Do You Share The Values Of The People You Work For?

Do You Share The Values Of The People You Work For?

By

Leonard Zwelling

I have been thinking about this a great deal as it pertains to the Trump Tax and Budget Bill that made its way through Congress and will be signed the day of this writing, July 4. As a student of Congress, I am quite sure that any bill that requires the vote of the Vice President to get through the Senate is a lousy bill. A bill of this size involving trillions of dollars should not get passed using a tie breaker. It barely passed the House and what deals were made by Speaker Mike Johnson to get the votes to pass this can only be imagined. That is no mandate nor are the people’s best interests being represented by their elected members of Congress no matter how much these Trump sycophants celebrate in front of the TV cameras. And that joy in the face of the pain they just inflicted, in itself, was sickening. To celebrate 11 million Medicaid beneficiaries losing their health care is unseemly.

The reason a bill of this size and consequence has split the Senate in two is that it is a poorly-conceived bill preserving tax cuts for the wealthy while trimming benefits like Medicaid for the less fortunate. In any reasonable universe, this bill would be voted down on a bipartisan basis. However, President Trump has vowed to use the power of primaries against any Republican who opposes his “big, beautiful bill.” In other words, this is a bill passed by coercion, even sweeping up Lisa Murkowski, a senator I met on the Hill and who I had a lot of respect for until now. When the biggest pimp in history is in the White House, all the members of the Republican caucus who support him are, well, you know.

This bill reflects the values of Donald Trump. He will reward his rich buddies and forget the blue-collar Medicaid-dependent poor, especially in rural red states, who put him in office. In other words, Trump has no values at all. His only concern is Donald Trump and how he is doing now. The current United States government in its “America First” foreign policy, reduction of foreign aid, and now its cruel use of Medicaid dollars to insure the longevity of the earlier Trump tax cuts while still expanding the deficit and the debt, has presented our country as a selfish nation beyond measure, foolish beyond imagination, and short-sighted about its place in the world. We simply are giving up our leadership role in the world because our president has no real values.

And talking about presidents with no real values, please someone tell me what the values of MD Anderson and its current leadership are.

Under R. Lee Clark, Charles LeMaistre, and John Mendelsohn, MD Anderson was synonymous with world-class patient care, ever more impactful research, and a novel drive to prevent cancer as well as to treat it.

The last two presidents after Mendelsohn have been self-centered and inept. DePinho wanted to turn MD Anderson into a drug company while personally making money and rewarding his friends—even his wife. Fortunately, that was stopped in its tracks after six years of nepotism and corruption from which the institution has not fully recovered because so many of DePinho’s cronies were kept around by Pisters.

I have no idea what Dr. Pisters even wants MD Anderson to be. At least Ron had a vision, even if his values were a little self-centered and surely grandiose. Pisters has not articulated any values or any strategy beyond getting bigger. He’s been good at that as MD Anderson now has 26,000 employees, many of whom work from home—so they say. I wonder how much the institution spends air conditioning all the administrators’ office space that stands empty and unused.

MD Anderson values used to be easy to find. It was on Dr. LeMaistre’s tee shirt: Fighting Cancer, Now That’s A Job! Or articulated in Dr. Mendelsohn’s logo: Making Cancer History. Or even the phrase: “research-driven patient care.” What’s Dr. Pisters’ take on what he is trying to do? I have no idea. It’s hard to fight cancer and make it history from home or even from Colorado.

So don’t be surprised if the people working at Anderson have trouble aligning their values with those of the institution they work for. If you don’t know the values of the leaders of the place where you work, how can you align your values with those of that leadership? More importantly, why would you work for these leaders?