Viewpoint

Rand Paul and positive implications

FROM THE CHIEF MEDICAL EDITOR

Larry E. Patterson, MD

The night of Feb. 23, 2009, was dark, cold, yet clear. Important details, for this was to be my first nighttime flight, traveling in a 30-year-old Cessna Skyhawk. I was five months into my private pilot training, and the “cross country” night flight requirement would take me 89 nautical miles to Bowling Green, Ky., coincidentally the home of Dr. Rand Paul. Less than six months later, ophthalmologist Rand Paul would announce he was entering politics, running for the U.S. Senate. (Are the two events aligned? Maybe. I like to think so.)

This issue features a first for Ophthalmology Management: An interview with an officially declared candidate for president of the United States. (I realize by the time you read this 25 or 30 other candidates could have declared — and just on the Republican side.) While Dr. Paul no longer operates a private practice, he continues to do charity eye surgery when time permits, including a recent visit to Guatemala, the country where I’ve been working for more than 20 years.

Barbara Bowers, MD, an ophthalmologist in Paducah, Ky., who has performed charity cases with Dr. Paul, told me the following, and I think most of us would concur:

“I agree that governmental intrusion at both federal and state levels has drastically weakened our medical care system. Physicians no longer have control over patient care or even their own practices. It has limited patients’ access to physicians of their choice, limited their access to new technology that could be beneficial to them, restricted physicians from providing the care they believe is in the patients’ best interest, necessitated less doctor-patient interaction while necessitating a vast increase in time spent fulfilling non-clinical bureaucratic requirements. It has limited access to medical care, decreased the quality of medical care, all while increasing the cost of medical care.”

I’ve written this before, and I’ll write it again: Central planning doesn’t work … no matter how many times it’s tried.

By the way, I’m not endorsing Rand Paul for president. That’s not my intent with this column. What I am saying is that no matter what your political leaning, having an ophthalmologist in the race can only have positive implications for medicine in general, ophthalmologists in particular, and our patients especially. Getting some of our viewpoints and concerns out into the open by one of our own could help bring renewed attention to the overregulation problems we are burdened with, to the max.

I’ll close with a quote from Rand Paul that sadly explains the difference between his two roles.

“In Washington, nothing is ever solved. Nobody can just try to solve a problem and fix it or diagnose a problem and fix it,” he said. “In medicine, there’s not a lot of arguing. . . . For the most part, everyone knows what’s wrong, figures out what’s wrong and moves on to a solution.” OM