Obama and the AMA

You gotta love the guy. Whether you agree with his policies or not, you gotta love the guy.

President Obama spoke at the American Medical Association yesterday, presumably to generate support for any healthcare reform coming down the line from his administration. He is a brilliant speaker, you must admit, even if you don't agree with his policies.

I don't want to make this a love fest for Obama, but I did love his speech. He knows his audience. He knows who they are and he knows what makes them tick.

He said that he wants doctors to go back to being doctors, not administrators. Hello! I think all of us want that, certainly the health care providers.

"Care" has come out of the "healthcare system", and now it's just a "health system", maybe even without the "health" if you look at some of the rankings of our country vs. other parts of the world. It has become a factory and the patients are just cogs in the wheel.

Doctors go into the field of medicine to help and heal people, not to administer policies dictated by some third party machine. Obama was talking their language, feeling their issues.

Obama also said that he wants to work with doctors to fix healthcare. He wants to listen to them, learn from them, and work with them to get the practice of medicine back to where it should be. The ultimate in collaboration. Again, he was talking their language. Doctors want to feel like they are in control of their field and of their patients.

And the truth is that we do all need to work together. Government, healthcare providers, manufacturers, and dare I say -- agencies. If we are going to put "care" back into the "system", then we need to figure it out together.

I guess Obama was speaking my language too.

You can read more about it here on the WSJ blog: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/

Hope this finds you well -- Jim.