Assad Meymandi: Immoral Medicaid move

Regarding the Sept. 21 news article “NC budget cuts $110 million from regional mental health”: It is morally indefensible, economically unsound and medically and clinically dangerous to privatize the N.C. Medicaid program. Practice of medicine is not and should not be regarded as a business. Medicine is a priesthood, and the privilege of practice of medicine is a calling. Medical practitioners ought not to be relegated to a group of three-piece-suit-wearing, briefcase-carrying businessmen who hold their MBA degrees as the supreme arbiter of people’s health care. They respond to the bottom line and to the shareholders and not to the health and welfare of common people.

Sir William Osler and Edmund Pellegrino are turning in their graves seeing what is happening to the holy profession of medicine, eroded by greed, arrogance and bottom line.

Let’s stop the foolishness. Medicaid ought not to be privatized. N.C. people deserve better.

This story was originally published September 26, 2015 at 2:00 PM with the headline "Assad Meymandi: Immoral Medicaid move."