiculous in that they contribute nothing in trying to define how to tilt the scale of freedom versus safety.
In any case, the border exemption is far too broad at present. I hate it.
As for the extension of such to electronic data, there is a reasonableness to the legal argument considering how the border exemption has been defined. However, the pragmatic result seems fishy at best.
We should try to maximize the return on our forfeit of liberties (such as the right to privacy). The return for checking IDs, checking citizenship, checking large vehicles for illegal immigrants or devices of terrorism is considerably higher than that for checking a number of laptops based on the suspicions of some GED carrying Border Agent.
I would’ve hoped, however much their legal arguments were in line with prior court holdings, that the 9th Circuit Court (here and here and here) would’ve had some gall and would’ve help reverse the general decline in our civil liberties.
I’ll be honest, I think something like political connections has a place (a small place) in a medical school admissions decision. Distinguishing students for admission becomes almost a crap shoot once you reach those essentially qualified academically. I’m sure the applications and CVs and awards and service commitments all blend together. Political connections are, in perhaps an unfortunate reality, something that may benefit the school and thus arguably community health. Why not put them into consideration?
Whatever my controversial opinion above, in this instance the weight of such connections appears to have been overvalued. And more stunning is the backdoor method by which the admission went down.
[The father] is a known fundraiser in the medical community. In 2005, he held a fundraiser in his own home where more than 150 physicians raised more than $100,000 for [Florida governor] Crist, according to a news release from the Florida Medical Political Action Committee.
Kone said he thought he was within his rights to admit a student absent committee support, but the move breaks with procedures described by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which provides accreditation to UF and medical schools throughout the U.S. and Canada.
“The final responsibility for selecting students to be admitted for medical study must reside with a duly constituted faculty committee,” according to the accrediting body’s standards.
[…]
Dr. Craig Tisher, former dean of UF’s College of Medicine, said he never broke with Ira Gessner, chairman of the Medical Selection Committee.
“During the five years that I was dean, I did not go against the wishes of the admissions committee,” Tisher said. “I let them make the selections, and I relied upon the judgment of the people who were interviewing the students and the chairman of the admissions committee, Dr. Gessner. All I can tell you is I didn’t exercise that prerogative (to overrule the committee), if in fact that prerogative exists.”
This legal argument is called pre-emption. After decades of being dismissed by courts, the tactic now appears to be on the verge of success, lawyers for plaintiffs and drug companies say.
The Bush administration has argued strongly in favor of the doctrine, which holds that the F.D.A. is the only agency with enough expertise to regulate drug makers and that its decisions should not be second-guessed by courts. The Supreme Court is to rule on a case next term that could make pre-emption a legal standard for drug cases. The court already ruled in February that many suits against the makers of medical devices like pacemakers are pre-empted.
[…]
In the fall, the Supreme Court will hear a…pre-emption case involving Wyeth, another drug company. Chris Seeger, a plaintiffs’ lawyer who has about 125 Ortho Evra cases, said he expected the court to rule in Wyeth’s favor.
The decision…does not foreclose lawsuits claiming that a device was made improperly, in violation of F.D.A. specifications. Cases may also be brought under state laws that mirror federal rules, as opposed to supplementing them.,
I have mixed opinions on this protection for drug makers. I’ve blogged on many an example of what I think is the naivete of lay juries in pharmaceutical liability cases but I’m certainly not sure that the FDA is in the best position currently to enforce full disclosure on pharmaceutical companies. It certainly is an interesting Supreme Court opinion to keep our eyes open for. If the opinion comes down on the side of big pharma I’m wondering what that might’ve meant for the Vioxx cases if Merck hadn’t settled. Maybe nothing…I have no idea.
If anyone has an informed opinion on whether FDA pre-emption of state laws (so many of the Vioxx cases were filed in federal court) would’ve had any effect on the whole Vioxx mess then please comment.
Hamed’s 4-year-old son, Mohamed, was dying of cancer and needed an artery transplant that cost $5,000. The only savings Hamed had was what he fished from his pockets at the end of the day.
