Dr. James DeGerome of Hypoluxo Island
practiced gastroenterology in Boynton Beach for 31 years.
Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
When he’s not pondering America’s health care challenge, Dr. James DeGerome works to maintain his own good health by jogging from the Dune Deck Café in Lantana to the Lake Worth Bridge and back several days a week.
At 74, the Hypoluxo Island resident is a retired gastroenterologist who practiced in Palm Beach County for 31 years, as well as a former president of the Bethesda Memorial Hospital medical staff and the Florida Gastroenterologic Society. He built the first ambulatory surgical center dedicated solely to gastroenterological endoscopy, at the corner of Golf Road and Seacrest Boulevard in Boynton Beach, and currently serves as president of the nonprofit Digestive Disease National Coalition in Washington, D.C.
In 2009, Dr. DeGerome published The Cure For The American Healthcare Malady, a critique of socialized medicine and prescription for reform that then future Gov. Rick Scott said “does an outstanding job explaining the life and death consequences of government-run health care and delivers a carefully thought-out path to high quality, affordable health care for all Americans.”
Now the book has just been republished in an updated paperback edition, incorporating the results of the Massachusetts Medical Society’s survey of that state’s system.
DeGerome and his wife, Carol, have been married for 24 years. She is a former vice president of Carteret Mortgage Co. in Delray Beach, and the couple have three children: James, the director of communications at the University of South Florida; Alison, a documentary filmmaker; and Julie, a regional manager for Cigna/Christie Healthcare in Boston, Mass.
— Ron Hayes
Ten Questions
Q. Where did you grow up and go to school? How do you think that has influenced you?
A. I grew up in a bedroom community in New Jersey. My dad was the local family physician, and he came from a family of eight kids. My grandfather was a full professor of Romance languages at New York University. In those days, the father would pick the occupation. He chose my father to be an M.D., and his two brothers to be a dentist and a Ph.D. like himself and they all accomplished that. I have five male first cousins and they’re all M.D.s.
Q. Tell us about your medical career; what were the highlights?
A. I went to Georgetown University for my B.S. degree and the New Jersey College of Medicine for my medical degree and was chief resident in internal medicine at the New Jersey College of Medicine. In 1970 I got board certified for the American Board of Internal Medicine and was immediately drafted into the Vietnam War by the U.S. Air Force. I was taken in as an internist and got out as a gastroenterologist.
I answered an ad in the Florida Medical Association Journal that had been placed by Dr. John Westine, who had a practice at 250 Dixie Blvd., and that’s where I settled in 1974. They needed a gastroenterologist at Bethesda Memorial Hospital and I introduced procedures of endoscopy to the area.
Q. What advice do you have for a young person entering the workforce today?
A. Oh, my God, I don’t know. The future is so complex and in transition that you don’t know what to tell them. Just practice the best you know how. You always have the satisfaction of making people better, but the circumstances of their practice are going to change rapidly over the next 20 years. Get satisfaction, that’s the important thing.
Q. Tell us about your interest in the U.S. health care system.
A. I’ve studied health care delivery throughout my entire career by going on rounds and interviewing patients in Canada, the U.K., France and Italy, and gathered my basic data over my career on my vacations — which was somewhat boring to my wife. I’d run off to the local hospital and talk to the doctors. My initial intent was to reveal that socialized medicine is not all it’s cracked up to be, and I expose the flaws in my book. I believe that it’s not less costly and does not really cover everybody and does not lead to higher quality health care. Those are my three conclusions.
Then I realized if I was going to criticize socialized medicine, I better have a better cure, so I lay out a nine-point plan based on a lot of ideas that have been around for a long time.
Q. How did you choose to have a home on Hypoluxo Island?
A. In 1988, I was shown an old, small house by the mayor of Manalapan, Dr. Kent Shortz, an orthopedic surgeon and a friend at Bethesda. I was president of the medical staff and he was the preceding president. He said I have a piece of property I must sell and he showed me this property on the lagoon and I fell in love with it.
Q. What is your favorite part about living on Hypoluxo Island?
A. Ah! I would say the view. It’s gorgeous. I look out on the lagoon and I can see the ocean from my porch upstairs. A beautiful piece of property I lucked into, and my neighbors are fabulous, wonderful people.
Q. What book are you reading now?
A. Castles of Steel, by Robert Massie, It’s about the birth of the German navy before and during World War I. It’s meticulously researched.
Q. Do you have a favorite quote that inspires your decisions?
A. From William Shakespeare, “Julius Caesar,” Act. III, Scene 2: “There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.”
Q. Have you had mentors in your life? Individuals who have inspired your life decisions?
A. A colonel M.D. named David Langdon. I was at Little Rock Air Force Base, and then Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, where I did two years of gastroenterology training under Dr. Langdon. I went in as an internist and he convinced me to be a gastroenterologist.
Q. If your life story were made into a movie, who would you want to play you?
A. Probably Clint Eastwood. I watch “Josey Wales” every now and then when I want to get rid of frustration.
The Cure For The American Healthcare Malady is available at www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com. For more information, visit www.degerome.com.
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