This just emphasizes the point I've been hammering since my first post on this site, hoping to catch the attention of the newly diagnosed:
Choose Your Treatment Provider Carefully!!
There are a LOT of Dr Kildares out there (incompetent, but great bedside manner), and not just at the VA. Unless the patient dies on the table, no one in the OR is going to speak up. They know who shouldn't be there, and gossip among themselves, but the information doesn't leave their immediate circle.
You and you alone bear the ultimate responsibility for the quality of your care, and you alone will pay the price. You SHOULD be able to assume that your treatment provider is competent, but that is sometimes not the case. PCa is not a mis-dagnosed sore throat, or a few poorly done stitches for a laceration. The consequences of a poor choice can be life-altering.
In a few years you won't have the choice option, you will be assigned a doctor, kind of like playing the lottery, but you'll bet your life instead of a dollar or two.
At least the guy wasn't doing RP's:
Nurse Jackie: Doctor, I think that's a bladder, not a prostate, that you just pulled out. Boy, is this guy going to have a continence problem!
The support for government run health care comes from dreamers who think we will have the same high quality of health care we presently enjoy, except it will be "free".
Nothing could be further from the truth. What we WILL do is subsidize people's poor life style choices (alcohol and drug abuse, smoking, and obesity), diminish the quality of our care through a variety of dis-incentives, and reward incompetence by lowering the bar for all providers.
Wealthy people (and members of Congress) will find good care by going outside the system as they do in Canada, England, Costa Rica -and probably everywhere else a government run health care system is in place. The rest of us will take what we are given, and like it.
The only ones who will benefit will be Dr Quaak and "workers" in the vast DMV-Post Office-IRS like bureaucracy that will be created to filter our money.