Running With The Big Dogs: Sybil Norcroft Book Six Read Online Free PDF Page A

president ordered.

Chapter Four
    White House Conference Center [an annex building of the White House], 726 Jackson Place in Washington, D.C., October 29, 2019, 0800 hrs
-Present: POTUS; VPOTUS; Surgeon General Sybil Norcroft; Attorney General; Speaker of the House; Senate Majority Leader; Secretaries of State, HHS, Treasury; Chairman CEA [Council of Economic Advisors]; Chairman, Federal Reserve Board; Chairperson, Council of Economic Advisers for the Congressional Joint Economic Committee.
Re: Proposal to create a National Health Service to forestall impending failure of the United States economy.
    P resident Willets opened the meeting on an upbeat note, “I have been in contact with PRC Chairman Liew Bao-Zhi by telephone last evening and again this morning. It is in their best interests to support us on a temporary basis. He insists on absolute secrecy about the PRC’s involvement. His conservative wing would have his head if they knew that he was going to allow an opportunity to destroy the power of the United States pass without jumping on it. They know next to nothing about geopolitical finances, and would never be able to grasp the fact that destroying the U.S. economy would plunge their own rapidly developing nation into the doldrums for decades to come as well. Now, it is time for us to hear from Frank Margoles from HHS and Dr. Norcroft, the Surgeon General.”
    Dr. Margoles smiled and indicated that Dr. Norcroft would make the presentation since it was more or less her baby.
    “Thank you, Dr. Margoles, Mr. President, and all of you. I have been working on this for several years. Allow me a moment to let you know how I got interested. I have five friends—middle-aged independent practitioners of cardiology—whose business operates in the red despite them having a thriving clinical practice. I, like you, had to ask, how can that be? The answer is simple, and chilling. Nonhospital clinicians in subspecialties such as cardiology, neurosurgery, orthopedics, urology, etc. cannot collect enough on their billing to make ends meet. They are leaving private practice in droves. However, hospitals and other large health organizations can only hire so many physicians; and, because supply of physicians applying for those jobs outstrips the demand offered by the HMOs and hospitals is now quite low, the only alternative for my friends and doctors like them is to retire early and usually to get new jobs outside of medicine. That flies in the face of a critical shortage of doctors to serve our population and constitutes healthcare delivery nonsense.
    Newly graduated physicians are in an even worse position. They have mountains of debt, and decent jobs are not available. Many of them will never practice clinical medicine and even insurance companies and large corporations are over-staffed by overqualified medical personnel. The patients out there in the country are having real difficulty obtaining a doctor. Physicians’ assistants and nurse practitioners cannot absorb the whole load because—although they are fine people—their educations are limited; and crucial skills possessed by physicians are becoming less and less available.
    “The PPACA [Patient Portability and Affordable Care Act of 2010, or “Obamacare”, as it is pejoratively known] has failed miserably to deliver on its promise. The concepts were excellent: patient centered health care delivery systems managed by a number of different accountable care organizations; payment based not on fee-for-service, but rather on evidence based performance and efficiency; bringing into the system the forty million uninsured who were—and, unfortunately, still are—clogging our emergency rooms.
    This included a mandatory agreement by all Americans to have insurance and therefore to remove ‘free-riders’ from the equation which would go a long ways to alleviate costs of our system. Better preventative care and better early care would prevent paying the huge costs of taking