There was another way, one whispered about for those with nothing. A man could wager part of himself, slip into a hospital gown, and wake up with an incision above the gut.
Hamed sold a section of his liver for a bit more than the price of his son’s operation. The boy died in surgery.
With his scar healing and his son buried, Hamed, whose knowledge of anatomy would perhaps fill a single page, decided that driving a bus was not the fate of the man he wanted to be. He brokered his first liver deal four months ago. He earned $900. Four more sales have followed.
There are virtually no laws governing organ donations in Egypt. Or so the article makes it sound like.
Mohamed Queita, a member of the Egyptian parliament and the ruling National Democratic Party, has been working for 12 years to pass a law to regulate organ transplants and stop an expanding black market that draws patients from across the Middle East and as far away as Europe.
“It’s the worst kind of business in Egypt. It’s worse than slavery,” says Queita, who has no comprehensive statistics but notes that one Cairo clinic had a waiting list of 1,500 people willing to sell their organs. “I don’t want the poor turned into spare parts for the rich. . . . People are coming from all over to buy organs in Egypt. They’re mainly gulf Arabs. If you’re a rich man from the gulf, you go to a private Egyptian hospital that has contacts with organ brokers. Serious cases of poverty in this country are causing an increase in the theft and sale of organs.”
The emphasis is my own. This kind’ve paternalism is just wrong. There are terrible, horrific stories out there but no matter the motives or the life situation that forces someone into selling an organ, it seems something like such is a personal decision without any negative consequences for anyone else. The government has no place regulating such decisions.
It’s real simple - just let people do what they want with their bodies.
It isn’t like western societies’ bans on selling/buying organs are achieving their goals anyway. Protecting the poor? Maintaining some ‘equality’ in the distribution of limited organs? Nonesense.
You can’t make direct payments, but those with resources are still open to bettering their odds of getting an organ by doing everything just short of paying the previous owner of the organ.
I Don’t Think I’ve Ever Seen An Episode of Three’s Company
Back in 2003 John Ritter had chest pain while he was on the set of 8 Simple Rules…
Turns out he was suffering a dissection of his ascending aortic aneurysm. Although he made it to the hospital the dissecting aneurysm cost him his life. It was a tragedy. And of course, in many people’s imagination someone needed to pay for that tragedy. Which is why Ritter’s widow sued everyone in the phone book. And last year actually settled with a good number of them. Here are Kevin’s thoughts when the suit was filed.
However, today comes news that two other doctors and their insurance, who didn’t settle and took the suit to trial, have emerged victorious. One of them was a radiologist who performed a whole body scan on John Ritter a year before his AA claimed his life and the other was a cardiologist who was called into the hospital late that night, hours after Ritter had been admitted, once he took a turn for the worse.
Jurors said the majority believed the cardiologist summoned to the hospital after Ritter was diagnosed with a heart attack had no time to order a chest X-ray that might have found the tear.
[…]
Defense testimony characterized the aortic dissection as lethal and contended that even with surgery the outcome would have been the same.
As in all MSM reported malpractice cases we don’t know all the specifics. Aortic dissections are notoriously hard to diagnose and ascending ones (near where the aorta takes off from the heart) easily mimic heart attacks, which is what apparently his physician at the hospital thought he was suffering. One thing that I can’t imagine is that it took the hospital physicians and staff so long to get a chest x-ray on Ritter which certainly might’ve shown a widened mediastinum.
Testimony showed that an X-ray was ordered as soon as Ritter arrived at the emergency room but for unknown reasons it was never done.
Even with that though, all aortic dissections carry something like a 33% mortality rate (although most of that is attributable to the time to diagnose this very acute problem).
Without passing judgment on the verdict itself, I am a little worried by some apparent attitudes on the defense side.
“I disagree with the jury’s decision but I believe in the system and I respect it,” said the widow, Amy Yasbeck. “It inspires me even more to find, with these brilliant medical minds, a path to diagnose aortic diseases.”
