Dr. Hal C. Scherz’s tenacious work bringing together doctors across America to make the case for repealing Obamacare brought him a deserved reward earlier today. During a lunchtime ceremony in Dallas, the Atlanta physician accepted The Heritage Foundation’s 2011 Salvatori Prize for American Citizenship.
Heritage annually presents the $25,000 prize, named for the late entrepreneur and philanthropist Henry Salvatori, to an American who advances the principles and virtues of the nation’s Founders.
Dr. Scherz, a tireless advocate for patient-centered health care reform as well as managing partner of Georgia Pediatric Urology, founded Docs 4 Patient Care (D4PC) in 2009. The mission of this voluntary association of medical practitioners: to champion sensible health care reform while promoting quality of care and affordable access for all.
“A modern-day Paul Revere, Hal Scherz set out to warn his profession and his fellow citizens of the federal government’s bureaucratic destruction of the American health care system through the takeover that came to be known as Obamacare,” said Matthew Spalding, Heritage’s vice president for American studies.
Edwin Meese III, chairman of Heritage’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, joined Spalding in presenting the Salvatori Prize to Dr. Scherz during a luncheon opening the think tank’s 34th annual Resource Bank gathering in Dallas.
Docs 4 Patient Care “seeks to preserve the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship rather than allow medical practitioners to become mere instruments of the state,” said Spalding, who directs Heritage’s B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies.
A former president of Georgia Urology P.A., Dr. Scherz also practices at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, having relocated from San Diego to Atlanta in 1994. He is past president of the American Association of Pediatric Urologists. The author of more than 75 peer-reviewed articles, he serves on the faculty of Emory University.
Dr. Scherz said he will donate the prize money to D4PC. More power to them. As Heritage’s Kathryn Nix blogged yesterday:
Years of research, including early warnings from The Heritage Foundation, indicate that Obamacare’s Value-Based Purchasing Program and schemes like it will be unsuccessful and result in more harm than good. Studies have since provided evidence to support expectations that pay-for-performance would hurt the doctor-patient relationship, threaten physician autonomy and deteriorate the quality of patient care in several other ways.”
Or as Dr. Scherz himself wrote in The Wall Street Journal last fall:
America’s doctors have millions of personal interactions each week with patients. We have political power. And we intend to use it by working to defeat those who have disrupted and gravely endangered the best health-care system in the world.”