Charles Parrish of Wayne State University submitted the following proposal:

 

 

Surgeons United who Care for America (SUCA*)

 

This is to announce the establishment of a new approach to surgery in the United States: Surgeons for America (SUCA). Following in the high-heeled footprints of Michelle Rhee and Wendy Kopp, we will employ the model of Teach for America (TFA). That model involves the recruiting bright young graduates of our best colleges and universities, providing them with 5 or 6 weeks of training, and then sending them out to provide high-value surgical operations for patients at low cost. They will replace older surgeons who have become set in their ways and have lost the ignorant, enthusiastic arrogance of youth. We prefer to recruit young people with bachelor degrees in the sciences or business, but we will consider candidates from the humanities on a case-by-case basis. Our particular concern in the selection process for candidates from the humanities is whether they have, or can quickly develop, a callous sense of indifference to patient pain and outcomes.

 

Part of both our 5 and 6 week courses in surgery, is a one-week course in the finances of Charter Surgery Urgent Care Clinics. All our trainees learn how to do such things as purchase a building through a newly formed for-profit firm and then to lease it back to the Charter Surgery Urgent Care Clinic, which is of course as 501(c) 3 non-profit organization. The SUCA surgeons should be officers of both the for-profit and non-profit organization in order to maximize their income and get the maximum tax advantages. All materials for use by the clinic (furniture, tables, computer, stirrups for gynecological exams, operating instruments, etc.) can be leased or bought outright from the for-profit firm.

 

As a small concession to experience (of which we are usually contemptuous), there will be a different between the training in the two tracks. Those who enroll in the 5-week program will be only qualified to perform certain simpler operations (vasectomies, D&Cs, appendix, Gall bladder and similar organ removals, skin and other simple cancer operations, penile and breast implants, etc.). Those who go through the 6-week course will be qualified for all operations, from brain cancer to hangnails. Those in the 5-week course will use the textbook Surgery for Dummies. The 6-week course will use Advanced Surgery for Dummies.

 

After three years as a Surgeon for America, a SUCA graduate will be encouraged to move on into their life career with warm memories of their youthful experience as a surgeon and with a dandy new citation in their curriculum vitae. We do not want these young surgeons to become stale (as so many of the older, experienced surgeons they are replacing are). Many of these young surgeons will go into hedge fund management or other Wall Street professions. Their experience as a surgeon trained to develop moral ambiguity and indifference to the to the pain they inflict through their novice approach to surgical procedures prepares them particularly for such professions.

 

SUCA was initiated by a grant from the Gates Foundation from funds freed up when Bill finally grew bored with funding charter schools and getting no results and being excoriated by Diane Ravich.

 

*Pronounced “Suck-A”, as in: “You are a suckaa.”