If she admits the difficulty in diagnosing this condition why did she vehemently press on in her malpractice suits for more than a year? To force more aggressive defensive medicine in California ERs, in the hopes someone else’s dissecting aneurysm is caught earlier? I don’t know, it’s likely I’m reading her media reported comments out of context but that line that I italicized is certainly fishy.
Okay, this post is yet more political commentary and deals with medicine in no way.
We have yet another reminder that Americans are woefully underinformed…and worse, likely uninterested about history and political machinations. Looking at it through this lens you wonder why it’s even an honor to be elected President. Yes, these people voted for you.
The study by the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that 22 percent of Americans could name all five Simpson family members, compared with just one in 1,000 people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms.
.1%? Are you kidding me? I’m sure the percentage is something better amongst those who actually cast a ballot, but still this is appalling. Two points:
It absolutely, positively is important and relevant to actually be interested and informed of something like the Bill of Rights when going to cast your ballot
Our lack of attention to American history and political current affairs is a currently worsening problem…this isn’t something that has always been the case
There is absolutely no cerebral involvement in how we decide to vote nowadays. We fill out the ballot based simply on who we feel will do the best by us or by who tugs at our hope or (more commonly) fear.
This is why we elect people like George Bush.
In honesty I’d probably need a moment to remember the right to petition the government for grievances, but given a moment to think I could certainly rattle the first amendment off. Congress shall not abridge the rights to/of: speech, assembly, press, religion, petition government.
Blue Cross of California had been sending out letters asking physicians to disclose any medical history that patients hadn’t disclose when applying for health insurance with Blue Cross. They were searching for expensive pre-existing conditions, so they could cancel (or modify) those patient’s policies.
The state’s largest for-profit health insurer is sending physicians copies of health insurance applications filled out by new patients, along with a letter advising them that the company has a right to drop members who fail to disclose “material medical history,” the Los Angeles Times reported on its Web site.
“Any condition not listed on the application that is discovered to be pre-existing should be reported to Blue Cross immediately.”
And although the program was far from new apparently, once it broke out into the media it naturally drew an outcry. Now BC has agreed to stop the practice but there is one thing to note,
After getting slammed yesterday by everybody from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Hillary Clinton, Blue Cross of California said it would stop sending letters to doctors asking them to help find patients who had failed to report pre-existing medical conditions to the insurance company.
The company said it had been sending out the letters — which include a copy of the patient’s insurance application — for years, and hadn’t received any complaints.
Doctor Jarvik, What Are You Doing Inside My Television?
There’s no doubt that the Democratic Congress is coming after big pharma after all the money the pharmacuticals pumped into Republican coffers over the decade prior, especially as Part D came into existence.
Once Democrats seized the committee chairmanships on Capitol Hill, the big drug companies sharply aligned with Republicans knew a period of reckoning was coming.
Now it has begun.
“We generally expected that when the Democrats regained control of Congress, that they would closely scrutinize some of the industries that they believed had been particularly favored by the Republicans and unreasonably benefited in certain ways,” said Bret Koplow, a pharmaceutical industry lobbyist at Patton Boggs.
“There was the perception that certain industries, including pharmaceuticals, were getting away with a lot,” he said.
In handing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger his biggest legislative setback, members of a Senate panel expressed concerns Monday that his plan to cover most Californians without health insurance was inadequately funded and would worsen the state budget crisis.
Democrats who voted against the bill cited a report released last week by the Legislative Analyst’s Office that concluded the plan could be underfunded by billions of dollars. They also expressed concern it would add to the state’s projected $14.5 billion deficit.
“You can say you’re going to cover 800,000 more children, but if there’s no money, you’re not going to do that and it’s cruel to raise such expectations,” Sen. Sheila Kuehl, the panel’s chairwoman, told reporters.
I still contend we’re going to see the state’s take the lead in increasing health care access before we see a major, successful national effort at such.
Ron Paul may be a racist (or more likely he’s not and Orac is just ‘ill informed’ or worse) but Dr. Paul is certainly right about the financial future of this country. Indeed, the only candidate who is right about the single largest challenge to this nation; a challenge larger than the war on terror, than the war in Iraq.
