The musings of a physician who served the community for over six decades
367 Topics
Downtown A discussion about downtown area in Philadelphia and connections from today with its historical past.
West of Broad A collection of articles about the area west of Broad Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Delaware (State of) Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Religious Philadelphia William Penn wanted a colony with religious freedom. A considerable number, if not the majority, of American religious denominations were founded in this city. The main misconception about religious Philadelphia is that it is Quaker-dominated. But the broader misconception is that it is not Quaker-dominated.
Particular Sights to See:Center City Taxi drivers tell tourists that Center City is a "shining city on a hill". During the Industrial Era, the city almost urbanized out to the county line, and then retreated. Right now, the urban center is surrounded by a semi-deserted ring of former factories.
Philadelphia's Middle Urban Ring Philadelphia grew rapidly for seventy years after the Civil War, then gradually lost population. Skyscrapers drain population upwards, suburbs beckon outwards. The result: a ring around center city, mixed prosperous and dilapidated. Future in doubt.
Historical Motor Excursion North of Philadelphia The narrow waist of New Jersey was the upper border of William Penn's vast land holdings, and the outer edge of Quaker influence. In 1776-77, Lord Howe made this strip the main highway of his attempt to subjugate the Colonies.
Land Tour Around Delaware Bay Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Tourist Trips Around Philadelphia and the Quaker Colonies The states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and southern New Jersey all belonged to William Penn the Quaker. He was the largest private landholder in American history. Using explicit directions, comprehensive touring of the Quaker Colonies takes seven full days. Local residents would need a couple dozen one-day trips to get up to speed.
Touring Philadelphia's Western Regions Philadelpia County had two hundred farms in 1950, but is now thickly settled in all directions. Western regions along the Schuylkill are still spread out somewhat; with many historic estates.
Up the King's High Way New Jersey has a narrow waistline, with New York harbor at one end, and Delaware Bay on the other. Traffic and history travelled the Kings Highway along this path between New York and Philadelphia.
Arch Street: from Sixth to Second When the large meeting house at Fourth and Arch was built, many Quakers moved their houses to the area. At that time, "North of Market" implied the Quaker region of town.
Up Market Street to Sixth and Walnut Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
Sixth and Walnut over to Broad and Sansom In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Montgomery and Bucks Counties The Philadelphia metropolitan region has five Pennsylvania counties, four New Jersey counties, one northern county in the state of Delaware. Here are the four Pennsylvania suburban ones.
Northern Overland Escape Path of the Philadelphia Tories 1 of 1 (16) Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.
City Hall to Chestnut Hill There are lots of ways to go from City Hall to Chestnut Hill, including the train from Suburban Station, or from 11th and Market. This tour imagines your driving your car out the Ben Franklin Parkway to Kelly Drive, and then up the Wissahickon.
Philadelphia Reflections is a history of the area around Philadelphia, PA
... William Penn's Quaker Colonies
plus medicine, economics and politics ... nearly 4,000 articles in all
Philadelphia Reflections now has a companion tour book! Buy it on Amazon
Philadelphia Revelations
Try the search box to the left if you don't see what you're looking for on this page.
George R. Fisher, III, M.D.
Obituary
George R. Fisher, III, M.D.
Age: 97 of Philadelphia, formerly of Haddonfield
Dr. George Ross Fisher of Philadelphia died on March 9, 2023, surrounded by his loving family.
Born in 1925 in Erie, Pennsylvania, to two teachers, George and Margaret Fisher, he grew up in Pittsburgh, later attending The Lawrenceville School and Yale University (graduating early because of the war). He was very proud of the fact that he was the only person who ever graduated from Yale with a Bachelor of Science in English Literature. He attended Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons where he met the love of his life, fellow medical student, and future renowned Philadelphia radiologist Mary Stuart Blakely. While dating, they entertained themselves by dressing up in evening attire and crashing fancy Manhattan weddings. They married in 1950 and were each other’s true loves, mutual admirers, and life partners until Mary Stuart passed away in 2006. A Columbia faculty member wrote of him, “This young man’s personality is way off the beaten track, and cannot be evaluated by the customary methods.”
After training at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia where he was Chief Resident in Medicine, and spending a year at the NIH, he opened a practice in Endocrinology on Spruce Street where he practiced for sixty years. He also consulted regularly for the employees of Strawbridge and Clothier as well as the Hospital for the Mentally Retarded at Stockley, Delaware. He was beloved by his patients, his guiding philosophy being the adage, “Listen to your patient – he’s telling you his diagnosis.” His patients also told him their stories which gave him an education in all things Philadelphia, the city he passionately loved and which he went on to chronicle in this online blog. Many of these blogs were adapted into a history-oriented tour book, Philadelphia Revelations: Twenty Tours of the Delaware Valley.
