Bizarre, Congress, Politics, Society, Torts

Heal Thyself: Florida Doctor Tells Obama Supporters To Seek Medical Assistance Elsewhere

Dr. Jack Cassell, 56, a Mount Dora urologist and a registered Republican, left a message for Obama supporters on his door: heal thyself or at least find a doctor elsewhere.

Cassell posted a sign reading “If you voted for Obama…seek urologic care elsewhere. Changes to your healthcare begin right now, not in four years.” Personally, I am not sure I want a proctological exam with a guy who is really pissed off at Democrats and liberals. Hint: when you visit Dr. Cassell bring a copy of Rush Limbaugh on tape, the exam goes much smoother.

Curiously, Cassell insists that telling Obama supporters to “seek urologic care elsewhere” is not denying them care: “I’m not turning anybody away — that would be unethical. But if they read the sign and turn the other way, so be it.”

This raises an interesting question. It would seem unethical to deny care based on political beliefs but state law only addresses race, religion,
gender, sexual preference or disability. However, as an ethical matter, it would seem rather clear but I am but a juris doctor.

To further his unique combination of politics and proctology, Cassell supplies copies of a health-care timeline produced by Republicans and added a sign that reads “This is what the morons in Washington have done to your health care. Take one, read it and vote out anyone who voted for it.”

For the full story, click here.

450 thoughts on “Heal Thyself: Florida Doctor Tells Obama Supporters To Seek Medical Assistance Elsewhere”

  2. Gone,

    By the way, It’s putting three or more links that send you to moderation limbo, not any particular word.

  4. Look, it’s 10 days away from April fifteenth, so, in essence we are on the final countdown. Tea Partiers have been around for a year and this has always been their target date. I think the racism thing has been pretty much exaggerated as to the name calling and the say it, don’t spray it incident of last week.

    It’s good to see the racist thing being discussed for the last couple of weeks. If Tea Partiers don’t know by now, not to carry racially motivated signs, then they are stupid no matter what there personal belief is. It would be in the best interest of the Tea Party Movement to have officials designated at every event and speak with anyone holding a racisit or could be deemed racist and take notes effectively policing themselves.

    There is the potential for Flash Riots.

    There are talks of Crash the Tea Parties by people on the opposing side. Up til now, at every Tea Party event, the local and state authorities have handled their duty with a few Feds mixed in I’m sure. There have been no images of police in riot gear. Over the next ten days it is in the best interest to pipe the racism thing and let it all go up in smoke or things could become literally that way.

  5. “Why are liberals so obsessed with poor blacks?’

    Therefore, I must ask – why are conservatives so obsessed with rich whites?

    Beuller? Beuller??

  6. Athena:

    Sorry if you didn’t get my analogy. Must suck to be you.

    Yes – the death panel argument is pretty stupid, especially since insurance companies already have a death panel but conservatives don’t seem to mind that fact. What’s your point, sport?

  7. …continued….

    There’s a one I’m looking for that basically says (and I’m para-phrasing):

    my ancestors where white protestants, not Africans. That says alot.

    I also find it interesting that at a recent rally in Arizona that Palin spoke at, the Alabama flag was featured heavily.

    Now we can argue about if the signs represent the majority of tea-baggers, or how much those who aren’t racist are responsible for saying “Get out of my movement,” but to deny that racist signs exist you really need to plug you ears, close your eyes and go ‘lalalalala’

  10. Relax, everything gone B a-ight.

    As I was walkin down the street one day. A man came up to me and asked me what the time was that was on my waaaattttch,

    and I saaaaiiiidddd, Does anybody know what time it is, Does anybody really care. Oh I can’t imagine why, ohhh nooooo, we all got time enough to die.

  11. Byron,

    In re: Enron

    You still mistake correlation and causation.

    Seriously, are you feeling okay? Your brain usually works better than this.

  12. Byron,

    “The market is rational because the market is nothing more than individuals”

    This begs the question that all humans are rational and they are not. You are still making the same causal fallacy as before.

    “and it is also ethical for the same reason and to the same extent that individuals who comprise it are.”

    Don’t make me repeat myself. See the above answer and substitute “ethical” for “rational”.

    “It is also most definitely self correcting, we see it everyday in the variation of price and supply and demand.”

    You are mistaking a rational mechanism for a self-correcting mechanism. They are not the same thing.

    As to what I think the market is? That’s pretty much what unregulated markets/capitalism, i.e. fascism, behaves like Byron. A civilization destroying monster. See again what mespo pointed to in Smith’s work. Also see Nazi Germany, Italy under Mussolini, and Spain under Franco . . . none of those fascist states had happy endings or equity and justice in operation.

    Your logical hole is getting deeper.

    Your belief, and that’s what this narrows down to – your belief that humans are all rational and ethical, does not comport to the facts as evidenced by history.

