at and federal money is going to be spent, let's look at places where it can be saved and liability is clearly one of them. i think any federal reform is like federal -- what i call, torque reform. light. if that is true, we have to be very careful that it does not undercut things that happen in the states already. i've seen some of the proposals and they provide something rather meager and then all the work is done in texas. it was done in texas. does not cut what the states have already done. there are mythical and real reforms. limits on noneconomic damages, which you would know as pain and suffering, works. congress so far is very shy away from that.

the trial lawyers want no limits on damages of any kind because they feel that if they get 1/3 of the result, any cut, cuts 1/3 of that recovery. that's simple math. they're going to fight it to the death. unlikely to occur on a federal level. the president has talked about, when he's ever gotten, about some type of best practice reform. if a doctor follows best practices, he or she will not be liable. that's what we've heard. but it's interesting. i did work for a number of years and spoke to a friend of mine who does planters work for 40 years. i said, if you ever had a case where your challenged the best practices of doctors, this is what's talked about in media. no. medical malpractice cases go about whether the doctor violated that practice. so it's an illusion reform that's put fort by a lot of people and people buy it. oh, yes, if i followed best practices, i'm not liable.

this lawyer, this lawyer here, cannot think of a case ever where the practice standard is changed, is challenged. it's what the doctor has done that's challenged. so really watching this magic trick that you may hear from some sources about reforms that sound like reformsing but they're really not. they're illusions. if a best practice defense is followed, and that's what comes forward, i think there is an irony with the trial lawyers and some trial lawyer partisans saying, well, when it comes to medical devices, there's a bill here to overrule a case. when it comes to following f.d.a. standards, that shouldn't be a defense at all. so defense made by the holy government is not a defense where they've approved the medical device, but some private standard it is. it is a complete, total

contradiction. the bidder that's up here to overrule the support case that held that if the f.d.a. approves a medical device that is it and there's going to be no tort suits and there's a bill here very strong to overrule that will create more costs than you can imagine and meanwhile, juries around the country, well meaning, redesign your heart monitor, redesign your catheter, or redesign everything, and they have absolutely no idea what they're doing. and there's a bill up here to do exactly that. medical screening timets sometimes work if they're staffed the right way and their results are told to a jury. it's not a total solution. eliminating double payment for the same injury can work, but usually in medical liability, it doesn't, because it's a right of resured or recover. i'll mention a simple reform. rewrote about it. it's in the outline. this is what trial lawyers do all the time.

if you stop them, it will sure reduce those crazy, multizillion dollar settlements. trial lawyers more and more are using evidence of wrong doing, punishment, evil, they are very good at this. i did it for years. to lift up that pain and suffering award. what the defendant did or doesn't do has nothing to do with somebody's pain and suffering. and if trial lawyers are limited to try pain and suffering based on what the patient suffered, verdicts will go down. and that's a reform that's very simple, doesn't cost anything, and it can work. in sum, a practicer will his care for patients can use stress and reduce feelings of hostility. can go a long way to reducing the likelihood of lawsuits. but if government takes over,

dr. weiss cannot do and cannot practice medicine the way he does today. his flexibility with patients is gone. meeting full reforms had been enacted at the state level and they should not be interfered with. the federal government can help in some ways, but we have to watch very carefully about things like stab standard practices that will engulf of all. thank you for your time. [applause] >> thank you, victor. katherine serks, the association of american physicians. >> thank you, grover. i'm going to talk about three things today. number one, doctors and the hassle factor that's going on. number tw is what's going on with organized medicine and the response to health care reform proposals. number three, most importantly, the impact that this has on patients. the first thing is, i want to

ask -- i don't see a lot lot of medicare eligible faces. i venture to say i see a couple. most of you, have any of you heard your parents or grandparents say, i'm having trouble seeing a doctor? i'm having -- takes me a long time to get abappointment? anybody who's listening to us at home. ask your parents or grandparents if they've ever had trouble. they're not alone. you've heard today about government medicine and that we already have government medicine, so what i want to talk about is what it's really like on the front lines of government medicine. what happens with doctors and patients. not just from policy standpoint. not just from a political standpoint. what it's really like out there. now, if you've heard that there are problems, you're absolutely right. and it's not isolated. our survey of physicians shows that 33% of doctors refuse to accept new medicare patients. now -- and on top of that, they

add 40% of them refuse to do some services to the medicare patients that they already have. and you've heard a lot about money. if you listened to the a.m.a. and organized medicine, you've been told the money is the only issue. but i'm here to tell you that money is not the only issue. the biggest reason, let me tell you the biggest reason cited repeatedly by doctors is what we call the hassle factor. that includes fear of retaliation and threats from government and carriers, and that includes regulatory hoops that they have to jump to and compliance that they have to go through. that is by far interfering more so than even is the money. so if we -- let's take this for a moment. if we go to government medicine, do you expect the hassle level to go down? i don't think so. ask anyone who has increased their practice. doctors will leave. they are telling us 65% of us

