On this episode of Healthcare Americana, host Christopher Habig engages in a candid discussion with an anonymous medical student (FreedoMDstudent). FreedoMDstudent’s anonymity underscores the sensitive nature of the topics discussed, particularly the influence of politics and ideology in medical education and healthcare policy. FreedoMDstudent sheds light on instances of ideological bias in essay prompts and residency application processes.
The conversation goes into the ramifications of political correctness and indoctrination on patient care and professional autonomy within the medical field. Specifically, concerns are raised regarding the American Medical Association’s (AMA) role in monetizing licensure and controlling the copyright of Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes, which are essential for reimbursement processes. This monopolization poses ethical dilemmas and undermines the integrity of direct patient-physician relationships.
Christopher and FreedoMDstudent advocate for free market solutions in healthcare, emphasizing the benefits of competition, affordability, and patient-centric care. The discussion concludes with a call to action for medical professionals and students to challenge the status quo, resist institutional pressures, and advocate for free market principles in healthcare delivery.
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TRANSCRIPT
[INTRODUCTION]
Announcer
At Freedom Healthworks, we are focused on putting medical professionals back in control of their practices, utilizing a structured, tailored approach to business startup and operations. It could make sense for you to work with our professional team to avoid expensive pitfalls, and more importantly, expedite your journey to success. As we all know, time is money. If you’re involved in the practice of medicine and desire to practice free of headaches and constraints, reach out for a no obligation, consultative conversation, call us today at 317-804-1203 or visit freedomhealthworks.com.
[EPISODE]
Christopher Habig
Hello and welcome to Healthcare Americana. I’m Christopher Habig, CEO of Freedom Healthworks. Today we’re doing something a little bit different. Given the overwhelming response and continued relevance, we’re actually revisiting one of our most provocative and most popular episodes. This episode explores the infiltration of woke ideology into U.S. medical schools, examining its implications for medical education and practice.
Now, why are we doing this? Well, in recent years, the term woke has entered the lexicon as a broad label for progressive political movements and perspectives, particularly those that emphasize what they call social justice and equity. Its reach has extended into various sectors, including education, which mirrors healthcare in a lot of ways, corporate America, and obviously what we’re doing here, which I already mentioned, the healthcare world.
As this ideology makes its way into the curriculum of medical schools across the country, it really sets off a complex debate about the future of medical education and the very nature of healthcare itself for those who are drawn to medicine as a calling, not just a career. What does this shift mean for medical students? What about the doctors they will become? And really, most importantly, for the patients that they will serve.
This episode dives deep into these questions featuring insights from an anonymous medical student. Now, it might be hard to establish credibility from an anonymous source, but we did this to really protect her identity due to the fear of backlash amongst her medical school, which is scary in and of itself. And it’s the only anonymous episode that we’ve ever done on Healthcare Americana. So you’ll understand firsthand
the challenges that she is facing and how she is grappling with those potential consequences. As we rerun this episode, I encourage you to listen with an open mind and any past listener will know we try to stay as neutral as we possibly can in this political spectrum because fixing healthcare is something that both aisles should be focused on. And like I always say, one party has bad ideas and their party has no ideas. So listen with an open mind. And again, regardless of where you stand on the spectrum of these issues,
consider the long -term impacts of an ideological shift on our healthcare system. So without much further ado, let’s step back into this vital discussion from Healthcare Americana and remember, while some time has passed since this episode first aired, the issues it tackles remain as pertinent as ever.
You’re about to hear the original episode in its entirety, after which I’ll come back on to wrap things up and discuss some of the feedback we’ve received since its first airing. Here’s the episode.
Christopher Habig
Hi everybody, welcome to Healthcare Americana. I am your host, Christopher Habig, the CEO and co-founder of Freedom Healthworks. This is a podcast for the 99% of people who get care in America. We’re not clinicians or policy makers, we’re patients and caregivers, executives and advocates who are fed up with the status quo and we have a desire to change it. This podcast brings listeners backstage at innovative organizations with innovative individuals across America that are putting patients first by delivering exceptional care to anyone and everyone.
