Jay Dickey: “I come here as a former small business owner and as a lawyer. When I first looked at this situation, I looked at it from…”

“I come here as a former small business owner and as a lawyer. When I first looked at this situation, I looked at it from the doctor's standpoint and I saw a tremendous need, dire circumstances that doctors are facing, even to the extent that we were going to lose doctors presently existing and applicants were not going to apply. And I rushed in with my philosophical approach to this and said, ``We've got to help the doctors at all costs.'' What I found out was that ``at all costs'' meant the cure was going to be worse than the disease, that the small business owners were going to be killed by being put into courtrooms without any type of protection and in greater numbers. So what I wanted to do was to try to look at the patients and say we need to get them in the treatment room and not in the courtroom. I have looked carefully at this and I can see that the Hastert bill is a perfect solution for this, or maybe not perfect but it is a perfect start. It is something we need to look at. If we do not do this, we are going to have patients who will not have choices because they won't have doctors, and that is serious.”