    I said your greed was showing to illicit a specific reaction. Now I’m saying again your blind spot is showing in the hope you’ll have a light of reason switch on at some point. You can correct the fallacies of your operations or not, but the logic still stands.

  13. Buddha:

    can we get beyond Enron, I seem to remember that government regulations allowed them to do what they did. Had it been a free market what they did would not have been rational and therefore would not have been done.

    That is the problem with government intervention, it distorts markets and causes irrational outcomes. Government bureaucrats cannot set the price of oil and gas or wheat or corn and expect the market to behave rationally. The market (i.e. individuals) change their behaviour to adjust to false premises (government intervention). It is the response to the false premises caused by government intervention that is the cause of what you see not the other way around.

    If I tell you that I am going to pay you $100 for every crayfish you bring me what is going to happen? A rational man would be collecting crayfish all day long, but the purchaser is clearly not rational because crayfish are probably $75 per bushel.

  14. Buddha:

    “The implicit assumption is that the market is 1) rational, 2) ethical and 3) capable of self-correction/self-policing.”

    The market is rational because the market is nothing more than individuals and it is also ethical for the same reason and to the same extent that individuals who comprise it are. It is also most definitely self correcting, we see it everyday in the variation of price and supply and demand.

    I think you think the market is some big green blob that behaves at random eating towns and cities and out of control and causing mayhem with the populace.

  16. EC,

    Not to nitpick, but wouldn’t Caribou Barbie be a more accurate term?

    Unless you are thinking of a different political Barbie, of course.

  17. He doesn’t even know what’s in the Bill – just repeating all the Maliboo Barbie and Crazyass Bachman talking points

    Cassell: Hospice cuts in 2012…Does the government want people to die slowly?
    Colmes: Do you really think the government wants people dead?
    Cassell: Well I think that they’re cutting all supportive care, like nursing homes, ambulance services…
    Colmes: What to you mean they’re cutting nursing homes?
    Cassell: They’re cutting nursing home reimbursements
    Colmes: Isn’t what they’re cutting under the Medicare plan what was really double dipping; they were getting credits and they were getting to deduct them at the same time.
    Cassell: Well you know, I can’t tell you exactly what the deal is.
    Colmes: If you can’t tell us exactly what the deal is, why are you opposing it and fighting against it?
    Cassell: I’m not the guy who wrote the plan.
    Colmes: But if you don’t know what the deal is why are you speaking out against something you don’t know what the deal is?
    Cassell: What I get online, just like any other American. What I’m supposed to understand about the bill should be available to me.
    Colmes: It is; it’s been online for a long time; it’s also been all over the media…

    http://www.alan.com/2010/04/03/doctor-against-treating-obama-supporters-admits-not-knowing-whats-in-health-reform-bill/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+liberaland+%28Alan+Colmes+Liberaland%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

  19. ATLANTA – 11Alive News first broke the story about several anti-Obama billboards that popped up around Atlanta two days ago.

    On Friday we found out who’s behind them.

    “There’s a group of entrepreneurs, small business owners, that have frankly just said, ‘we’ve had enough’ and they’re taking the gloves off,” says Atlanta author and motivational speaker Tommy Newberry.

    Newberry is an outspoken conservative whose books include, “The War on Success: How the Obama Agenda is Shattering the American Dream”.

    He has now come forward as the spokesman for what he says are about a dozen business owners who hatched the idea for the billboards about two months ago.

    http://www.11alive.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=142459&catid=3

    http://www.billboardsagainstobama.com/

  20. Byron,

    “The problem as I see it is the government intervention in the market. It distorts markets and causes the problems you see and attribute to capitalism.”

    The implicit assumption is that the market is 1) rational, 2) ethical and 3) capable of self-correction/self-policing.

    The problem with the first assumption is that while markets have mechanisms that are capable of rational description, history shows other irrational factors are in play. If not, we would not have the term “market panic” or “artificial scarcity” and see a phenomena like the spike in duct tape and plastic sheeting sales caused by some moron who obviously slept through high school biology telling people it would protect them from a biological attack (which is supreme irrational bullshit).

    The problem with the second assumption is . . . Enron. I can list a whole list of other examples of bad acting corporations distorting the market, but why not stick with the poster boy?

    The problem with the third assumption is . . . Enron. Those bastards would have kept screwing with the energy markets until that whole system broke if the Feds hadn’t shut their criminal asses down. Because you have self-control and ethics Byron does not mean everyone does. In a world where humans were perfect, your idealized concept of how a market works might have merit, but the real world is messier than the models.

    “That is why you cant have government monkeying around in the private sector it causes artificial booms and busts. People change their behaviour to take advantage of these changes and viola-an artificial economy based on some bureaucrats commodity manipulation vs. a true supply and demand economy based on principles of human consumption determined by individuals pursuing their rational self interest.”

