by Publius
BigGovernment.com has learned that the University of Wisconsin medical school is investigating reports that its physicians handed out fake medical excuses to union teachers who were planning to call out sick this week.
On Saturday, Andrew Breitbart approached doctors signing teachers up en masse and was told he has ‘[Gov. Scott] Walker Pneumonia.’ Upon putting down his real name, and stating he wasn’t sick and that did “didn’t want to get in trouble,” with cameras filing the scene, one of the alleged doctors became suspicious and demanded that the cameras be shut off.
BigGovernment.com blogger Christian Hartsock and prominent Madison-based blogger and U of W law professor, Ann Althouse chronicled the mass fake doctors note sign-ups, as well.
On Sunday, the Teachers Union backed down and told its members attend class on Tuesday.
The University of Wisconsin says any doctors who signed notes did so on their own behalf — and without the approval of the university.
The Atlantic talked with the head of Wisconsin’s Center for Bioethics:
Big Government
BigGovernment.com has learned that the University of Wisconsin medical school is investigating reports that its physicians handed out fake medical excuses to union teachers who were planning to call out sick this week.
On Saturday, Andrew Breitbart approached doctors signing teachers up en masse and was told he has ‘[Gov. Scott] Walker Pneumonia.’ Upon putting down his real name, and stating he wasn’t sick and that did “didn’t want to get in trouble,” with cameras filing the scene, one of the alleged doctors became suspicious and demanded that the cameras be shut off.
BigGovernment.com blogger Christian Hartsock and prominent Madison-based blogger and U of W law professor, Ann Althouse chronicled the mass fake doctors note sign-ups, as well.
On Sunday, the Teachers Union backed down and told its members attend class on Tuesday.
The University of Wisconsin says any doctors who signed notes did so on their own behalf — and without the approval of the university.
The Atlantic talked with the head of Wisconsin’s Center for Bioethics:
After viewing the videos at my request last night, Dr. Arthur Derse called me up exclaiming, “Holy mackerel! It’s much worse than it looked in the paper. I’m stunned, absolutely stunned.” Dr. Derse is the Director of Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities a the Medical College of Wisconsin. “When all’s said and done, it’s really the profession of medicine that has the black eye in this case,” he says.
There is no question these doctors are masking political opinion in the white coat of the medical profession, Dr. Derse believes. “The videos are pretty damning.”
It’s sad, but what puzzles me most is how in the world three of the four physicians I can identify from these videos and other media reports are faculty members of UW’s Family Medicine department, and one is a senior resident in that same department. It’s a good training program, committed to providing sorely-needed primary care doctors to the state of Wisconsin. It teaches professionalism, and its faculty are supposed to model integrity. What were they thinking?
They’ve managed to belittle a public trust between physicians, employers and patients. A doctor’s sick note is a serious document. It represents an employer’s desire to verify through a respected, independent, medically qualified third party the fact of an illness and the true need for convalescence. In the videos now circulating online, we witness multiple members of a noted family medicine department trash one of the well-recognized rights and privileges of their profession, with little forethought as to the consequences.
Big Government
