Some time ago when I first came to Florida, I was befriended by Karen, a lovely young woman who hailed from Indiana.  She was a transplant to the Space Coast, just as I was, beating me here by a couple of years.  Karen was an RN.  She worked for a biomedical company that held a NASA contract to perform clinical tests on the astronauts pre-flight.  She was also involved in clinical trials to determine the effects of prolonged bedrest on the human body, simulating the weightlessness of space flight. She even got to experience weightlessness in NASA’s “vomit comet”.

In the ten or so years Karen and I hung out together, I met lots of interesting people, including some of her astronaut friends and their families.  Karen also introduced me to a psychiatrist named Pat Santy who was doing research at KSC on temporary duty, if my memory is correct.

Fast forward a few years. Karen left Florida for Houston to take a job at Johnson Space Center, and over time we lost touch.

When I joined the blogging world, one of the first people I met was ThirdWaveDave. One day Dave suggested I might be interested in reading a post by a blogger who called herself “Dr. Sanity”, and — oh by the way, she also had worked in the Space program too.

It was Pat Santy.  Our virtual cyber “orbits” re-intersected.  Since then, I’ve read her posts and listened to her radio show when she was doing one.

Today Dr. Sanity is considering her future in the medical profession.  She’s penned a piece that deserves your read.  (I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank Charlite for bringing it to my attention.)  Here it is…

http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2010/03/my-last-word-on-health-care-reform.html

The only guarantee you have that ObamaCare will provide the promised benefits, and remain within its boundaries, is the trust you place in the word of Barack Obama and his party… and your faith in future politicians who have yet to be elected.

It is madness to extend such trust to the party of Charlie Rangel, John Conyers, Nancy Pelosi, Christopher Dodd, Barney Frank, and Harry Reid. There is no reason to trust an administration that places billions of dollars into the hands of unaccountable “czars,” including the odd Communist. Only a fool would believe the endless string of lies and deception from this President will magically transform into honesty and fidelity, after his angry demands for more power are fulfilled. A party that openly plans to subvert what little power remains in the tattered Constitution will not become more lawful after it seizes control of an entire industry. It would be idiotic to believe that a government whose economic projections have never come close to reality can suddenly predict the costs of the most enormous program it has ever produced. Remember, this Administration’s idea of a “system working” consists of frantic airline passengers tackling a terrorist seconds before his underwear detonates.

It would also be foolish to place such faith in Republicans, or anyone else. Today’s Democrats are not unique in their corruption, a cancer that can be driven into remission with electoral chemotherapy in 2010 and 2012. Massive government breeds massive corruption through its very nature – it is the predictable behavior of people who are no less greedy, ambitious, or deceitful that the most rapacious robber baron. They hide their avarice behind masks of finely chiseled sanctimony, but as the final maneuvers toward the passage of ObamaCare illustrate, they’re just as quick to bend rules and perpetrate fraud as any white-collar criminal.

It would be a horrible mistake to accept a deal with the creators of history’s most staggering natonal debt, based on assurances they will place your interests ahead of theirs, for decades to come. As Darth Vader memorably explained to Lando Calrissian, the State can always alter the terms of the deal, and your only recourse will be praying they don’t alter it any further.

Back in June, 09, when this monstrosity of a bill was only a gleam in Obama and Pelosi’s eyes, I wrote that I didn’t care any more and that the zombies and vampires could do what they wanted:

I’m done.

My entire professional life as a physician and psychiatrist I have been exceptionally vocal about the prospect of government medicine here in the US. I have given impassioned speeches (when I was younger); written essays in medical journals and elsewhere; and talked until I am blue in the face to anyone and everyone about the horrors of socialized medicine and government interference in the health care system of this country. Once it would have seemed impossible that I would ever want to quit medicine; to stop practicing psychiatry.

I have watched with dismay as every year we have inched closer and closer to the Democrats and the left’s goals; goals which I firmly believe will completely destroy American medicine. I have watched up close and personal the utter soul-destroying consequences to both patients and doctors alike, of the pervasive cultural collectivist and looter thinking in my specialty. Every time this madness is killed, it just doesn’t stay dead. Like some kind of putrefying zombie, the left just keeps resurrecting it. Logic doesn’t matter. Facts don’t matter.

Let’s face it. To the zombies of the left, reality doesn’t matter. With President Postmodern in office, aided and abetted by zombie hordes in Congress; why should I pretend anymore that it does?

This time around, I JUST DON’T CARE ANYMORE. If that’s what people want, so be it.

I’m done. If Congress passes Obama’s destructive zombie health plan in any form, I quit.

I will simply not practice medicine anymore. I will take my psychiatry books and my years of experience and do something else. I used to wait tables when I was in college. It’s an honest living and Obama isn’t interested for the time being in nationalizing restaurants–yet.

Let me be clear. I don’t believe that people have a “right” to health care; because, what advocating such a “right” basically means is that you believe you have a “right” to my mind; you have a “right” to my professional competence; i.e., you have a “right” to enslave me.

Having chosen to work primarily in the public sector most of my life, I have watched this entitlement and victimhood mentality grow to incredible proportions in parallel with number of laws, regulations, administrators, and oversight agencies. I have watched the decline of personal responsibility and the rise of endless demands and impossible clinical and psychosocial conundrums that I am expected to solve, even if my patient has no desire to change. I have been demoted to the near-mindless activity of pushing pills to the point that I understand why my collegues see every clinical situation as a biological malfunction–the old adage that says, to a hammer everything looks like a nail, comes to mind. Psychiatrists are the mental health profession’s hammer; and drugs are the nail. And, the same powers that tell me to prescribe drugs, warn me against the evil of working too closely with any of the drug companies, for fear I might be corrupted, God forbid, by the dastardly profit motive.

I have watched as the quality of care has inevitably deteriorated even as spending went up. I have watched the system abuse patients and doctors alike–to the point that the frustration level just keeps going up and is simply not worth it anymore.

I quit my memberships in the AMA and APA some years back when I realized that they were not really in it to make things better for doctors or patients. Perhaps at one time they were real advocates for both, but now they are like most of those supposedly “capitalist” businesses–like AIG and all the others– who willingly feed at the government trough and can’t get enough of that yummy government pork. They sold themselves long ago–in both areas of clinical and research medicine– in order to have a place at Big Government’s table….

We will all see what happens when and if the zombies take over health care in this country and make it all like Medicare and Medicaid….and GM and Fannie Mae and etc. etc.

I expect a Zombie Health Czar (Barney Frank would be perfect) will be appointed any day now. Someone who will have control over doctors’ compensation and drug company profits. Someone who won’t have to answer to the public who can control implementation of any aspect of the zombie plan that needs to bypass intelligent scrutiny.

Well, I guess I lied to myself about being done with the whole thing, because I wasn’t able to keep my mouth shut about the topic, as readers of this blog know; and I have since written many times about the increasing insanity and duplicity and outright lies about so-called “health care reform”- Obama style. But what I didn’t lie to myself about is what I will do if Obamacare passes.

This weekend is clearly going to be make or break for those of us who value freedom and don’t want to see America take a giant leap forward toward socialism and Big Government.

Like Charles Krauthammer, I believe that–by hook or crook(and undoubtedly it will be mostly crook), this terrible thing is going to be foisted on the American public, who clearly do not want it. But we will get it nonetheless, because we were so careless about who we elected; so mesmerized by empty rhetoric and so zombified by the promises of hopenchange.

I am pessimistic, but willing to be pleasantly surprised that there are still people of conscience and integrity who will stand against this health care tyranny.

If there aren’t, then this will truly be the beginning of a pathetic end for the American values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

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