He was a true Renaissance Man, interested in everything and everyone, remembering everything he read or heard in complete detail, and endowed with a penetrating intellect which cut to the heart of whatever was being discussed, whether it be medicine, history, literature, economics, investments, politics, science or even lawn care for his home in Haddonfield, NJ where he and his wife raised their four children. He was an “early adopter.” Memories of his children from the 1960s include being taken to visit his colleagues working on the UNIVAC computer at Penn; the air-mail version of the London Economist on the dining room table; and his work on developing a proprietary medical office software using Fortran. His dedication to patients and to his profession extended to his many years representing Pennsylvania to the American Medical Association.
After retiring from his practice in 2003, he started his pioneering “just-in-time” Ross & Perry publishing company, which printed more than 300 new and reprint titles, ranging from Flight Manual for the SR-71 Blackbird Spy Plane (his best seller!) to Terse Verse, a collection of a hundred mostly humorous haikus. He authored four books. In 2013 at age 88, he ran as a Republican for New Jersey Assemblyman for the 6th district (he lost).
A gregarious extrovert, he loved meeting his fellow Philadelphians well into his nineties at the Shakespeare Society, the Global Interdependence Center, the College of Physicians, the Right Angle Club, the Union League, the Haddonfield 65 Club, and the Franklin Inn. He faithfully attended Quaker Meeting in Haddonfield NJ for over 60 years. Later in life he was fortunate to be joined in his life, travels, and adventures by his dear friend Dr. Janice Gordon.
He passed away peacefully, held in the Light and surrounded by his family as they sang to him and read aloud the love letters that he and his wife penned throughout their courtship. In addition to his children – George, Miriam, Margaret, and Stuart – he leaves his three children-in-law, eight grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and his younger brother, John.
A memorial service, followed by a reception, will be held at the Friends Meeting in Haddonfield New Jersey on April 1 at one in the afternoon. Memorial contributions may be sent to Haddonfield Friends Meeting, 47 Friends Avenue, Haddonfield, NJ 08033.
The Institute for Experimental Psychiatry Research Foundation meets alternatively in Boston and Philadelphia, in recognition of its rather complicated historical relationship with Harvard and Penn. The Spring 2005 trustees meeting was held in Boston, with Dr. Charles Czeisler of the Brigham and Women's Hospital making a presentation of his work with sleepy resident physicians. Sleep is now a central focus of the work of the Institute, particularly the effect of lack of sleep on performance. Resident physicians are a group with lots of experience with sleep loss, so much that such experiences as residents are central imprinting in the lifelong brotherhood of the profession. The public tends to regard the torment of protracted craving for sleep as some kind of dangerous hazing inflicted on professional newcomers by sophomoric seniors. Every once in a while, someone gets hurt by these games. That seems to be a general public reaction. For the most part, by contrast, members of the profession who have themselves undergone the experience turn away silently from such unfeeling remarks. As the old contraceptive joke about the Pope has it, if you don't play the game, don't make the rules.
In the first place, it is wrong to suggest that resident physicians are somehow helpless victims of authority, abused slaves of somebody's profit motive, or warped masochists enduring the process in order to inflict it on someone else. Perhaps the example of my classmate Seibert is useful. As a freshman medical student, Seibert was so overwhelmed by the volume of facts he was expected to learn, that he decided to give up sleep entirely. Seibert, by the way, was no moron; he was an honors graduate of a very selective Ivy League university. And he actually did stop sleeping for more than two weeks until he collapsed and had to be stopped. This was his own choice, gamely adopted in spite of general ridicule. And to show that overachieving is not limited to physicians, there was my oriental patient, the daughter of the President of her country. She related that as a graduate student she did not go to bed for three years; during all that time, she sat at her desk, slapping her face to keep awake. What we are talking about here is a self-selected group of committed and dedicated people, perhaps overly shamed by the specter of failure.
The work of our Institute has helped document and understand the injurious effect of sleep loss on performance; no one can go very long without sleep before responses and vigilance begin to deteriorate. A great many vehicle accidents are caused by drowsy drivers; it is a concern that pilots of airplanes on long-distance flights are to some provable degree less competent to land the plane. Therefore, it is not completely surprising to find that interns on protracted duty do make 20% more errors in medication orders, and nearly 50% more diagnostic errors. It is jarring to discover a measurable increase in the number of intern auto accidents, particularly when driving home from work. Maybe we ought to pass a law about it.
