Sarasota County Public Hospital Board, at-large Seat 1: Tamzin A. Rosenwasser

Age: 74

Current occupation: Physician

Resident of Sarasota County: 34 years

Why are you running for election?

I am running because several distressed people who know me asked me to do so. My work protecting patients has been on an individual and a national level. I consented to run because I know that medical care is being twisted by other considerations than taking care of patients.

Have you ever run for public office before? If so, for what office?

No.

What experience and/or special skills do you have that make you a better candidate than your opponents?

As a physician, I understand medical care and what it entails. I made medical decisions, sometimes in seconds in the emergency room and intensive care units. I was responsible for those decisions, and was right beside the beds with my patients and their relatives.

Medical care requires constant study, good judgment, hard work, compassion and ethics. Most of the board is business people. There is no business Hippocratic Oath. Business can supply financial knowledge, but only recently has medical care become the “healthcare industry.” My patients are real people, not industry widgets.

I have more than 40 years’ experience at the interface of physicians with hospitals, government and medical corporatists. I know what has happened to make medical care a bureaucratic nightmare for both patients and physicians.

As a member, board member, officer and past president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, whose motto is “All for the Patient” I have been at the forefront in protecting patients from government interference; we stopped HillaryCare, won a case recently for the United Airline pilots; and another against the FDA preventing patients from getting medications prescribed by their doctors. 

What do you see as the top three or four priorities that the hospital board needs to address? And how should those priorities be addressed?

• Tracing what went wrong during COVID, not just at SMH, but all over our nation, for all of us to understand and correct it. That means things like understanding and communicating the proper roles of the federal bureaucracies and confining them to those roles.

Doing all we can to support our physicians in their care of patients and preventing them from being coerced, threatened and extorted by government bureaucrats.

• We need to engage directly and honestly with the people of Sarasota County. Restoring confidence in Sarasota Memorial Hospital is important for people in Sarasota County. 

COVID shattered many peoples’ confidence in SMH and in their doctors. Doctors have grand rounds to examine unusual cases and to delve into what could have been done better. We need to have doctors on the hospital board with that ethic. 

During COVID, there was understandable fear and uncertainty, in all sectors of society. Let’s learn from the experience. SMH has so many areas of excellence. Let’s correct the part that went wrong.

• Exploring ways of keeping our independence from outside interests.

On a scale of A to F, with A being excellent, what grade would you give the performance of the current SMH executive team? Why, and what if anything should change in the way SMH leadership operates the SMH system?

On COVID, I would give them an F. I realize that I do not know their specific roles in that regard.

SMH has areas of excellence, but the fact is, we have to right what went wrong.

Every organization has a primary purpose. Those purposes vary. Every organization also has a secondary purpose, but the secondary purpose is the same for every organization, and that secondary purpose is to stay in existence.

When threatened, many organizations abandon their primary purpose in favor of the secondary purpose. That results in destruction of the primary purpose. The primary purpose of a hospital is to take care of sick, injured, helpless people. When the government tries to twist that, and the hospital changes to make money from the government and goes along with what the government or medical corporatists want, then patients are endangered.

The hospital’s property-tax millage rate has been 1.042 mills. In 2023, that generated $81.9 million in property-tax revenue, accounting for 58% of the hospital system’s surplus over its expenses. What is your position on the hospital’s millage rate — should it remain 1.042 mills; should it be reduced or increased? Why?

The hospital’s property-tax millage rate of 1.042 mills I would leave at that for now. 

My goal is to have the hospital be efficient. I also want citizens to have control over the money they earn. 

I would describe myself as thrifty, but not stingy. In other words, I abhor waste, but when an expenditure is necessary, I undertake it.

A faction of Sarasota County citizens contends the hospital should be sold and privatized. What is your position on this and why?

As far as “privatization” is concerned, does anyone think a philanthropic billionaire, or even a multi-millionaire, like Danny Thomas, who founded the truly charitable St. Jude Children’s Hospital for Sick Children is looking to buy our hospital? Of course not!

The people who buy hospitals and medical practices are what I call the medical corporatists; the people who are Wolves of Wall Street buying and selling “Healthcare Exchange-Traded Equities.” Their sole goal is to make money for themselves and their shareholders. They have no medical ethics. 

There are laws in some places against the corporate practice of medicine, but those laws are ignored or circumvented. 

The reason I am totally against this is that doctors are always supposed to work for their patients, not for some corporate entity.

There should be no third party intruding on the patient-doctor relationship. When corporate entities take over medical care, patients and their doctors become nothing but a means of making money for some corporate officers and their shareholders. It’s an abomination. 

I have seen medical care going down the drain over the past 44 years, and that’s why I have worked with the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons for the past 26 years.

I will note that someone has put out a rumor that those running for the hospital board against incumbents want to “P-word” the hospital, but you are the only one who has asked whether that is true. It is a lie. It is false. 

Do you agree or disagree with the board’s decision as outlined below — why?

(Regarding COVID-19 vaccines, the hospital board recently rejected a motion from Board Member Victor Rohe to add on the SMH website, among other points, the following: “to fully inform the public of the lack of pre-authorization safety data, the evidence of probable risks of these injections and of [Florida Surgeon General] Dr. Joseph Ladapo’s recent call to immediately halt the use of these COVID-19 mRNA injections. … Further, all staff and employees should be instructed, when they interact with patients or other members of the community who make inquiries about the COVID-19 vaccine, to refer those patients or community members to the information available on the SMH website concerning the risks and lack of safety data, rather than simply referring those individuals to local pharmacies that continue to dispense these potentially dangerous injections.” 

Instead the board unanimously voted to support the following: “That the Board will continue to respect and honor every patient’s right to make [his/her] own health care decision within the patient-physician relationship, and using all resources available to them to inform the discussions surrounding those decisions … [T]he Board will continue to endeavor not to invade the physician-patient relationship or mandate treatment regimens for patients to its physicians.”)

The hospital board should have retained Mr. Rohe’s original motion. The substitute motion is vague. For example, “The board will continue to endeavor not to invade the physician-patient relationship…” Why not: “The board pledges not to invade the physician-patient relationship”? The substitute motion is better than nothing but is only a face-saving gesture.

The many red flags concerning the mRNA shots are being ignored. It is a novel technology; poorly tested, it violates the Nuremberg Code to force people to take this shot. Even coroners and life insurance companies are alarmed.

COVID had a greater than 99% survival rate. Most deaths occurred in patients with Vitamin D deficiency, diabetes, heart or lung problems and obesity, over half of them over 75 years old. Those patients might have been successfully treated had early treatment and the doctors who found success with it not been demonized, ridiculed, threatened and prevented from using the treatments which seem to have been effective.

In any case, the first part of the Hippocratic Oath is “First, Do No Harm.” Especially when there is a serious risk, caution is necessary. Many things have been withdrawn with far fewer red flags.