Jim Geraghty of National Review Online initiated and has virtually patented the phrase, “All statements from Barack Obama come with an expiration date,” documenting same with accelerating frequency.

Now, albeit a little late, some doctors (not nearly enough) are getting heart palpitations over what seems to be an Obama statement that defied the laws of physics and expired before being issued, sort of.

According to Inside Health Reform, an online newsletter, “Barack Obama’s presidential campaign last fall asked the New England Journal of Medicine [NEJM] to remove a controversial medical liability reform sentence from an article bearing Obama’s signature...

“In side-by-side statements from then-candidates Obama and John McCain published online by NEJM on September 24, Obama wrote, ‘I will also support legislation dictating that if you practice care in line with your medical societies’ recommendations, you cannot be sued.’  But that statement was removed from the article on NEJM’s Web site within a few hours of being posted after the campaign discovered what it calls ‘errors,’ an administration official told Inside Health Reform.  The version currently in NEJM’s online archives does not contain the tort reform proposal, nor does it warn readers that a change was made.”

The newsletter goes on to report that the article “was transmitted from folks inappropriately” and also suffered from “oversight in the editorial process.”  The remarkable missing sentence, which was the only correction to the article after it was published, got notice when the President of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, testifying before a congressional committee, publicly supported the President’s “announced position.”

That would be the Obama position that wasn’t, isn’t and never will be, and even if it was, is or could be, will never be enacted in this political world.

Let us repeat the flyaway Obama sentence, this time with emphasis:  “I will also support legislation dictating that if you practice care in line with your medical societies’ recommendations, you cannot be sued.”

Now, docs, we love you and we need you, now more than ever, and we agree with Philip K. Howard, who heads a legal reform coalition, that the “legal system terrorizes doctors” and that much of the waste in our health care system “is generated or justified by the fear of legal consequences that infects almost every health care encounter.”

But docs, as much as we love you and need your medical expertise, your political expertise is generally woefully deficient, and most of the organizations that supposedly represent your interests could be rolled by a third-rate, alkie carnival barker, never mind the current Master of Misdirection, President of Prestidigitation. 

Do you have any idea at all the power that the Plaintiff’s Bar (or whatever self-serving euphemism the bastards are using to continue terrifying you) has over this President, this House of Representatives, this Senate, that Governor, that State Legislature?

How many decades have you been plaintively and desperately supporting tort reform?  How’s that worked out so far?

As many of you have stopped delivering babies or stopped participating in Medicare, have you noticed that your President and your Congress are in the process of doing a fine side-step shuffle toward socialized medicine?  Do you believe, like some of your brethren in other segments of the health care system, that you just better cut the best deal with the devil that you can?

Just think, there is a scenario under which you can end all the litigation against you.  That’s when you become doctors of the state and rest of us become medical prisoners of the state, with health care rationed and apportioned.  We think that’s what your President really meant to say, before he withdrew saying anything at all, with the complicity of one of your leading medical publications.