Commiseration is one thing; proposals to interfere are quite another. For one thing, the time-honored protection against the harm of this problem is redundancy. The complex, fast-paced and dangerous environment of a hospital, like that of an airline cockpit, has very little tolerance for lack of vigilance. Our solution has been to do everything three times, with overlapping responsibilities and repeated opportunity for catching errors before they get through to the patient. Although the malpractice lawyer seeks to pin the whole blame on some person, particularly one who is covered by insurance, the reaction of doctors to adverse events is to presume that at least three people must have cooperated in letting it slip through. At night and on weekends, the reduced staff tends to weaken the defensive network. But by every assessment, the greatest threat to our protective screen of redundancy is cost control. Any manager of managed care can find duplication and overlap in ten minutes of searching for it in a hospital; redundancy is a big factor in the high cost of running a hospital. The law of decreasing returns will dictate that it becomes very expensive to eliminate the last one percent of errors. To state it in reverse: it is very tempting to save a bundle of money in a competitive world, by accepting only a small increase in the errors. Since it is a matter of opinion, physicians are grimly determined that it shall be physicians who strike that balance. Those who press for more punitive treatment of physicians in the matter of errors should reflect that it surely will convince physicians to flee the risk of responsibility for the decision of where to strike the balance.
If you bend metal repeatedly it will crack; if you stretch a rope too hard it will snap. These unfortunate events are not called errors, and it is improper to search for blame in them. The medical profession is aghast that the public does not seem to appreciate that average life expectancy has increased by thirty years in the past century. That's not ancient history; life expectancy has increased by three years in the past ten. A system that produces a result like that is entitled to a certain amount of tolerance for its errors if we must call them errors. In other environments, that's known as pushing the envelope. Anyone who thinks it's fun to stand on your feet for thirty-six consecutive hours -- hasn't tried it.
Surgeons are perhaps somewhat more conscious of the need to train young professionals to drive themselves beyond ordinary endurance. After all, if an operation is unexpectedly prolonged, the surgeon can't just quit, he must finish. Neurosurgeons, with their fourteen-hour procedures, are particularly vehement on the topic. But it is true of every physician, too. When the telephone rings in the middle of the night, will this young fellow haul himself out of bed, or will he tell the patient to take an aspirin and call again in the morning? Increasingly, we hear complaints from patients that other doctors didn't even take the trouble to examine them; the implication that we are somehow not like that is very flattering. Part of the training is forbearance, too. At three in the morning, it is very easy to feel sorry for yourself and to reflect that an administrator with four times your income is home in his nice warm bed. The fact is, that if the person who is up and on his feet doesn't do the job, no one will.
Cadwalader
Some incomprehension from bystanders must simply be endured with patience. Beyond that, it could be futile to seek a complete understanding. Quite recently, I was explaining to a young lady in a tailored suit who Thomas Cadwalader was. His portrait, beneath which we were standing, hangs in the great hall of the Pennsylvania Hospital. Although he died in 1789, Dr. Cadwalader is still famous for his remarkable, unfailing courtesy. A sailor in a tavern on Eighth Street once waved a gun and announced to the crowd he was going out the swinging doors to shoot the first man he met. The first man happened to be Dr. Cadwalader, who tipped his hat and said, "Good morning, sir." So, the sailor shot the second man he met.
The young lady in the tailored suit brightened up. "The moral of that story, " she said, "Is always wear a hat."
1. Mandates: Individual vs. employer. Neither one covers the "illegals".
a. Individual mandate lays cost on young healthy, subsidizes older, people.
b. Employer mandate costs small business, subsidizes large.
c. Neither mandate addresses the tax issue which caused the problem.
d. The illegals concentrate in five states bordering Mexico -- start there, don't leave it as a left-over.
2. Cost control: the CBO sank this legislation in one sentence.
3. Cost control: the Town Meetings angered people with good health insurance, who don't want to see it injured. That's 85% of voters.
4. Cost control: Taxing providers and suppliers only raise health cost.
5. Cost Control: Home care may no longer be cheaper than hospital care except as a reimbursement quirk.
5. Increasing access is incompatible with cutting costs. Choose, don't dissemble.
6. Health care is a problem but does not create priority over two wars and the worst depression in eighty years -- none of which is now going well. Push the reset button.
THE PECULIARITIES OF OBAMACARE POLITICS
1. Required Reading: "The Road to Nowhere" by Jacob Hacker
a. "Budget" Reconciliation.
b. Cloture: terminating debate.
c. Bob Dole: Public Option is a sacrificial feint.
2. Role of Gerrymandering
a. Seniority puts extremists in control of Congress b. Gerrymandering puts moderates at greatest political risk.
c. 2010 is a redistricting year, especially in New Jersey and Florida.
d. Some political party will someday assert national party control over nominations to safe seats.
