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2013
Awards
standpoint, you can't operate a business the way you want to if you
accept federal money. There are too many strings attached. We just
decided from the beginning that we didn't feel like Medicare was a
trustworthy institution and we decided we would not ever deal with
them."
But that doesn't mean senior citizens get turned away. "I see
Medicare patients here," says Dr. Smith. "They just leave their
Medicare card in the car."
Beyond Medicare, government involvement in health care is, he
maintains, a prescription for influence-peddling — Washington, he
says, is where moneyed interests go to buy laws and regulations
designed to greatly benefit the few at the tremendous expense of the
many.
"Anything the government gets involved in, it will corrupt. It will
become completely laden with bribes and backroom deals," he says.
"The players who benefit from heavy regulation are the gigantic players who often write, or help write, these regulations, with the interest
of destroying their smaller competitors or upstarts. They're not
designed for our benefit, as the 'central planners' would like for us to
think. They're designed to mash any sort of entrepreneur who wants
to enter this market to compete with the buddies and the pals who
are so well connected."
The proposed ban on physician-owned hospitals is Exhibit A, he
says. "Who benefits from that? That's just an obvious bribe that was
paid by the American Hospital Association to keep physician-owned
hospitals from springing up and doing on a hospital-wide basis what
we're doing in a surgery center. Washington is a pay-to-play, briberyridden, corrupt regime. And the American Hospital Association and
the big hospital lobbies are proof of that."
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O U T PAT I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E O N L I N E | S E P T E M B E R 2013