Today’s episode is a complete departure from our norm. Yeah, we’re still gonna talk about healthcare issues. We’re still gonna talk about how everyday lives are affected from patients and physicians. But for the first time ever on Healthcare Americana, our guest has asked to speak under conditions of complete anonymity for her own protection in her career
seeking her career and furtherment into medicine. This isn’t a decision that we took lightly, that I took lightly. You talk to anybody who’s actually a real journalist out there and anonymity is one of those things that kind of gets you laughed at. But in the order of sensitivity, knowing that certain professions are very sensitive to this and believe me, I know healthcare is one of those in medical schools especially, we decided to honor that request.
So with us today telling her side of the story is, like I said, going to respect the conditions of anonymity, but available for contact on her Twitter handle at FreedoMDstudent. And that is FreedoMDstudent with one M, so almost like a Freedo MD student. Well, FreedoMDstudent, welcome to Healthcare Americana.
FreedoMDstudent
Hey Chris, thanks, it’s great to be here.
Christopher Habig
Alright, first question of course is going to be, why did you request anonymity in order to talk about this subject?
FreedoMDstudent
I think the fact that I’ve been so strongly cautioned, and by people I consider to be really brave in this free market movement, about remaining anonymous in speaking out about these issues says a lot about how these sort of, you know, woke politics, if you will, have taken hold of the medical field. I first glimpsed this when I was applying to medical schools and reading over the essay prompts for applications and what kind of lingo and answers the admissions committees were looking for.
it was obvious then that they were selecting for these kinds of radical left-wing social justice warriors, if you will. I mean, essay questions like, how do your gender, sexual identity, race, ethnicity, whatnot define you as a person? And then it’s now that way with residency application processes, whereby many residency programs now have specific staff dedicated to…
Google searching and social media stalking the residency applicants. And while it would probably be totally fine to most residency programs if they were to find my social media feeds completely littered with pictures of me throwing Molotov cocktails at a radical left-wing demonstration, if they were to catch wind of me being a conservative or even worse, a libertarian-minded person…
they very well might toss out my application, even if all my posts are civilized and professional. We’re seeing just this shutting down of free speech that’s happening now and not a lot of tolerance for diverse viewpoints like this.
Christopher Habig
Okay, so I am just completely astonished to hear this. And I guess now thinking about it, I might not be because it seems like that kind of thinking is pervasive in a lot of our institutions that we hold really sacred because, you know, medicine is, I mean, you’re a scientist. You want to be a scientist. Physicians are scientists. There’s a scientific method. There’s experimentation. There’s things. There’s evolution. Science is something that has never settled. There’s theories.
And we try to prove theories and try to disprove theories and try to learn more and more and more. I want to ask, you know, how this happened. And knowing that you might be sitting there throwing your arms up in the air, be like, I don’t have a frigging clue. How do we get here?
FreedoMDstudent
I think we’re seeing just an overall shift in the culture of young people now. And that really is what has motivated me to start this whole movement of educating and promoting free market ideas amongst my peers and professionals. Because I don’t want to practice in a socialized system. I don’t want to practice medicine and socialism. And I don’t want to grow old with socialized medicine.
It does seem like that’s where we’re headed. And in looking at the culture of people in medicine right now and the culture of society as a whole, I really have a lot of concern for the future of healthcare in America, looking at the kinds of policies for which they advocate, their beliefs about government and healthcare, right? We can have the most amazing advancements in technologies, but policies are gonna determine who can access it.
These young people, young physicians and medical students right now are the ones who are going to shape the future of healthcare, especially as we’ve seen that the pandemic has pushed for an increasing role of physicians in politics. And I say that I look at this culture with great concern because overall the current generation really does support these far-left policies and socialization of medicine now, certainly at least the loudest ones too.
And there also is this concurrent lack of education in economics and history and philosophy, right? I recently overheard some of my classmates talking about how they think the government should send out inflation relief checks, great idea. And so, yeah, data from Pew Research and Harvard Institute of Politics are just similarly showing this massive shift of millennials and Gen X voters towards the political left, especially amongst those who went to college.