3. The hidden role of the Governors' Medicaid scam.
4. Small states need regional health insurance regulation; big states hate it.
5. The unconstitutionality (X Amendment) of mandates and the impeachability of presidential macing of political support.
WHAT OBAMACARE OUGHT TO SAY
1. Eliminate or modify the tax preference for employer-purchased insurance.
2. Repeal or modify the McCarran Fergusson Act to permit interstate insurance.
3.Restrict patents to those drugs which convince FDA of their unique value.
4. Mandate price/cost ratio to be displayed next to medical prices.
5. Pay hospital claims only after proof of transfer of responsibility after discharge.
6. Similarly, pay for lab charges for last day in hospital only after proof of reporting.
7. Override Maricopa Case of 1982 legislatively.
8. Restore the PSRO system.
9. Federally pre-empt anti-HSA state laws and regulations.
10. Subject Medicare debt to creditor disciplines:
a. Suspend COLA and add-ons until proof of solvency.
b. Merge Medicare and Medicaid, thus ending the cross subsidy.
This second Foreword is a summary of a radically modified proposal. It cannot be implemented without further changes in the law or at least some clarifications of the Affordable Care Act. To state the issue, it is that increasingly larger proportions of American lifetimes are not employed, and therefore are not able to take full advantage of an employer-based system. It becomes increasingly doubtful that thirty years of employment can sustain sixty years without earned income if you include childhood. Further, there is every reason to expect further migration of illness out of the employable age group. And finally, while there are signs of reasonableness, the mandatory stance of Obamacare is not greatly different from a package of mandatory "benefits" imposed on all attempts at innovation before they can be tested. If changes in the law are required before implementation, liberalization might as well be in place before innovations are proposed. No private company could proceed at arm's length without advance assurances resembling cronyism. Everything else is negotiable, but the notion of mandatory pre-approval of any modification must be softened to something less sovereign.
Sickness itself has moved into the retiree age group and will continue to migrate there. The means of payment cannot move from the employee group, so a two-step process is resorted to, with the middle-man government controlling the flow of money between age groups. If we are ever to remove middle-man costs, this feature must be removed, as well. Meanwhile, the paraphernalia of medical care, the medical schools, hospitals, and doctors, remain largely in the urban areas where employment formerly centered. So the government once more becomes a middle-man, and the system begins to resemble a virtual system, based on computer systems which do the job without actually moving. Until everyone stops moving, such duplication increases costs degrade the quality and start riots. We must move people less, and move money more. At one careless first glance, that sounds like shifting money between demographic groups, but picking winner and loser demography has repeatedly been shown to be too divisive; almost a prescription for a second Civil War. In short, we have fallen in love with a computerized virtual model, based on the faulty assumption that it is without cost. Here and there it might be tried experimentally, but it is far too early to make it mandatory. Consequently, it proves much easier to re-design the payment system, shifting money between different stages within individual lives, than to make everyone find a new doctor, just because the insurance compartment changed. It is absurd to make everyone move to Florida on his 66th birthday. Even redesigning transaction systems is not easy, but it is by far the easiest choice. Nevertheless, there is still too much friction in the various systems to make such improvements mandatory.
The best model to adopt is that of the university president who ordered a new quadrangle to be built without sidewalks. Only after the students had worn paths in the lawn along their favored routes to class, did he cover the paths with concrete sidewalks.
The issue at the moment is that money originates with employers, supporting the whole system, but their employees no longer get very sick. To reduce complaints, they are given benefits to spend which they really don't need, raising the cost of transferring the money to retirees who do need the money but are covered by Medicare. We are in danger of repeating that whole cycle with Medicare, piously calling it a single payer system, when in fact it would be a single borrower system as long as the Chinese don't collapse. Expensive sickness now centers in the retirees, but within fifty years a dozen diseases will be conquered, and we will then need the Medicare money to pay for retirement living. Constructing massive systems without that vision will just make it harder to replace them. We are, in summary, in great need of a gigantic funds transfer system, since moving the people and institutions to match the funding is preposterous. But as long as the system has two champions (Medicare and the Employer-based system) in possession of all the money, we flirt with collapses in order to force rearrangements.
All of this is divisive, indeed. For years to come, the easiest thing to move around will be money. Eventually, institutions and clients can sort themselves out for geographical unity, and probably improved efficiency. But a financing system with the money for sickness in the hands of people who aren't sick, plus a governmental, system dedicated to an age group with almost all the coming sickness but unsustainable finances -- is a wonder to behold. Therefore, we offer the Health Savings Account as having the flexibility to collect money from the young and healthy, invest it for decades, and use it for the same people when they get old. It can cross age barriers and follow illnesses, or it can remain with survivors and pay for their protracted retirement. If Medicare is modularized, it can supply the money to buy pieces as they begin to appear less desirable. It can redistribute subsidies to the poor if an agency gives it money, and it can adjust to changes in geography and science, since all it works with, is money. And it avoids redistribution politics by giving the same people, their own money.