-- of them tell us if they had it to do all over again, they would not participate in medicare. now that does not bode well for participation in a new government medicine program. the hassle factor. let's talk about what that hassle factor is. that's practicing in an atmosphere of fear and retaliation. the hassle factor that organized medicine is willing to sell out their position for a few percentage points increase in the physician reimbursement rate. that's not going to make the hassle factor go away. that's hassles of the doctors who play this dangerous game of regulatory roulette. let me tell you what that means. it means if you check the wrong box in a coding form, you can be prosecuted for fraud. we have a problem with fraud and abuse in this system. but criminals tend to get away with things and doctors make easy pickens when prosecutors

want to coming after them. so doctors, they're always told, if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear. greg has already shown us, it's almost impossible when you have more pages of regulations than the i.r.s. affecting the way you conduct business in your practice every day, it's almost impossible for you not to do something for which you could be prosecuted. you could lose your license. you could lose your practice. you could lose your home. the hassle factor of doctors being told what are best practices and that they'll have to fulfill those, they'll have to follow that, if we have comparative effectiveness research and the national health board that decides what's good for average patient, are you an average patient? i don't think of myself as an average patient. but doctors will have to go through the hoops of treatment procedures and outcomes measurements that have been outlined for those average parents. -- patients.

the halses that doctors are now having loyalties split. they have to answer to a medicare carrier as opposed to the patient when they're making decisions about what to do and how to treat the patient. let me tell you something. this is really telling. this tells you that it's not about the money. 65% of physicianings that we surveyed said they would rather treat patients for free than to treat a medicare or a medicaid patient. because then they don't risk that hassle factor. we already have -- with already have this, but cannot expand it. let's talk about what this means for patients now. for patients, this is about freedom. if patients are limited in their treatments, for example, if you are the parent of a child with an autism syndrome of some sort, what's going to happen when we have a national health board making decisions about which treatments are most appropriate?

they're not going to be able to make the choices that they want. our doctors tell us they will quit. they will quit medicine. they will not practice. you think it's difficult fining a doctor to treat you now? just wait until we have fully implemented government medicine. i'd like to tell a story about -- i had an -- i had an appointment with fema for many years. i've been to a lot of disasters. and when you're on a disaster, you see very quickly that the groups that are getting done on the ground are the volunteer groups and the private sector. they're the ones that make things happen, because there's a reference to katrina earlier. we already have doctors on the ground who are getting it done. we have doctors who are actually taking no insurance or government programs now. and you know what they're offering? they're offering $35 medical office visits. they're offering $10 lab tests. those doctors are really taking care of patients.

if we have government plan and mandatory insurance that these doctors are forced to participate in, they will not be able to practice medicine that way an they will be gone. they will be out of the system. so our response to abc is that tomorrow night, doctors are holding their four-hour town meeting for you to hear about what they really think about government medicine and i hope you'll join us for that. thank you. [applause] >> thank you. now joined by rick scott, the chairman of conservatives for patients rights to discuss rationing. >> thanks for the opportunity to be here. my background is i've been if the health care business for years. i started a hospital company, built that up. hospitals all across this country and in europe. i saw absolute rationing of health care. we had four hospitals in london. if you visited other hospitals in london, you could see how

pathetic the facilities were and talk to parents and see how they didn't get care. one of the first things we did this year is put together a documentary and we hired -- you can get a copy outside. if you don't get a copy, just e-mail me. what we did is we hired jean randall, an anchor from cnn who had gone freelance. he talked to patients and doctors. i'll give you quick stories. a 19-year-old girl says she's in college, it's time to get a pap smear test. they get in the united states and most countries after earlier two years after sexually active or 18 years old. she goes to the primary care doctor, says no, the government says you don't get it until you're 20. then they say the government just changed the law until you're 25. she goes back at 23, she's got cervical cancer and she has a year to live. she's 25 years old now. another example, a doctor, an oncologist, he'll tell you, you

can get a copy of this on the website, faces of government health care and look at all these interviews, he says if you're 70 years old, we don't even tell you all your treatment options. we know the government won't pay for it. over there, no, it costs too much. debbie herself, 55 years old, gets breast cancer. she can't get it, so she starts doing bake sales to see if she can pay for it out of pocket. it was against government regulation to do that. they've recently changed it maybe but the only reason she got it is because she got a story in "the new york times." there's a story about don newfield. he had heart arrhythmia. lives outside vancouver, canada. took 20 months to get an appointment with a cardiologist. he's in the e.r. almost once a month, almost dying. he had to come to the united states to a hospital in oklahoma city to get care. so there's no -- if you look at any country that has government health care, they ration.