FreedoMDstudent
And other large pools of young Americans under 30 are now showing that about 70% of them support a government-run universal healthcare system, AKA Medicare for All, which is a substantial increase from just a few years ago, and that number is growing steadily. And so this woke culture, we first saw it take hold of college campuses. Now, if you haven’t read Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s book, The Coddling of the American Mind, I highly recommend they do a great take on
kind of how we ended up where we are now with the kind of hypersensitivity and how easily everyone’s offended and semantics about everything, you know, it’s really eye-opening book and how we’ve come to embrace all this cancel culture and virtue signaling and identity politics. So I think it really began on college campuses. It can be traced somewhat back to the culture in which people who went to college the past
few years were raised. Here we saw increase in media prevalence showing all of the child abductions and while the rate of child abductions has gone down substantially, the perception of them has gone up and just a lot of it has to do with media and where we get no or hover parents and being really protective. And then they go to college and they treat the administrators like their parents to referee day-to-day fights.
FreedoMDstudent
But the lack of education is really concerning, definitely.
Christopher Habig
Sure, yeah, if you’re not a history student of history, excuse me, then history tends to be in patterns, not necessarily repeat itself. But you know, I want to dive into the point you said where a lot of opinion polls show that medical students and residencies, they favor socialized medicine because they obviously don’t know that when the Soviets took power, the first people to really…
hit the execution block we’re physicians and people who were very much educated. So it’s a terrible philosophy, but I’m curious to hear what the argument is in the halls and in the classrooms that say, yeah, government should absolutely take over my profession. I can’t wait to be a doctor and I can’t wait to be a government employee.
FreedoMDstudent
I think there’s just not a lot of thought to it overall. I think if they’re taught anything about free-market systems, it’s that they’re evil and for greedy capitalists. It was like the second week of medical school, right? We had a required attendance lecture on healthcare economics that was given by the dean in which she basically presented a whole slew of outdated and misleading graphs and overtly promoted socialization of medicine, like bowing down to Kaiser Permanent.
And then at the end of the presentation, there was just a brief slide that described some other approaches to healthcare. And under free market, it read, no rights to healthcare. Can’t pay for it for yourself. Too bad. And the professor basically went on to say that anyone who considers healthcare a free-market commodity is not only wrong, but like a horrible person. And I just look around at my classmates, most of whom attended college in this kind of woke era and
were indoctrinated there, and then most of them who also had never taken an economics course. And here’s the dean of the medical school advocating to first-year medical students that we should have socialized medicine and saying free markets are bad. And this is what they’re teaching us now, and students need to start questioning these ideas more critically, but there’s not a lot of that questioning and critical thinking that’s being promoted. I mean…
I remember too early on my first year of medical school when the American Medical Association, right, the AMA, was doing recruitment. And they kind of had you hard. We get like so many emails and they bribe you with all kinds of free stuff. But you have to attend this recruitment lecture. And for my year, that lecture was on Zoom. Now, I didn’t join the AMA, but I happened to walk into my group study room during this recruitment talk. And all of the students in my…
pod were there and they had the talk going on in the background, but instead of watching it, they were just socializing with each other. And so I walk in and my classmates were so confused, like, didn’t you join the AMA? Aren’t you supposed to be in this Zoom lecture? And so I told them, no, I oppose the AMA and I refuse to join. And they just all went totally silent and stared at me. And so I decided to own the floor and ask them, does anyone know the mission statement of the AMA?
FreedoMDstudent
Nothing. Does anyone know some of the policies the AMA supports? Nothing. Can anyone tell me how the AMA makes its money? Nothing. Can anyone tell me anything about this organization with which you just voluntarily publicly associated yourself? And they were just silent for a good minute. And then one of them chimed in, but don’t you want the free book? It was just shocking and troubling to realize almost everyone in my class chose to join the AMA, mostly having
little idea what the AMA stands for. Now if any one of them had stood up and said, yeah, this is the mission of the AMA, these are some of their policies, and I support the AMA. I would have said, all right, let’s have a conversation, right? But it seems like a lot of times now they just hear free stuff and that’s it. And so I think that’s a lot of why I decided to start this movement of changing the culture of medical students and medical education.
I believe obviously that a free market enterprise in healthcare is the best way to ensure optimal care at affordable prices and the movement for socialization of medicine is growing but so is the free-market movement and reaching and re-educating these medical students will be key for the future of our healthcare system.
Christopher Habig
A couple points on that and this might shock you but I’m gonna agree with your dean that if anybody who says a free market healthcare is what we have right now is they’re out there absolutely wrong and I think that’s where a lot of what you’re what a lot of medical students don’t understand is saying that well we tried capitalism and we tried free market and healthcare and doesn’t work because that’s what we have today and they’re absolutely incorrect we have the closest thing to socialized healthcare in this country already.
