Dr. Richard Bosshardt
speaker
190 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Dr. Richard Bosshardt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I've seen this in my own community where nurses who know the good surgeons from the bad surgeons say, Dr. So-and-so, he's so slow. He just takes forever to do this operation. And complications are directly tied to length of surgery. I mean, absolutely, positively correlated. The longer the surgery, the more potential complications. Exactly.
And this is recognized, and it's recognized in a very interesting way. The CMS, the Centers for Medicine, Medicare and Medicaid, they've come out and they said, we are not going to pay for anesthesia beyond a certain time. So if we have, for example, a breast reduction, which for me is about a three and a half to four hour operation, we'll pay for four hours of anesthesia for breast reduction.
If it goes beyond that, we're not paying for that additional time. And the idea is they recognize that people are taking too long to do these things. Point is, anesthesia has nothing to do with the length of surgery. They're just there to keep the patient asleep and stable and alive for you while you're doing an operation. But
That's the only way they can think to penalize the surgeon because the surgical time does not come into play unless you look at hospital charges or anesthesia charges. And so they recognize this. And this goes back to what I said. A lot of surgeons are not getting enough surgical experience to be able to operate, one, independently, and two, I would say efficiently, competently to do.
I'm not a speedster, but I can certainly hold my own with my peers in terms of how long it takes me to finish an operation and do a good job on it. I've never tried to be the fastest guy on the block. So all those things go to the fact that you're not going to really... recognize this decline because it's so subtle in so many respects. And patients don't know that.
And that's the other reason why I'm here, Tucker. I want this to be a wake-up call to my fellow surgeons. This is what can happen to you if you speak up and you try to promote excellence in surgery and you try to object or push back against a liberal ideology, politics ideology, call it what you will, in surgery. And I would love for there to be a groundswell.
of surgeons come in and say, hey, wait a minute, what's going on in my profession?
Absolutely. I mean, think about this. You're – You're an intelligent person. You have probably a wealth of experience because of what you do. You weren't aware of racial concordance. And I mean, you ask any guy in the street about that, they're going to just look at you like, you know, you have two heads. What the heck is that?
Well, that's what they call evidence-based medicine, which is. Well, right. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, think about it from this standpoint too. Think about the, for example, Celia Nelson, the female Jamaican black surgeon that was on the Zoom call with me. She's worked as hard as anybody to get to where she is. She's an excellent surgeon. I mean, she's experienced racism.
And she'll tell you flat out, yeah, when she first arrived there, people would mistake her for, you know, asked her to get a cup of coffee in the surgeon's lab. You know, those sorts of things. And she also noticed that sometimes when she'd walk into an exam room in the emergency room, that, you know, the look she would get was, you know, who is this? Is this... Someone good.
And she's worked through all that. She's worked through that. She's just put her head down. She worked hard. And now she says what happens is when she goes into the ER, that patient has already heard from multiple staff what a wonderful surgeon they're getting. She's going to be in there to see them. So she's earned her place. But think how unfair it is for the people coming up now.
the minority, if you will, surgeons that have to face this idea when they go into a room, that person may look at them and say, gee, is this a DEI hire? Or is this a person that really- I think everyone thinks that. That went through, that got here because of their excellence, because of their excellent academic performance in college and medical school.
Because of their excellent performance in their residency? Because they met all the standards, the standards that everyone should have to meet? Or am I getting someone who's a little bit less because of this? And that's part of the unfairness of it.
It is unfair on the face of it and in practice and every other possible way. Yes. You know, the thing about anti-racism that was so, I think, despicable was it said that, you know, you cannot be against racism. You have to be for this whole anti-racism shtick. Attacking whites. Yeah. So, you know... If you claim to be not a racist, that's a racist statement.
Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you why I did it. I was too busy. I was just, I had my head in the sand.
I'm fortunate in the sense that I was able to get through a career. And I'm at the twilight of my career. No, actually, the end of my career. I have nothing to lose, Tucker. I mean, they can't hurt me.
So I got many messages, private messages, which I can't access any longer from surgeons, including minority surgeons that said, you know, we agree with you, but we can't speak up because we're going to get pushed back. You know, we're going to be called, you know, Uncle Tom's or racist or whatever if we agree with the premise that you're putting out there. I don't have much to lose.
I don't want to say that. Well, I do.
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