Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Enslaving Doctors?

Blogging may be light for the next few days, due to my schedule.

But in the meantime, I urge readers to take a look at Brian Schwartz's post on his PatientPower blog: "Dehumanizing Doctors".

In particular, he points to the following disturbing comment on another blog:
A true "universal" system does not involve private insurance or a two tier level of service that doctors can run to when they are unhappy with the "government" tier. If universal is going to work then we all have to be in the same system and have the same commitment to its success.
This is precisely the attitude Dr. Leonard Peikoff warned about when he wrote in "Health Care Is Not A Right":
To call "medical care" a right will merely enslave the doctors and thus destroy the quality of medical care in this country, as socialized medicine has done around the world, wherever it has been tried, including Canada (I was born in Canada and I know a bit about that system first hand).
The result of "universal health care" is a system in which government forces doctors to work under the government's terms and for the government's prices even if patients and doctors would both gladly choose otherwise in a free market.