For all these reasons, Health Savings Accounts on a lifetime or whole-life model seem the logical place to fix the broken vehicle, while we somehow keep its motor running. If successful, it will grow too big, so it should remain modular from the start. It has feelers in the insurance, finance and investment worlds. It could easily arrange branch offices for retail marketing and service. It should have networks for research and lobbying. But as long as it retains the branch concept and avoids the imperial one, it should manage to keep the doctors, patients and institutions functioning as the whole universe rearranges itself -- at its own speed. The first major step in this process would be to clear up some regulations which did not anticipate it. With Classical HSA adjusted for the interim role, the design stage can be undertaken to link the pieces of a person's health financing. Variations of lifetime Health Savings Accounts can be tried in demonstration projects, perhaps staying out of the way of the Affordable Care Act by unifying parts other than age 21 to 66, as the New Health Savings Account. And then seeing which version of lifetime HSA survives the squabbling. That isn't all. The really big picture is to absorb the pieces of Medicare, one by one, as sickness retreats from being the central cost, and the cost of retirement becomes the real threat.
Homer, the blind Greek poet, portrays Odysseus on his voyage home from the Trojan War, mistrustful of his own good intentions about approaching the Sirens, beautiful women with an enticing song. Odysseus lashed himself to the mast of his ship, as a precaution against temptation. The modern version is an escrow account, which protects more useful later expenditures against youthful temptations to spend, or else against hysterical reactions to less serious problems. In an escrow account, the owner specifies legitimate use, deviating only with the consent of some third-party custodian. Escrow has in mind the need for healthy young persons to save for more serious illnesses when tempted to spend on less serious ones, while there does remain an outside possibility for early spending to be more sensible. Buying a red convertible roadster with money set aside for retirement might be one issue best restrained, but not absolutely forbidden.
Escrow subaccounts become necessary when long-term saving is more central to some purposes than others. In a Health Savings Account, the bulk needs to be available for bruises and checkups, but an irreducible amount is set aside for serious distant spending. In the general account, partial escrow meets current needs, but a portion is forced into an untouchable future account. An entire age group may be solvent, while any individual member of it remains in serious deficit. So, insurance spread-the-risk covers some, while escrow protects against others. Both have a cost, kept as small as possible. The depositor must keep in mind, his fears invigorate his counterparty's business plan to make a profit. This whole issue depends upon the J-shaped cost curve of health care. The non-escrowed, general funds are mostly limited by deposits into them, but it must be recalled that health insurance itself adds 17% to medical costs. Escrowed funds depend more on frugal spending habits multiplied by investment and compound interest, boiled down to a few tenths of a percent increment over many decades. Long after bruises and check-ups have been forgotten.
Here's the battlefield. Professor Ibbotson of Yale has shown total stock market returns have averaged 11% for a century, and other investigators using other sources suggest it may have been true for two centuries. Never mind that future predictions may not follow past results -- it's all we have to judge by. Three percent inflation reduces 11% to 8% real return. Serious unexpected recessions ("Black swans") come along every 20 years or so, it has been traditional to protect against them by investing 40% in bonds, reducing the real return to 5%. Our calculation of the present rate of healthcare spending requires 6.7% for the plan we will sketch in later. On the other hand, it will be noticed the finance industry consumes investment returns in a manner which reduces 8% to 5% and meanwhile shifts most of the risk to the customer. Because of computers and productivity, it does not seem unreasonable to hope for 6.7% to the depositor. But it won't come easily since the finance industry is resisting fee-only approaches which the Wall Street Journal estimates would add 1% to the depositor's return. Since bigshot investors refuse to pay more than 0.4% for investing large amounts, and since HSA investors do not have a payroll to meet in recessions, it should be possible to approximate everybody's goals. After a struggle.
Most of our projections assume a 7% investment return for a simple reason. Money at 7% doubles in 10 years; $100 turns into $200 in a decade. Since the life expectancy at birth is now about age 83, eight decades of 7% doubles eight times and $100 at birth turns into (200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200, 6400, 12800, 25600) or more than 250 times as much as you started with. This simple calculation allows you to check data in your head. It is a subset of the "rule of 72", which says any interest rate within reason divided into 72 gives an answer of how long it takes to double. Thus, 7% doubles in 10 years, 6% takes 12 years to double, 8% takes 7 years, 10% takes 7. If you prefer, the Internet supplies many compound interest calculators, but be wary of false answers when a computer cache fails to empty completely. If you use an internet calculator, be sure to use one of the simple formulas for checking answers in your head. That summarizes why we used 7% investment returns instead of 6.7%. No matter what you use, projecting the future contains some uncertainty.
