public understands or the government and healthcare corporate sector wish to admit. He believes the nexus between major healthcare businesses, including insurance and hospitals, and political power creates conflicted functioning within individual doctor patient relationships, which furthers the agenda of controlling healthcare spending at the expense clinical decision making, while leaving their own profit and political goals unscathed. This eye-opening account of how the American healthcare system operates yields a new definition for socialized medicine, which describes its effective meaning, as opposed to the standard, economic policy definition, which becomes burdened with concepts such as public versus private payers, socialized medicine versus social insurance, government-run etc., etc. The reality of socialized medicine is manipulated, controlled doctor patient relationships such that clinical decision making becomes conflicted by dollar management, and this is then used to satisfy a higher power's agenda, generally greed, campaign finance for political re-election, or political ideology. In the USA, the business of medicine is privatized and the medicine of medicine is socialized. Dr. Kirkwood notes that true healthcare reform cannot occur until the doctor patient relationship becomes free of external control from any payer and returns to its primary position as the essence of medicine, to be supported and served by the entire system. R. Garth Kirkwood, MD

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