Dear John, I am not for sale. Signed, Dr. Mom

The patient-physician relationship is like no other. One cannot fathom the depth of love for a child until she becomes a mother. One cannot fathom the devotion to a patient until she becomes a physician. I recall my heart fibrillating the day I received an urgent call in the operating room in the midst of a complex ocular trauma case from my three year old daughter’s preschool teacher informing me that no one had picked my baby girl up. My life was at that moment consumed, my being, one with the precious patient that teetered on the edge of blindness and disfigurement. My life was consumed, so much so that I had forgotten that I was a mother, so much so that a precious little girl watched and waited on a curb until trust and smiles morphed into disappointment and tears. But, she was not alone; she stood like a soldier beside a lone little boy, the son of the Chairman of Neurology. I was supposed to have picked him up too.

CEO’s of the likes of Aetna, Blue Cross, “non-profit” hospitals, and drug companies and politicians, the likes of our President, his appointees, and his operatives, callously, if not sinisterly, take advantage of the enigmatic phenomenon that is the patient-physician relationship. This is a despicable, intolerable scenario that will not serve these life-blood-sucking elitists well, particularly in a day when over 50% of medical students are women.

After felonious passage, the unread, paradoxically named “Affordable Care Act” is being rewritten, 28 times thus far, by one man with a pen and a phone, for political expediency, power and money. The CEO-politician relationship is the antithesis of the patient-doctor relationship, the very relationship that the one man’s pen so whimsically and abusively defiles. The former is based on and perpetuated by lies. The latter is based on truth.

As a woman physician/mother devoted to my patients, children, and pursuit of truth, I was aghast when I logged on to the one man and his operatives’ HHS.gov website only to discover that my services are for sale at the stroke of his pen by his Aetna and Blue Cross CEO pals. I was never asked or told that my life-long-cultivated skills, God-given talents, and soul would be peddled on a risky, back-door-undone, discriminatory marketplace. I was tricked.

Dear Johns,

I am not for sale.

You may not use me and my works to discriminate against my fellow American patients, much less for your profit. I will not serve one patient under one set of rules and another patient under a different set of your pen’s usurious rules. You lie to me and my patients. I call you out. You falsely advertise my services. You profess “access to care” for your members using false advertising when you list me as one of your “providers”. You trick patients, who you call members; I will not be tricked by you. By the way, I am a doctor not a provider.

You sell nothing but empty promises without me and my colleagues. You can’t deliver. You are exposed. My colleagues and I will go forward in a new, parallel universe in which we will deliver actual medical care at actually affordable prices. You will be frozen, exposed in the cold of your calculated, Alinskyite lies. The American patient will awaken from your Orwellian-trance and be angry with you.

The Chairman of Neurology was not angry with me. His son, the little boy on the curb, grew up strong, not victimized, able to brush off hard knocks, and pursues success as an up-and-coming artist. The Chairman’s wife was not angry with me. She and her daughter are nurses, gutting it up to treat others in the trenches. Those of us that have shared the rite of passage to become physicians or nurses know, pursue, and defend the unspoken truths.

The little girl on the curb is not angry with me; she grew up strong. She guttses it up, stands for truth, and works to serve others. She, my baby girl, receives her M.D in 3 months. My second daughter survived her waits on the curb in similar courageous fashion and is presently a medical student too, in the footsteps of her grandfather, mother, and big sister.

As for me, doctor mom, I have four amazing daughters. 50% of my women are physicians-in-training in medical school classes composed of 50% women- women who are not victims, women who stand for truth, women who work hard, and women who will not be bought and sold against their will by Dear Johns who peddle false bills of goods because they think we are weak and worthless. I have thousands of precious patients with whom I share sacred patient-physician relationships. As for me, patient mom, I share the sacred inviolable patient-physician relationship with my own physicians and surgeons who rescue me from the ravages of cancer. I fathom the depth of their love. This knowing compels me to fight until the ink runs dry at the tip of Dear John’s phony pen.

Am I angry? Yes. How long will I fight? I will fight until the American patient wins the war on medicine. I will fight until the American woman wins the real war on women-the one that spews from the phony pen of the phony Dear Johns on the left. Fathom that.