If math of all sorts bothers you, the following chapter may be skipped, since plenty of people with green eyeshades will check it. Ultimately, however, all projections of the future involve some guesswork, and therefore probably some errors. I stand in awe of the life insurance industry, which managed to make a stable business out of almost the same problem. They had to pick a premium decade in advance, invest it in a sea of uncertainty, and return a fixed but attractive guarantee decades later -- and still stay in business. That doesn't mean it will work every time, or that just anyone can succeed. But it does seem to show it is possible.
Let's summarize. The present system is going broke. Unless something changes, the Government will be unable to continue its present level of Medicare spending for more than a decade or so. The public is complaining about how much Medicare costs, but in spite of straining at the limits, 50% of its spending is borrowed by bond issues, and it does not provide any retirement benefits beyond present Social Security. Mrs. Clinton proposed lowering the age limit at a calculated extra cost of $7800 per enrollee per year, eight years ago; probably a third more in today's inflation, which the government protests are too little inflation to erase their deficits. And yet, Medicare covers half of all healthcare costs in the nation. As the Affordable Care Act demonstrated, the healthcare needs of the rest of the country cannot subsidize Medicare, Medicare is more likely to be asked to support other age groups. Medicare is the "third rail of politics, just touch it and you're dead." And yet, additional really sick people are moving into the Medicare age group; eventually, we will reach the point where, except for self-inflicted disorders, there will be no health costs except the first and last years of life. If we are on a pathway toward concentrating all, or mostly all, of healthcare costs into Medicare, it is futile to imagine doing away with Medicare. That's where we are, and it is pretty grim, forget about math to prove it. Please look now at our counter-proposal.
We propose to change the financing, not the delivery system. The total revenue is unchanged, the style and methodology of healthcare delivery are unaffected. Continuing bond issues to cover deficits are not contemplated, although one-time transition costs may have to be. Childhood costs are included, obstetrical and pediatric costs are transferred to Medicare. A moderate retirement benefit (nevertheless larger than sickness costs) is provided. Provision is made to include other programs, like additional pearls on a necklace, but only if they are self-sustaining, every ship on its own bottom. Everything is based on incentives and voluntary enrollment; nothing medical is mandatory. It may take longer than everyone wants, and it may include some approaches that offend some people, but at least they don't have to join if they don't want to. Since mathematical precision is impossible, it may fall short of its goals. In that case, it will only partially cover expenses. In that case, it will require supplementation. But it's hard to see how anyone would be worse off. If you think I am just ranting and raving, read on.
The American Medical Association feels unappreciated and misunderstood, and that is indeed a pretty accurate appraisal of things. In 1976, when I was offered an opportunity to be nominated to the AMA House of Delegates, I naturally was flattered to represent a thousand physicians. But I must admit that an extra incentive was the opportunity to learn what the AMA was all about. Since that is not exactly a superior qualification for election. I kept it quiet until now, but I can tell you that it is a very common feeling among new delegates. Even up to the time of being invited to give this lecture, my thoughts were formless or subliminal, and it is actually a welcome opportunity for me finally to coagulate my thoughts in order to say something useful to you tonight. Some would say, it is about time I made up my mind.
It seems helpful to begin with a broad historical perspective. Most of you know that the AMA was founded in Philadelphia in 1847 and that this Philadelphia County Medical Society is older than the AMA, and older than the Pennsylvania Medical Society. That was entirely natural, since Abraham Lincoln was then a small child in a log cabin in the forests of Illinois, whereas Spruce Street was lined with mansions, and the Pennsylvania Hospital was one of less than a dozen hospitals in the whole country. Things changed dramatically during the Nineteenth Century, but it would be important for you to recognize that by the year 1900, only seven percent of American physicians were members of the AMA. The AMA was founded as an elite brotherhood, adhering to a Hippocratic Code of Ethics, protected by stringent entrance restrictions, and internally disciplined by active boards of censors. If you were a member of the AMA and had not yet been thrown out, the public could be assured that you pledged active allegiance to Code of Ethics.
Well, as you know, the news media now jeer, and the AMA now despairs, that membership has declined to slightly less than half of all practicing physicians, a fact which is probably correctly attributed mostly to the rather high dues. Again, you should know that at the peak of membership in the 1930s, when it is fair to say that almost every physician was a member, the dues were free.