Not many people understand that. Not many people get that. So, you know, I’m going to it’s kind of I kind of laughed when you said that for your dean. I was like, well, yeah, he’s right because we don’t have it right. We actually haven’t had a free-market healthcare system in quite some time predating world war two. You raise an interesting point to where, you know, how do you compete with somebody who’s shouting from the mountaintops, hey, come over here and we’ll get you a bunch of free stuff. People have free stuff. And I feel like that’s one
what one side of the political spectrum has to offer is saying, hey, everybody, come join our plan and you get free ice cream as long as, you know, as well as you never have to pay for another doctor’s visit. They don’t read the frying print saying, well, you’re not going to be able to actually go see a doctor, but hey, whatever. You got some free ice cream. You got a free pamphlet. You got a free book. How about that? And it’s hard to compete with free. So what’s your rebuttal?
FreedoMDstudent
I think that education is a big part of that. And some of that happens just through day-to-day conversations I have with my peers and medical students. But I think we really need to bring back history and economics and philosophy to our overall education system, not just in college, but they’re tossing out a lot of those topics or teaching them from a very biased perspective and
so we need to start educating on those areas so that people can even join the conversation and learn how to defend a position, regardless of which side of the political spectrum that comes from. And I don’t know all of the best ways to do that. Some of it I think also is gonna come from as we go down this woke radical path. I think that we’re seeing
it being taken too far in a lot of areas where a lot of people, like, it’s just, they’re falling off the cliff and some people are finally now starting to step back and say, Hey, whoa, wait a minute. Like, what is this that we’re advocating for? This is ridiculous now. And it’s just gone so far that we’re seeing, I think, some people starting to step back from it and think a little more critically, but that needs to then be coupled with education and that has to do with medical school curriculum.
But it’s hard to do that as well when medical schools are under fire from the LCME, right, the accrediting body about what they are and are not allowed to teach. And diversity, inclusivity, equity, you know, all the anti-racism and whatnot trainings and curriculum are now a part of the tenure track and promotion at a lot of medical schools. And so if medical school faculty don’t
support the politically correct idea of the day, then they could be putting their job at risk. And medical students who aren’t compliant with drinking the woke Kool-Aids, they could be getting professionalism concern reports. And so we really need to start taking a look at some of these policies and bring back academic freedom, bring back freedom of speech so we can even have the opportunity to teach medical students about this.
Christopher Habig
We’re talking to a medical student speaking on condition of anonymity for free year of reprisals from her medical school and potential career paths. Twitter handle at FreedoMDstudent. That’s freedom D student. How dangerous is it to patient care to have politics infused into the exam room?
FreedoMDstudent
I mean, it’s disastrous. And I mean, you can see this with large organizations like the AMA. And by money spent, the AMA is the third largest lobbying organization, only second to the US Chamber of Commerce and Association of Realtors. And they’ve just hijacked healthcare reforms. And they’ve consistently backed policies for mandatory health insurance. They’ve
used Congress to limit the number of residency positions that they fund each year, which has created this de facto cap on new physicians. But even more troubling is when you look at like sources of revenue for the AMA, right? One of those sources is their master file, which is data on every medical student and physician from the moment you start medical school until like after you die. And they sell this data, which includes prescribing history to private companies, which then sell it to drug companies to use in marketing efforts.
Another major source of revenue is the licensure, right? So physicians are obligated to pay for an AMA physician profile as a condition of licensure. But even more problematic is that a huge source of the AMA’s revenue is from current procedural terminology, CPT codes, right? Which is the nomenclature that we use to report and reimburse for medical services. And these codes are copyrighted to the AMA, so they have this monopoly
over the reimbursement processes. And every doctor, hospital, clinic, billing for these services has to pay the AMA a fee in addition to buying the organization’s CPT code books and all these other materials. And it’s really almost a conflict of interest. I mean, these positions rely on CPT codes for their reimbursement. And then they also control the composition of the CPT codes. And so it’s really problematic there.
