A few good things...

Last night I had dinner with one of my girlfriends who is a year ahead of me in the same medical school. She's my inside connection for all things in medical school. In fact, after dinner she presented me with a huge stack of first year books, ALL FOR ME! I was so excited! Those things are damn expensive... all you pre-meds might want to start a piggy bank or something. So big thanks to her, my book bill should be significantly lighter. For those of you who don't know, med school books run upwards of $1000 per semester. Yikes!

Ok, so the point is that she is one of our school's delegates to AMSA (American Medical Student Association). She just got back from a conference where they were of course discussing the nuances of Obama's health plan, as well as the new implementation of the Bush admin's loan repayment system for residents.

A couple of new things:

1. She said residents do in fact have to pay back loans during residency, but the payments are income sensitive... and you won't have to pay above a certain portion of your income regardless of how much you owe. Ok, fair enough.

2. After 10 years in public service, or 20 years working anywhere, along with continuous payments, the balance of your debt is forgiven. The years paid during your residency count towards this. Sweet!

On the Obama Plan:

1. A big part of the Obama plan is about "standardization of care". Meaning that condition X is successfully treated with treatment plan A which works 95% of the time. As a physician, if you choose to do anything other than treatment plan A for condition X, the services will not be paid for.

Ok, this sounds like bunk to me. In this case why do we even need physicians? If we can just standardize patients into little checkboxes, we can just get high school grads as technicians to follow the set protocol. Ridiculous. What about the percentage of people that treatment plan A won't work for? The role of a physician isn't just to treat a patient according to a checklist, but to assess other mitigating circumstances in the patients life... to ensure the treatment will match his condition, his capability, his lifestyle. Oh, boy... don't get me started on this.

2. The Obama plan doesn't allow for pre-existing conditions to exclude patients from coverage. Yay! About time!

But overall, I think many things in the Obama plan have the potential to be good... but physicians really need representation on the things that will negatively impact our decision making.