What happened to the ama was the Flexner Report in 1914. At that point, the AMA enlarged its traditional posture of self-discipline in a naughty world to active involvement in the processes by which medical excellence is produced. The Flexner report was devoted to examining the scientific content of the medical educational process and membership in the AMA came to stand for scientific as well as ethical excellence. Without intending for it to happen, the AMA had stumbled on the real secret of medical prestige, and after that, the AMA had no problems with attracting membership.
Throughout the Nineteenth Century, the major accomplishment of the AMA had been to establish the state licensing process. As a result of its formative activity in lobbying legislatures to create state boards of medical licensure, and it's later spectacular success in specifying the best medical educational process, the AMA has long played an influential, indeed dominant role in both areas. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals was another AMA project, and so was Blue Shield. None of these secondary power centers (now dominant in licensing, education, hospital regulation, and health insurance) was established as an AMA vassal,but their formats were established from the beginning using the AMA model, their early leaders were all AMA leaders, and to this day, the AMA is certainly where to be if you want to learn the ropes. It must surely be frustrating to the enemies of the AMA to see how fruitless it has been to resist the power of the AMA in these areas, because so much intangible power rests in the experience, savvy, and contacts of the AMA in these areas, because so much intangible power rests in the experience, savvy, and contacts of the AMA leadership. They know where the bodies are buried, and they know all about the personalities and politics of the process. You could spend three lifetimes as an outsider just trying to learn what is going on. By the time you learned, the situation would have shifted just enough so the information wouldn't do you any good.
So, you can see that in some ways the AMA is an object lesson in the way that society often gives power to idealistic leaders, and then Idealism struggles to check the corrupting pressures of Power. The ancient Greeks thought it was a good idea to have philosopher kings, but history teaches us that even they acted more like kings than philosophers. Since this seems to be the universal nature of human behavior, it is vital that we search for self-regulating mechanisms in our institutions. The one I suggest for the AMA is the very unpopular suggestion that we be careful how we lower the dues, and we must never achieve automatic membership of the entire physician community. We must be cautious of defining success in the Morris Fishbein sense of getting rid of all dues because then the staff and leadership won't need to solicit membership. When we stop scratching and scrabbling for members, the members lose their ultimate power to impose their wishes on the organization. No one now needs to sign a petition or make a speech, and it is definitely counterproductive to threaten the leadership that you are going to resign. Rather, the invisible hand of the perceived wishes of the membership is raised in every vote at every Trustee meeting we must care of this or that, we must be careful of our image, else the membership might not like it. The paradox is that the AMA is now much more representative of members than it ever was in its heyday. When Morris Fishbein was coining a fortune in cigarettes advertising in the JAMA, the wishes of the membership be damned.
The thought I would next pursue is that the bumper stickers, paraphrased as "If you don't like the AMA just try to practice medicine without it." The . AMA is the largest medical publisher in the world, and while New England Journal has more prestige at the moment, it wouldn't take a charismatic editor more than five years to put the JAMA back on top of the prestige heap. The AMA News is by far the best medical newspaper in the world, and it supplies an absolutely unique information role.
The AMA has a program in the health care within our prisons which has almost no visibility, but which I can assure you is something you can be very proud of as a humanitarian effort conducted for its own sake. The AMA is extremely active in such abstruse but vital projects as creating medical nomenclature coding, uniform insurance billing forms, medical manpower surveys, health economics monitoring, and clearinghouses for personal exchanges. Whenever we have had a war or physicians draft, the AMA has been the only organization capable of coordinating the civilian and Military medical needs of the country. The AMA seems to be the only organizations which give a hoot about the Veterans Administration or military medicine. There is a very large building in Chicago filled with a thousand salaried people doing many other very necessary things, and doing them quite creditably, without getting very much public credit for it.
The United States of America is a republic, not a democracy as we sometimes tend to say. The American Medical Association is a much purer form of a republic, and its retention of some republican forms which the National government has lost has been a very useful political education for me. I take my seat in the House of Delegates by presenting a little yellow card, signed by the current president of the Pennsylvania Medical Society. If I have the card, I am seated; no card, no card. The cards are given to the State societies in the proportion of one card for every thousand AMA members. The AMA sees to it that the State Society Presidents are in person at the meeting to adjudicate credentials disputes. States may elect their delegates in any way they like and there are several methods. In Pennsylvania, the election is made by the Pennsylvania Medical Society House of Delegates, where membership is roughly one for every hundred members, sitting by countries. Philadelphia County has 30 delegates, and three AMA delegates, although there is nothing official about that.
