AIMS President Brian Lee Crowley was one of a select group of health care policy experts from around the globe invited to present to an international conference organized by the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest (CMPI).
The conference panels focused on how cost-based government healthcare policies are taking the decision-making process away from physicians and how government policies are actually impacting the practice of medicine.
This Commentary is based on Crowley’s remarks and includes his modification of a well-known poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Crowley’s “Ode to a Canadian Physician” became an instant hit. He uses the ‘Ode’ to describe the physician’s loss of port within the Canadian health care system.
In Physician (Dis)empowerment: The View from Canada Crowley points out that physicians surrendered a great deal of power over their own professional lives and their ability to act in the interests of their patients when physician and hospital care was essentially taken under full political direction in the 1960s in a wave of ideological enthusiasm and economic ignorance. He says despite the misgivings of some in the medical community, doctors largely embraced a public sector health care monopoly model, a monopoly that has only extended its tentacles and its centralising control in the intervening decades.
To read the complete Commentary, click here.
The keynote speaker at the CMPI conference in Washington. D.C. was Dr. Francois Sarkozy, managing partner of AEC Partners and brother of French president Nicolas Sarkozy.
Other participants include Scott Gottlieb of the American Enterprise Institute, Marc Siegel of NYU School of Medicine and NY Post and LA Times Columnist, and Tim Evans of The Stockholm Network.