And I know a lot of awesome people who are in the AMA, who support free markets, who get it, who are trying to change it from the inside, but I struggle to see how an alliance between big government and big medicine could ever be expected to benefit taxpayers or patients for that matter. And so I think that when you, the government really gets in the way of direct patient care. We need
to have a direct relationship with physicians. That’s when you get optimal care, is when your doctor is able to work directly with their patients, they’re able to get to know them. And that can’t happen the way that we have it now.
Christopher Habig
Obviously, I’m a big proponent of what you just said within Freedom Healthworks and setting up our networks of independent physicians across the country. Just dealing directly with their patients. They’re beholden only to their patients. I’ve always thought that there’s a huge lack. You mentioned education a few times. I just don’t… And based on what you’re saying, it makes sense of why it’s hard to make an impression on medical students and residents to say, look…
You don’t have to go out and sign the first offer that’s put in front of you from a, from a residency, after a residency program from a teaching hospital or anything along those lines. And it’s almost like the walls being pulled over their eyes. I mean, what you’re describing is more akin to brainwashing. And I don’t, I don’t say that as a cliche and I don’t say that lightly. But when you’re looking at trusting somebody with saving your life, a life and death decision, quite literally.
I don’t want to be in the position thinking, you know, are they going to, are they going to make a decision based on what their politics are just by looking at me or listening to me or are they going to honor their Hippocratic oath and treat me to the best of their ability?
FreedoMDstudent
Yeah, I mean, when I propose a free market enterprise for healthcare, the response I usually get from people is like, healthcare is just so expensive. If we take away insurance, then only the super wealthy will be able to afford it. But the reality is healthcare is so expensive because of the government and all the middlemen, right? I mean, we know economics 101, competition drives down prices. If physicians operate in a competitive free market, prices of healthcare would drop substantially.
And quality goes up, right? It’s in a free market, a competitive market. If your service or your product sucks, then you go out of business. And we can see this when we compare like cash pay surgery centers to big hospitals. A surgery that’s priced at $3,000 at a cash pay surgery center gets billed at $20,000 at a big hospital. And you have to haggle the big hospital just to even find someone who can figure out the price of the surgery.
And so if you have like a $5,000 deductible, then it’s actually cheaper to go to the cash pay surgery center. And where does all that extra money go? It doesn’t go to the physicians. It doesn’t go to the benefit of the patients. And we know that these kinds of cash pay centers also have lower rates of infections and complications. And so better quality care. And a competitive market makes the healthcare actually very affordable for most people.
But then you always get the follow-up question of like, well, what about the poor? But if you remove these bureaucrats from the middle, physicians are free to charge whatever they want for their services, and that includes charging nothing. And they do so often. And you can also negotiate a price and a payment plan. And so these so-called greedy capitalists at cash pay surgery centers and medical facilities are actually giving away a lot of care for free.
And we see that too with direct primary care practices, this accessible, affordable prices, individualized care, and just high-quality care through this direct relationship between you and your PCP. That’s how healthcare is supposed to be.
Christopher Habig
Do you find it ironic that when your peers advocate for socialized government takeover for medicine, which in itself creates a monopoly for that organization, but yet when you say, look, competitive competition is good, there’s real life examples of how this works and how it increases patient care and increases access, yet they say no, competition doesn’t work, yet they’re advocating for more monopoly powers?
from the government. I’m like, well, those two things don’t add up. And anybody who’s had any brain cell activity, connecting the dots there, like those two things are totally polar opposites, yet you’re advocating for something that should never ever be spoken in the same sentence. I find that hugely ironic.
FreedoMDstudent
Yeah, I mean, government is the problem, not the solution here for sure.
Christopher Habig
Well, even when people are advocating for socialized medicine, they’re thinking, well, the only way to contain prices is to give monopoly powers. Well, wait a minute. That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Monopolies are very good for that company. If I’m a businessperson, hell yeah, I want a monopoly. If I’m a consumer, hell no, I don’t want a monopoly. And Americans are very good consumers on most things except healthcare. And, you know, we’ve talked about that before.
I don’t want to just focus on the negative here because that can be a very, very deep hole. And it’s tough to pull out. And I think a lot of our physicians and future physicians have fallen in that hole and never been able to look up and see that the sky is still blue and the sun is still shining. There are organizations out there who are fighting the good fight and advocating for doing things that are free of really the nonsense that you’ve been describing for the past
20 minutes or so. One of those good players is an organization that I am a huge fan of called the Benjamin Rush Institute. I know you’ve been involved. Give us a little background of what your efforts are there, what they’re doing, how people can possibly get involved and trying to right the ship and reach really the people that we’re gonna entrust our future care with of ourselves and our loved ones to say, hey, these students get it.