The AMA House of Delegates meets twice a year for a week. Since you cannot retain your seat without tending to the political fences, a delegate must also attend the state and local meetings. A delegate must thus expect to devote four full weeks a year to the experience, and he need not expect to be influential at the AMA until he has been there at least five years. The AMA delegates feel very strongly about personal commitment; you can be tolerated if you are pretty eccentric, but if you don't come to a meeting, you are instantly ostracised, and probably will be quickly replaced.
The delegates have two main duties. They are an electoral college and they are a legislative body. The House of Delegates elects the President of the AMA and the Trustees, who run the organization between meetings of the House. The House also elects the members of four Councils, who are the specialists in matters of science, legislation, medical practice, and governance. The 70 officers, trustees, and councilors are the leadership, the Curia so to speak, and House of Delegates meetings are highly charged with the politics of these elections as well as the shadow of elections coming in future years. I am inclined to think the candidates take the elections too seriously and the delegates do not take them seriously enough, but it is a matter about which you cannot be entirely certain. There is absolutely no doubt that every delegate has ample opportunity to know every candidate very well, and it is likely that the House makes relatively few mistakes in its choices.
Acting in its legislative role, the House of Delegates usually receives a very thick handbook of agenda, two weeks before every meeting. Most newcomers are overwhelmed by the unexpected volume of detail and are quite unprepared for the ensuing experience of holding up their hands and voting on two or three hundred issues in the course of a week. There is a knack to mastering the process, of course, but mostly the knack comes from making the awful acknowledgment that you really must spend all evening studying the handbook, every evening for the two weeks before each meeting. You don't have to do it, of course, and some members are obviously bluffing. But if you expect to be effective you must do it, and if you want to get effective you must do it, and if you want to get effective you must do it, and if you want to get promoted you have to be seen to be effective. Business starts at 7 AM sharp, often in a city where you must cope with three hours of jet lag, and it goes straight through to midnight. The fact that you are eating breakfast o at a reception does not change the business nature of the day. Only a profession of workaholics could produce three hundred delegates and three hundred alternates, the majority of whom will put up with this grind for ten or fifteen years. Some of our decisions may be wrong, but we sure try hard to make them right.
In closing, I think I should say something about the AMA lobbyists. The AMA is rightly known as having the most effective lobby in Washington, but you ought to know what that means. Since we are a national organization, and every congressman has a doctor, and every congressman lives where there is a county medical society, it is possible to create an organization which can influence the entire Congress, but only with a massive organizational effort. Congressmen too are overload with work and live in a constantly confusing environment. Just to be able to get them to listen to your story is an achievement, and it is necessary to work very hard at repairing this network of contracts. AMPAC raises campaign contributions, and this is one way of reaching some congressmen. Knowing who is on what committee, how he leans, who can influence him, and when the timing is right is an enormous organizational job. Sometimes extraordinary measures are needed, was true in April 1984 when mandatory assignment of Medicare benefits looked as though it might pass. The AMA flew in 125 state medical society presidents and other key contracts and led each one up to the appropriate doors at the critical moment. As you know, the effort was successful.
Most lobbying, however, is far less dramatic. The Federal Register is published weekly and averages seventy thousand pages a year. Perhaps a twentieth of that fine print pertains to medicine in some way, and it must be culled out, studied, decided about, and lobbied with the staff assistants and bureaucrats who are producing it. here are no major victories in this sort of work and you lose a lot of arguments. But there is little doubt that the steady pressure, the constant alertness, and the presentation of superior information have the effect of pushing this avalanche of legislation in directions which are much more favorable to medicine than if the effort were not undertaken.
And fellows, it all takes money. We can raise money by forming captive malpractice insurance companies, or getting advertising in our journals, or charging for computer networks, or speculating in real estate. But who pays the piper calls the tune. In the long run, the member will only control their society if the society remains heavily dependent on their dues. You really must choose between three alternatives. You can have no one represent the profession in an era when everyone else is represented. You can be represented by a bureaucracy which constantly reflects your wishes because it constantly hungers for your dues. The decision is yours and you can expect, in the long run, to get what you pay for.
109 Volumes
Philadephia: America's Capital, 1774-1800 The Continental Congress met in Philadelphia from 1774 to 1788. Next, the new republic had its capital here from 1790 to 1800. Thoroughly Quaker Philadelphia was in the center of the founding twenty-five years when, and where, the enduring political institutions of America emerged.
Philadelphia: Decline and Fall (1900-2060) The world's richest industrial city in 1900, was defeated and dejected by 1950. Why? Digby Baltzell blamed it on the Quakers. Others blame the Erie Canal, and Andrew Jackson, or maybe Martin van Buren. Some say the city-county consolidation of 1858. Others blame the unions. We rather favor the decline of family business and the rise of the modern corporation in its place.
Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.