    Again you are mistaking cause and effect. Correlation is not causation. The general form of the fallacy is:

    A and B regularly occur together.
    Therefore A is the cause of B.

    But your error is even more subtle than that. There is more than one form of causal fallacy. The error you are making is similar to the post hoc fallacy which has the general form of:

    A occurs before B.
    Therefore A is the cause of B.

    But that’s not exactly the causal error you’re making either. The causal fallacy you have fallen into is more accurately the fallacy of ignoring a common cause, which bears the general form:

    A and B are regularly connected (but no third, common cause is looked for).
    Therefore A is the cause of B.

    Your blind spot is human nature, old bean. The true cause of both market instability is the true cause of the need for criminal law in the first place: human nature. The markets, to be the pristine model you envision, would have to exist in a world where no one lied, no one cheated and not one stole. When you find that world, send us a post card.

    “And what do you call excess? Most CEOs don’t make out like people on Wall St. do. Go look at the prospectus of any American Corp., they do well but I wouldn’t exactly call it excessive. And why shouldn’t a person of superior performance be paid a superior wage? The problem is that many seem to think that everyone can run a company or create Microsoft or Apple, they cant. But most people can dig a ditch or flip a hamburger. Why should a ditch digger be paid more than he is worth and a CEO be paid less than he is worth?”

    And who decides that relative worth?

    The irrational and faulty markets manipulated by those “at the top” to inflate their own self-value artificially is who. No one’s time is worth five million dollars a year. Not mine. Not yours. Not Bill Gates. Not Jesus H. Christ Himself. And don’t even go to Wall St. Wall St. is a shell game casino of guys selling made up shit to other guys stupid enough to buy it. If it wasn’t, credit default swaps – a made up arbitrage transaction – would have never been an issue. Betting on cricket fights in Thailand makes better sense than buying a CDS. And let’s look at professional sports, shall we? The main reason salaries in that market for players is sky-high is that the players started suing the owners over, duh dun DA!, excessive profits earned off the fruits of their labor, i.e. theft by conversion or inequity in distribution of profits.

    That a human is worth something in a market is a fairly retrograde and primitive idea. The only true value of a human is immediate value to those around him in assisting with their survival and/or an ability to create new or novel ideas that change the lives of the maximum for the better. This is why Aristotle is still studied today yet no one ever mentions great Greek businessmen of antiquity. One made a concrete measurable contribution that was durable whereas the guy in the market was by in large just jerking off. If the sun were to go nuts today and kill every electronic device on the planet (which it could), who would be the more valuable to society? An arbitrage trader (who produces no real product) or the ditch digger (who keeps your homes from flooding)? The reason this is a retrograde and primitive idea is that it is

    1) by its term relative to a given situation and therefore contextual and

    2) it’s a form of self-imposed slavery to irrational and relative market mechanisms.

    This hardly comports with the notion of freedom or liberty. When one becomes a slave to one’s possessions, who is the actual master? You or your crap that you can’t take with you? The answer is so simple I’ll call it self-evident.

    No, Byron, your optimism about human nature and your misunderstanding of model versus reality have led you into a logical hole. If this doesn’t seem persuasive, I submit that Slarti and Bob can point to other examples of models not matching reality, but none of this will change your error until you come to grips that the problems in markets are not the causally connected to the operation of government (maximal, minimal or malfunctioning) but that the errors in both systems are rooted in the causation of human nature. This is why the government’s internal structure of checks and balances (when properly functioning and not distorted by the crime of institutionalized graft) operate to not just hold other branches in check but support them in their areas of weakness. And this is analogous to how and why governments are a necessary check and balance on markets and business as well. Life, and ergo all of civilization, is in reality a team sport. A team sport we cannot win if we let the pitcher purposefully throw balls at the heads of batters on a regular basis. That leads to batters charging the plate and the bench clearing and soon there is no game. Just simple anarchy.

    Your error, simply put, is that because you may be a decent fair playing guy that everyone is and that’s not the case. Some men just live to see the world burn. That’d include you and your entire family too if they could profit from it.

    The problem isn’t regulation from government.

    The problem isn’t a market based mechanism per se.

    The problem is human nature.

    And your nearly Pollyanna-ish refusal to see that true root cause has distorted your reasoning. This is NOT an insult by the way. Simply it is a reflection that you think humans are better creatures than we actually are, but – while admirable in sentiment – it is not the reality. Potential is not actualization. A rock on a ledge is merely a potential crater until it falls. We have enormous potential to be good beings. Conversely, we have enormous potential to be evil beings. We develop systems, from religions to governments to logics, in an effort to steer us toward not just personal good but societal good. We try to impose order upon the chaos of human nature. And it is this very trait, not thumbs or tool use or the capacity for rational thought, that truly differentiates humankind from animals.

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