They want to do the right thing. They’re the ones in the trenches. Might not be able to speak up, because we don’t want to get them kicked out of school or anything like that, but the BRI seems to be a wonderful resource for them.
FreedoMDstudent
I’m a huge fan of Benjamin Rush Institute also. So Benjamin Rush Institute, or BRI, is like the AMA in that it’s a coalition of medical students and physicians, but they have a strong focus on education in healthcare economics and politics, particularly in support of free markets. So they seek to unite medical students and physicians from across the political spectrum who believe that a free market enterprise in healthcare…
and a direct patient physician relationship ensure optimal patient outcomes. So, it’s been really awesome working with all the folks at BRI and we’re really thankful for all the support and resources they provided us. It’s been really cool seeing the movement grow amongst the medical students. We’ve got a lot of them involved now. We’ve also gotten a lot of support from the Free Market Medical Association.
Christopher Habig
Big fans of the FMMA, been title sponsors here for a while. What is your, and this will be kind of the parting question here. What is your advice to somebody who might be in your shoes, who is thinking about medical school, who is in medical school right now, maybe in residency, coming out of residency, who are saying, I can’t believe that medicine has gone this route. This isn’t what I signed up to do yet, or sticking it out. What’s your advice to them?
FreedoMDstudent
I think there’s something everyone can do to break down these barriers to go on the free market. And there are like a lot of those barriers. I mean, we see the AMA, we see this culturally, there’s all this hostility that a lot of people have towards libertarian-minded people. And they think we’re just greedy capitalists, can’t convince them otherwise. And then we’re also all just fighting against this brainwashing that we’re seeing that’s in high school and college. And now it’s, you know, this indoctrination is just getting worse and more extensive from a younger age.
And so the medical students involved in Benjamin Rush Institute and FMMA, we’ve been having a lot of events to provide education and open discussion about health economics and free markets and things like direct primary care. So it’s really engaging people in these conversations, and anyone can get involved in those. We’re also trying to work towards getting more medical students and physicians into free market practices.
For example, my chapter of BRI is working to organize opportunities for students to shadow physicians who are in free market type practices. We’ve been building a network of these physicians. Many of them are direct primary care docs. It’s asking who is willing to have a medical student shadow them. And overwhelmingly the response has been, yes, we want to get medical students involved. And so we’re putting together a list of these physicians and a system for students to sign up to shadow them.
And also asking around outside of our local area to see who may have summer research internship opportunities for medical students. I think just getting medical students into the doors at these kinds of practices to experience free market healthcare firsthand and see the awesome care that it can deliver will have a big impact on them. And also having this, you know, Benjamin Rush Institute specific shadowing system is an incentive for more students to get involved.
I mean, a more difficult barrier we’re also trying to crack is the lack of residency positions in free market and private practices. So part of how physicians get trapped in these massive corrupt hospital systems, because they’re basically forced to do residency in them. There’s almost no residency opportunities in like free market medical practices. And there’s also no institutional support or guidance from the schools for students who are seeking alternative residency spots.
FreedoMDstudent
And then on top of that, students really receive almost no education on how to set up a private practice or anything about business or economics and healthcare. And we’re told time and time again what an insurmountable task it is to try and set up your own practice. And now it is actually a lot more difficult to make it in private practice now than, say, 20 years ago between the changes and expansion of Medicare, increased cost of liability insurance, reductions in physician reimbursements,
and electronic medical rectors and all these regulatory hurdles are putting a lot of strain on private, independent physicians. And now only about 17% of medical students say they intend to have their own practice. And so we’ve started talking to leaders at BRI and Free Market Medical Association, talking to physicians at cash pay or free market hospitals and surgery centers, and just trying to figure out how we might build and find more residency opportunities.
and how we can encourage more students to consider going into private practice so they’re not just pushed en masse into big hospitals. We brought in bankers and professionals who specialize in loans to recent medical graduates to speak to students about financial logistics of setting up your own practice, brought in physicians from free market practices, like DPC docs to share their stories and just
really getting the message out to medical students that you don’t have to be a slave stuck in a big hospital system. You can build your own practice. You can help change how healthcare is delivered. And here’s some awesome people and resources to support you. And so if you’re listening, if you’re a DPC doc or a private practice physician, reach out to the medical school near you and the medical students and offer them shadowing opportunities, offer them summer research opportunities.