the way they ration is they always run out of money because government always overpromise everything. they do exactly what everyone is talking about. they underpay doctors. what are you doing to do? take action? this is the career i want to have. are you going to do more of this? no, you'll do less. we have more limited access all the time. so the best example we've already talked about is medicaid. how many doctors want to take care of medicaid? once one is the reimbursement and the hassle factor. the more government we have involved in the system. i would ask everybody to take the time, this is 28 1/2 minutes. watch this. get on our websiting look at all the different interviews. talk to people in other countries. don't rely on us. talk to people who tell everybody the problem with government health care. you, your kids, your daughter, your son, your parents are not going to get the same health care they get today. thank you very much. >> the website? >> you can get on -- the

easiest is facesofgovernment healthcare.com. there's probably nine different interviews with doctors and with patients and it tells about the problems of getting health care in nose countries. thanks a lot. >> 1992 if the goth was was running -- somehow if the government was running health care and they decide if they don't have enough for cancer treatments, does anybody watching this believe that nancy pelosi's relatives will ever have a problem getting health care? does anybody here believe that the mayor of chicago or any of his relatives will ever have a problem getting health care? now, do you think that perhaps

you or one of your relatives might be told that there isn't enough to go around, might be one of the people who just isn't told about a new treatment? somehow when the politician run health care, you know their friends and relatives will be taken care of. that is why the elected officials talking about this aren't scaring of rationing. we may want to be somewhat concerned about rationing if we are not friends, major contributors to those politicians. who make these decisions. in the future if they get their way. it's now time for amy of patients first to make an introduction. >> thank you, grofere.

i wanted to tell you quickly about two efforts that we are undertaking with americans for prosperity and the americans for prosperity foundation. first of all, we have a petition that is online now under patients first and the website is joinpatientsfirst.com. this petition is basically protesting against everything that you've heard here today, saying we do not want to have ration care, saying we don't want to have delayed care, denied care, or any more government control over health care than we already have now. in fact, we'd like to see less. we'd like to see real reforms focused on patients. i encourage you to join patients first, join patientsfirst.com and check that out. i also have the privilege of introducing today someone who has been very helpful to all of us americans in sharing her own experience and telling her story. and i'd like to give her a couple minutes to introduce herself to you. hopefully she can do any

interviews with anyone else who would like to speak with her afterwards and share a little bit of what happened to her. i would like to introduce shonea holmes. she is from canada and she's going to tell you a little bit about her firsthand experience there. >> hello. i am the face of a government-run health care. it's something that happened to me that i never ever thought would happen because i actually think i'm in a worse position than people in the united states that have no insurance. i do have insurance. and i couldn't get any access to care. i started having terrible onset of problems and vision loss. went to my family doctor, who sent me for vision tests and it was determined that i was going blind very quickly. at that point, we started to try and get some specialists to see me. and i set up an appointment

with an endocrineologist and a cronologist. one was going to be a four-month wait and the other is a six-month wait. i'm almost embarrassed because those wait times are really considered pretty good in canada, because it definitely is a year to a year and a half, sometimes two years, and that's just to get in for an initial diagnosis. that's not the wait times for m.r.i.'s, for blood working for anything else you might need. so i came down to the united states, absolutely frantic. went to the mayo clinic. had all my testing done in a week. at the end of that week, was given a full diagnosis. it was recommended at that time by the doctors at the mayo clinic to go home and be treated at home where it was covered under my government insurance health plan. i tried that. came back to canada and i couldn't see anyone. i frantically tried every

avenue that i possibly could. three weeks later, because i was told i had four to six weeks before my vision would be gone totally. i came back to the united states when my husband stayed at home and continued to try and get me help at home with no luck. within another week, he joined me and i was on the table and my eyesight was saved. i have gone through this every time that i have tried to get treatment. i am sadly not just one story. and i could tell you hundreds of stories that are both minor to tragic. but it is very -- it's a very slippery slope when people get involved with government health care and there's nobody to advocate for you. my only avenue at that point was to leave the country, because i wasn't allowed to do what i did in the country. i'm not into ited to go to a doctor privately. i'm not allowed to buy private health insurance. i can insure my dog to see a

