"In medicine, above all, the mind must be left free. Medical treatment involves countless variables and options that must be taken into account, weighed, and summed up by the doctor's mind and subconscious. Your life depends on the private, inner essence of the doctor's function: it depends on the input that enters his brain, and on the processing such input receives from him. What is being thrust now into the equation? It is not only objective medical facts any longer. Today, in one form or another, the following also has to enter that brain: 'The DRG administrator [in effect, the hospital or HMO man trying to control costs] will raise hell if I operate, but the malpractice attorney will have a field day if I don't—and my rival down the street, who heads the local PRO [Peer Review Organization], favors a CAT scan in these cases, I can't afford to antagonize him, but the CON boys disagree and they won't authorize a CAT scanner for our hospital—and besides the FDA prohibits the drug I should be prescribing, even though it is widely used in Europe, and the IRS might not allow the patient a tax deduction for it, anyhow, and I can't get a specialist's advice because the latest Medicare rules prohibit a consultation with this diagnosis, and maybe I shouldn't even take this patient, he's so sick—after all, some doctors are manipulating their slate of patients, they accept only the healthiest ones, so their average costs are coming in lower than mine, and it looks bad for my staff privileges.' Would you like your case to be treated this way—by a doctor who takes into account your objective medical needs and the contradictory, unintelligible demands of some ninety different state and Federal government agencies? If you were a doctor could you comply with all of it? Could you plan or work around or deal with the unknowable? But how could you not? Those agencies are real and they are rapidly gaining total power over you and your mind and your patients. In this kind of nightmare world, if and when it takes hold fully, thought is helpless; no one can decide by rational means what to do. A doctor either obeys the loudest authority—or he tries to sneak by unnoticed, bootlegging some good health care occasionally or, as so many are doing now, he simply gives up and quits the field."
Socialized medicine will finish off quality medicine in this country—because it will finish off the medical profession. It will deliver doctors bound hands and feet to the mercies of the bureaucracy.
The only hope—for the doctors, for their patients, for all of us—is for the doctors to assert a moral principle. I mean: to assert their own personal individual rights—their real rights in this issue—their right to their lives, their liberty, their property, their pursuit of happiness. The Declaration of Independence applies to the medical profession too. We must reject the idea that doctors are slaves destined to serve others at the behest of the state.
I'd like to conclude with a sentence from Ayn Rand. Doctors, she wrote, are not servants of their patients. They are "traders, like everyone else in a free society, and they should bear that title proudly, considering the crucial importance of the services they offer."
The battle against the socialized medicine, in my opinion, depends on the doctors speaking out against the plan—but not only on practical grounds—rather, first of all, on moral grounds. The doctors must defend themselves and their own interests as a matter of solemn justice, upholding a moral principle, the first moral principle: self-preservation. If they can do it, all of us will still have a chance. I hope it is not already too late.
Very good Sarcastic Conservative, it is an article by Leonard Peikoff. Here is the link to it.
http://www.afcm.org/hcinar.html
As for LadySnow.... who in the hell said this was Obama's plan...? Are you sure you're responding to the right question? This article is just highlighting why socialized medicine, and government intervention into the health care market is a horrible idea...
Reformed
Preach it!
charlie_the_carpenter
It's rather long-winded.
Ninja Rabbit 007
It's a great article. It's a very articulate way to show how impratical government run health care is.
Do you have the website where you got it from?
Sarcastic Conservative
Nevermind, this is from an article by Leonard Peikoff.
The actual, full article is incredible. That little snippet, of whatever else is there, doesn't make a very effective essay. I agree with the points made it, though.
LadySnowbird
This is NOT the Obama Heath plan. If you go to his website and read his plan. His plan will open up the govenment employees plan to the general public. That is not socialized medicine. He feels that the people of this country should be able to have the same coverage as the government employees.
dinodino
While it does identify real problems with the CURRENT situation, when you get down the conclusion, it's really a bunch of nonsense written from the perspective of a Doctor who subscribes to Objectivism -- the philosophy of Ayn Rand. "Socialized Medicine" is never really defined, and a real solution to the issues is never offered -- pie-in-the sky gobbledygook as convoluted, tedious and confusing as the denouement of an Ayn Rand novel -- her philosophy only works in fiction, not the real world.
PS -- The writer also seems to be asserting he or she is omnipotent.
Also, the writer claims only the doctor is or can be objective. As I said, fiction.
Yup Peikoff, the "heir to Ayn Rand".
Orignal From: What are your thoughts of this article written about socialized medicine?
Post a Comment