If there’s a Benjamin Rush Institute chapter at your nearest medical school, reach out to them. And then if you’re a medical student, join Benjamin Rush Institute. And if there’s not a chapter at your medical school, then start one. And I’m happy to connect with anyone looking to do that. You can direct message me on Twitter. Also, anyone listening, anyone at all can sponsor medical students to attend conferences, like the Free Market Medical Association Conference.
FreedoMDstudent
Or the Free2Care Conference, I think that’s coming up in September. DPC summits, right? These conferences are really amazing opportunities for medical students to learn and to engage in the free market and learn how to talk to their peers, connect with physicians who have been champions of the free market and really empower them to become movers in the free market.
And so I also ask you again, you could follow my Twitter, the FreedoMDstudent. Everyone’s on social media nowadays, like it or not. And so it’s a great way to spread information to young people. And I’m happy if anyone wants to reach out to me, I don’t mind receiving direct messages on that Twitter. I’d love to hear from you all.
Christopher Habig
I want to thank you for coming on the show speaking out. You know, when you’re saying a lot of that about the free market and how, how independent practice, you know, is tougher these days. I’m over here waving my hand like, oh, there’s, there’s a lot easier way to do it because you just forget about all those things you said, right? Don’t worry about reimbursements. Don’t have to worry about overheads. Don’t have to worry about pre-authorizations or anything along the slides. Go direct. Build a business model out with the current revenue. You’re going to thank yourself in the long run. Well, it’s been a pleasure talking to you.
Thanks again for being, I guess kind of that brave whistleblower. The Twitter handle that you mentioned, FreedoMDstudent. So go to Twitter, at FreedoMDstudent, one M, excuse me. So FreedoMDstudent, and direct message, get involved there. It’s a sad state of affairs that we do have to speak on condition of anonymity. And I hope that in the very near future, we can have you on
and peel back the veil and say, look and behold what kind of change we’re able to bring and not have to bow down to censorship and fear of reprisal. So keep up the good fight. Good luck in your studies. We need more physicians like you. Anybody who says differently is…just wrong. That’s the only one way to explain that there. So thank you so much once again for your time and thanks for joining us here on Healthcare Americana.
FreedoMDstudent
Chris, I appreciate you.
Christopher Habig
All right, folks, that was our discussion on the rise of woke ideology in U.S. medical schools. Originally aired August 18th, 2022. It’s a conversation that continues to evoke strong feelings and really spirited debate amongst our listeners and within the broader medical community. Now, I’ve received a wealth of feedback, some in praise of the critical examination of the topic and others expressing concern about the potential consequences of ignoring
such important social issues and medical training given today’s political climate. What is clear to me from all the responses is that this delicate intersection of education, ideology and healthcare is a crucially important one. That’s a no brainer and it deserves our attention and really an ongoing dialogue. It gets scary when ideas are forced upon people against their will with a
“You must follow this or else”. It’s that blind following that really scares the hell out of me and really should scare you too. Let’s get doctors the freedom to practice how they see fit and take care of the patients without trying to interject causes or specific issues into the way that they have to practice their art in the way that they have to translate what is happening to a patient
into real treatment plans. I want to thank everyone who’s engaged with this episode, shared it, and contributed to the conversation. Obviously, the conversation is not over. If you have thoughts or feedback, feel free to reach out to us. Our email is info@healthcareamericana.com. We’re on all the socials. Your insights and opinions really do help shape our understanding of these issues and where we take the show. They also remind us of the diverse perspectives that make up our listener base, which I’m very thankful for.
And as always, we aim to provide a platform for thoughtful discussion on all things related to healthcare innovation, policy and practice for patients, for physicians and for those might be employers and the people actually paying the bills in a third-party system. If you have any thoughts on today’s rerun again or any questions, contact us. Until next time. Stay informed, stay empowered with Healthcare Americana. I’m your host, Christopher Habig. Thanks for listening.
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