veterinarian, but i can't insure my children. i am really here -- i am so thankful that i was able to come to the united states and get treatment, and i really just feel an obligation to share my story so that if anybody ever has any doubts of whether or not a government can get in between you and your doctor, let's talk. thank you. [applause] >> shonea, you've been invited by abc to talk about how you were treated -- >> no. >> about how you were treated by canadian health care? >> no. >> one of the sad things is that what gets into this debate, you hear more stories. some with sad ending, some with happy endings, because people got to the united states and got the treatment they couldn't get in canada or britain. if we move to a government-controlled, politicized medical system, where will we go when they tell

us no? again, i don't think they're going to be telling any of the kennedy clan or the pelosi clan that they can't get any health care that their little hearts desire. but i do think that the average americans will run into the same challenge that people in britain and canada have run into. we're now joined by jenny beth martin, the national coordinator for the two-party patriots. tony perkins on deck. [applause] >> thank you. barbara gilbert of florida volunteered as a local coordinator for one of the 850-plus tea parties that were held on april 15. like 1.2 other million taxpayers on the treats on tax day, she is concerned about the out-of-control government spending and taxing. barbara is unique.

she has been diagnosed with what can be a terminal illness. she knows intimately that her time on this earth is limited, and she's made a commitment to herself, her family, her two grandsons, her community, and her country, to use whatever time she has left to serve her country. our country. america. tea party patriots with the help of people like barbara gilbert around the country are mobilizing grass roots activists who are the heart and soul of the tea party movement. we are going to be doing several things to defeat nationalized health care to promote fiscally responsible government spending. and what we're doing is taking the expertise from panelists like you guys and we're putting it on the ground with our troops, putting their feet on the ground to inform and educate our fabes, our family,

and our friends about about the effects of government-run health care mean to us. for instance, on july 4, there are going to be self--- there are going to be independent state events all around the country that tea party patriots is sponsoring. two of the largest ones are in sioux falls, south dakota, which is focused solely on educating americans about the effects of nationalized health care. and the other one that's going to be very large is in dallas, texas. tea party patriots is hosting opposition to government-run health care town hall meetings between now and the end of july. each week, one of these town halls will be fully interactive, like this event today. today we're on patriots heart networking which is part of blog talk radio. we're on you stream, live video streaming. chat rooms and a tweet stream going on all today.

on july 2 in florida, in -- and then nationwide on july 17, tea party associates is hosting another major round of tea party protests around the country. this time, we're going to be in front of the local congressional, and senatorial district offices all around this country. if you've heard about the effects of government-run health care today and it concerns you, and if you are like barbara gilbert and you're willing to serve your country to ensure that your children and grandchildren are not left to inherit these deficits in this kind of health care, go to teapartypatriots.org today to get plugged in. >> that's teapartypatriots.org. we're now joined by tony perkins, the president of the family research council. tony? >> thank you, grover. we've heard about health care

in other countries. but as a former member of the louisiana legislature that served on the health and welfare committee there, we are one of the few states that has a state-run public health care system. and so we want to look at how public health care is conducted, we can see that even in our own country where you often get chair sores before you even get a bed down in louisiana. so i would encourage to take a closer look at how we've been providing health care in these public systems in our own country. but what's been pointed out here that's of grave concern to many americans is rationing of health care. that concern is magnified when you face the very real possibility that taxpayers will be denied certain treatments and procedures while at the same time their tax dollars will be going to fund a mother who will terminate the life of her own born child. now, at present, the bills do

not specifically state that abortion will be covered either in the house or the senate versions, but we're certain that abortion will be covered under the guys funding health care services, which are stated more broadly. the only way that we can can assure -- ensure that tax dollars will not go to fund abortion is to make sure that it is explicitly stated that it will not be funded through a public system or through -- through the health care reform initiative. as we know, than sis pelosi says that is the way to save money through family planning, which includes abortion services. 71% of americans that were polled just last month expressed opposition to the idea that their tax dollars would go to fund abortion. so when you combine the concept of rationing, that we would deny people health care coverage while at the same time taking their money to end the life of an unborn child, that

is something that is intolerable for many americans. in addition to not funding abortion, health care providers rights must be protected. health care providers should not have to participate in abortion or other practices, such as euthanasia, or the prescription of drugs that would end life as well. constant protections must be included in the health care bills. some have argued on the other side that these issues are covered by the hide amendment and other writers. we have to realize that those are annual riders which can easily be knocked off by congress. any provisions pertaining to life and the conscience rights of medical professionals must be provided in these bills. we would encourage americans to express their concerns with these issues to their congress.