Doctor Bentivegna is an ophthalmologist living in Connecticut. He has written numerous op-ed pieces for The Hartford Courant and The New York Times regarding health care, tort reform, and the political situation in Haiti.

Joseph Bentivegna, M.D.April 29, 2019

No Senator Warren – Doctor and Nurses are not Racists

The mortality rate for black mothers is about three times higher than those of white mothers and Massachusetts senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren knows why. While speaking at Texas Southern University, a historically black college, she stated the following: “The best studies that I’ve seen put it down to just one thing: prejudice. Doctors and nurses don’t hear African American women’s medical issues the same way as they hear the same things from white women.” In other words, Senator Warren believes that that we doctors and nurses deliberately give black patients inferior care. Let’s look at the stats. According to both the United Health Foundation and the World Health Organization, the maternal death rate per 100,000 is for 47 for blacks, 18 for whites and 38 for American Indians. To put this in perspective, the rate in 1900 was 900 (there is no data on different races at this time), so overall, the situation has improved tremendously for all women since the dawn of modern medicine. … [Read more...]

Cheating to Enter Elite Schools is about Social Status

March 15, 2019 My best friend from high school and I were both accepted to Ivy League schools. We declined. We both received substantial scholarships, so it wasn’t the money. But we felt more comfortable attending schools close to our rural Pennsylvania homes with both family and friends nearby. But more important, we did not feel that attending an Ivy League school would make any difference in our lives. And we were right. Both us did fine in our respective careers. But forty-five years later, America has changed and getting into an elite school has become an obsession for America’s wealthy and upper middle class. Our kids are tortured with SAT prep courses, diarrhea contracted during some Third World humanitarian project and personal coaches trying to turn them into world class lacrosse players. Thus, it is not surprising that a recent scandal has unearthed a ring of corrupt coaches, mercenary SAT takers and unscrupulous test correctors dedicated to gaming the system. Attending an elite school makes entry into America’s Ruling Class much easier. … [Read more...]

Politicians Like Ned Lamont are Why Donald Trump is President

Anyone who wonders why the general public was so outraged that they put Donald Trump in the White House has only to look at the behavior of our new governor Ned Lamont. Taking a page from the playbook of his fellow Greenwich plutocrat, Lowell Weicker, Lamont deliberately misled the voters by promising to place tolls only on incoming trucks, just like Weicker misled the voters in 1990 into believing he would not initiate a state income tax. Like Weicker, Lamont knew that if he had been honest, he would have lost. We witnessed the usual kabuki theater that precedes a middle-class fleecing, as Governor Lamont assembled a team of business leaders, Goldman Sachs cronies and reached out to Republican leaders for input. We saw learned men and women with furrowed brows pondering the complex dilemma of responsible stewardship. It was a huge scam of course. Lamont had every intention of imposing tolls. As a scion of the J.P. Morgan fortune (his great grandfather was a partner in Morgan’s firm) and a respectable entrepreneur in his own right, he knows how to read a balance … [Read more...]