As the elections draw near, candidates continue to reach out to the South Asian vote. Illinois Senate hopeful Barack Obama recently met with a group of South Asian American community and business leaders at a fundraising dinner held at the home of physician Vipul Aurora as reported by NewKerala.com:
…the Senate hopeful who has become a political star after his speech at the Democratic convention, says South Asian Americans and “we share the same values”.
“We are in a good position, thanks to the support from the South Asian community,” he said adding, “We share the same set of values.”
“We have made tremendous strides politically in the last 18 months,” he said. “There was a time when many people said, ‘He (Obama) has no organisation, no money and we cannot even pronounce his name’.”
Of course as you can imagine, many of the doctors at the gathering expressed hopes that Obama would focus on the problems of medical malpractice insurance if elected. Will he oblige them?
“We will have a serious conversation about the problems of medical providers,” Obama assured him. “The primary villains of the medical community are the trial lawyers. The crisis is real – we cannot afford to have doctors moving out of Illinois.”
“Given their utility to society, I would choose doctors over lawyers every time,” Obama said. “I say this as an attorney. The economics of medicine has got much worse over the past two decades.”
Ouch. I know quite a few Obama supporters who are also lawyers that are not going to be happy with such an overt declaration. A lot of South Asians are now choosing Law over Medicine as a profession. The money in our community may end up there in the future. We all know that policy follows the money. If he has Presidental aspirations he better be very careful with his rhetoric.
The other interesting tidbit about this gathering was that there were Pakistanis in attendance as well. The brother of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, Naveed Musharraf told Obama:
“I am going to vote for you. You remind of Martin Luther King’s dream and his advice, ‘You don’t judge a man by his colour, but by the strength of his character’. You have the same idealism of President John F. Kennedy.”
Abhi, thanks for sharing this information. Obama’s getting himself into murky waters here by not doing his research. No, trial lawyers are NOT the villains of the medical community. And no, the biggest issue facing the medical community is NOT medical malpractice insurance. No, high insurance premiums are not necessarily caused by the number of lawsuits (insurance companies have not reduced premiums in several states where “caps” were placed on how much money people could gain in non-economic damages in lawsuits).
I am sad to see my brothers and sisters stating that medical malpractice insurance premiums are THE health care issue that Obama should worry about for the State of Illinois. Yes, premiums ARE an issue that need to be addressed (caps are a band-aid approach that ends up hurting the patient anyway… insurance company tactic reform might be a better approach). But physicians in Illinois really should also be worried about the millions of uninsured people in the state, and the increasing health care premiums (not only for their malpractice, but also for their patients).