I always say that the plural of anecdote is not data but of the hundreds of Iowans I talked to last week not a single one told me health care was the issue driving their Caucus vote. So despite all the coverage it is difficult for me to imagine healthcare playing a major role come Tuesday and the New Hampshire primary.
[I]n New Hampshire, the first primary state, there’s a sharp partisan split over government’s role in making healthcare available. As a likely battleground, the Granite State could be a bellwether on the issue in next November’s election.
The stark difference between the parties is reflected in the findings of a Boston Globe poll of likely voters in the Jan. 8 New Hampshire presidential primary - 80 percent of Democrats polled say providing health coverage is government’s responsibility; only 30 percent of Republicans agree. Moreover, it explains the dramatically divergent healthcare proposals of the candidates - Democrats would move toward universal coverage and a larger government role; Republicans generally favor tax incentives to expand private insurance and restrain costs through market forces.
One of the contrasts is the support (or lack thereof) for individual mandates. And according to Pollster it may explain Clinton’s reluctance to raise the health care issue into the limelight.
Opposition to the notion of an individual health insurance mandate — “should individuals be required to buy health insurance” — is greatest among the less well-educated and downscale voters that are the core of Clinton’s base in New Hampshire and elsewhere:
Panda Bear and Graham have conflicting posts on the merits of ‘Social Justice’ and just what Social Justice entails.
Social Justice is certainly an amorphous term which in part makes the debate difficult to keep within a set of boundaries but essentially Social Justice is the idea that to each, as he deserves, goes the benefits of society. Those benefits paid for in the form of wealth redistribution.
The debate is a continuum from whether Social Justice should even be an ideal, all the way to exactly how one judges what individuals “deserve.” I think, despite some confusion, that Graham and Panda Bear are talking about the same thing.
Panda Bear worries about the free loader who exploits societal handouts by pretending to be a victim.
Social justice, as I understand, it about equality. Distributing shared, scarce public resources as equitably as possible. Nothing in it speaks of victimhood.
But the two positions on how Social Justice is defined aren’t mutually exclusive. The reality is that, at least subconsciously, victimhood has become the standard by which we evaluate what an individual “deserves.” And determining what of societal benefits an individual deserves is the whole practice of Social Justice.
[T]he mob, once it discovers it can vote itself access to other people’s wallets, is difficult to keep in check and the usual dependency triumvirate of ghetto, trailer park, and academia are perpetually braying for somebody else’s money. The extent to which this money can be secured depends on how many productive citizens can be lured onto the dependency plantation, usually by the proganda of fear and class envy. The problem with creating a welfare state is that it tends to fulfill the dire prophecies of its creators. The more productive citizens are taxed the more economic activity is stifled leading to stagnant economies where there are, in fact, no jobs for many people who would be employed if growth and economic opportunity were encouraged at the expense of stealing from one set of citizens to give to another.
I’ve often criticized the “right to health care” by asking who defines that right in a society with limited resources. ‘Oh you get this yearly mammogram but not that colonoscopy.’ Any line drawn is nearly entirely subjective and indefensible compared to an expanded or contracted definition. Such applies to all welfare, all wealth redistribution, all Social Justice.
Yeah, Society Took The Corn From The Indians And Gave It To The Pilgrims
Graham speaks of ‘equality,’ but it appears to me that if Social Justice is something real then it calls for an equality of position. Here’s what I mean:
First, equality can be defined as an equality of opportunity, in the sense of nothing but natural impediments (your ability, circumstance, etc) to your progress up the social and economic ladder. In such a case Social Justice either doesn’t exist or is satisfied by you merely being alive and not being interfered with by other members of society.
Second, we can talk about an equality of position such that everyone has the same. In such a case Social Justice is paramount, but such calls for the complete redistribution of wealth.
No society, no individual can philosophically defend the determination that “Well you’re entitled to this much in food stamps but no more!” or “$400 in a housing stipend but nothing else!”
You either satisfy ‘equality’ by redistributing all wealth equally or you don’t redistribute wealth at all.
