Removing one provider from the ranks of this specialty would not equate to a crisis in regards to access to care if there existed an adequate number of providers. Also, patients should not have to choose between no access to care or care from one such as this provider. The system is clearly broken and needs to be fixed. I make no apologies for putting physician financial compensation and oligopoly market position at the bottom of the list of the issues that are of import in this discussion.

Information regarding “reputation” is not terribly useful. Physicians’ abilities to process information and utilize it in decision making is pretty suspect outside diagnosing patients.

When there is enough of a shortage there the system will correct itself.

For all your posting, you have never once said anything about how things should really be different with any sort of concrete proposal as to what those changes would look like or how they might work. And no one has denied you the opportunity. So can we all assume that while you don’t like things as they are, you also don’t have a clue as to how to change things for the better in a way that would actually work? It’s easy to squeal and rant on a computer keyboard. No one expects a thing from you.

Faustian choice? Hardly. People in this Florida community won’t pay for a highly trained and hopefully competent practitioner to work in a very high risk field, liability-wise, who can afford adequate insurance coverage and still earn enough to make the stresses and efforts of practice in that particular place worthwhile, or at least more worthwhile than practicing somewhere else. That is why the doctor has eliminated his malpractice premium. That is why he chooses to be employed by a hospital. That is why he chooses to practice after filing bankruptcy. If this is such a good deal for anyone else, why aren’t they trying to break into this market and push out this supposed “incompetent”?
Maybe there just aren’t any takers.

Neurogurgery is notoriously high risk. Patients who need a neurosurgeon are usually in real trouble. Bad things frequently happen even with best possible practices, it is the nature of this kind of medical practice. Well trained neurosurgeons have to be not just skillful-nearly always–but also have to have extraordinary judgment. Paying them well and being very selective is the way that these sorts of people have been found in the past. I don’t see how any solution you might propose to somehow make more neurosurgeons that would be able to do any better.
I do not think that lesser-qualified and less thoroughly trained pratitioners is the answer, that is for sure.

“Idolatry?” Is that your peevish and resentful term that from a better person might be considered simple respect? I’ll take the “idolatry”, clay feet or not, to any silly wooden-headed alternatives you might propose.

This is the unfortunate Faustian choice that we are left with secondary to our domestic medical oligopoly. Either no health care or allow barebacking incompetents to provide the substandard care that they do provide. I hope that the populace is happy with this “bad outcome.” It is the well deserved result for their idolatry.