The Noble laureate Friedrich Hayek came to slightly similiar conclusions, in the sense that the problems of trying to determine what individuals ‘deserve,’ in order to satisfy Social Justice destroy the principle itself.
Social justice requires not merely that individuals receive what is rightly theirs in general terms, but that individuals and groups also receive some stipulated distributional share of the society’s total output or wealth. However, Hayek showed that in the market economy, distributions of income are not based on some standard of “deservedness,” but rather on the degree to which the individual has directly or indirectly satisfied consumer demand within the general rules of individual rights and property.
To attempt to distribute income shares by “deservedness” would require the government to establish some overarching standard for disbursing “social justice,” and would necessitate an economic system in which that government had the authority and the power to investigate, measure, and judge each person’s “right” to a share of the society’s wealth. Hayek suggested that such a system would involve a return to the mentality and the rules of a tribal society: government would reimpose a single hierarchy of ends and would decide what each member should have and what should be expected from him in return. It would mean the end of the free and open society.
I’ll keep my arguments philosophical and stay away from the pragmatic consequences of trying to implement Social Justice. Needless to say I agree with much of what Panda Bear concludes.
I’m a big Ron Paul fan if you don’t know. Doctor Paul is an Ob/Gyn and a ten-term Republican congressman whose about as libertarian as anyone ever elected to federal office. I’m such a fan that right now I’m somewhere between Davenport, IA and Texas, having spent more than a week in Iowa volunteering on his campaign.
Now, despite some of the, uh, optimisim I ran into amongst volunteers and staff in Iowa concerning Dr. Paul’s chances, most know that Ron Paul is not going to be the Republican nominee for President. To the chagrin of some choice dickheads. (I love that Ken Layne couldn’t make it into Palmer College, much less Duke Medical School and yet somehow Wonkette keeps publishing Paul critiques like there’s some value to the lives of it’s editors*).
But whatever Paul’s chances at victory, fifth place is disgusting. Ron Paul lost to Fred Thompson, a man whose idea of campaigning is when someone notices him while he’s trying on slacks at the mall.
It wasn’t the media, it wasn’t the message, it wasn’t the “scandals,” it wasn’t that Iowans are stupid (although after speaking to hundreds of them I can testify to that).
Proof of a Mass Media Conspiracy!
It’s the campaign.
The final polls before the Caucus gave some reasonable hope to the Paul campaign. A finish of third would’ve been remarkable and not totally unreasonable. A finish of fourth more expected. A finish of fifth disappointing. But, even before the Caucusing began there was considerable doubt from anyone on the ground in Iowa, with any sense, who had spent any time with the Ron Paul campaign.
This is the most disorganized political campaign I can imagine. My credentials aren’t terribly impressive - I have some campaign education and I’ve worked on a Congressional campaign - but you don’t need a PhD in political science; one look at the Paul campaign and you know that this isn’t how you run a political campaign.
From near sexual harassment of volunteers to strategic moves like still cold calling people off the voter registration list a day before the Caucus and not even having campaign phone lines to use three days before the Caucus, the centralized Iowa effort for Ron Paul might as well have been non-existent.
While the entire time I was in Iowa was a near disaster in terms of organization, the GOTV effort may have been the most disgusting.
The database of known Paul supporters was, uh…shameful. To top it off, it was corrupted the night before the Caucus and the campaign had no back up of it. It was nearly six o’clock on Caucus night before some volunteers got their lists of supporters to call and remind of the Caucus and most of Iowa lacked Ron Paul volunteers in place to drive people to the Caucus if necessary, despite having the man power in the state.
I did my undergrad work in USC's School of Cinema-Television Cinematic Arts. I have a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Writing for Screen & Television. I loved it, but a future of waiting tables and taking meetings with B-List producers was not for me.
This blog is ostensibly to discuss healthcare policy and maybe educate a few of my fellow medical students. But it will stray into current events, politics, and other science topics when they draw my interest
Other odd notes about me:
I've skied half the resorts on this list (Squaw Valley/Lake Tahoe, Snowbird/Park City, Whistler, Taos, Vail)
I "played" lacrosse in high school and through a club level team in college
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