Pursuing praxis

Would that only ….

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Dear Senator Kennedy,

I understand you are recovering from surgery on a brain tumor, undertaken at Duke University Medical Center with Dr. Allan Friedman. Although I wish you a speedy recovery and good results with your ongoing treatment, I note with sincere concern your consistent and long-standing advocacy for universal health care in the United States. As a neurosurgeon by choice and by profession, I would like to bring to your attention a very deep contradiction between the services you advocate for, and the services which you have personally sought out and benefited from, as underscored in your present circumstances. I have said it before, so permit me to quote myself:

"Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? . . . I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything — except the desires of the doctors . . . . I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind — yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating room table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims."

I ask you, sir, to re-consider your position on universal health care, and the attending issues of doctors’ rights together with patients’ rights. Good health care presupposes doctors who are both willing and able to treat patients. Remove the incentives and ability of doctors to exercise their best judgment - which is what we have been trained to do - and by logic the system will retain only the willing, irrespective of ability.

High esteem stands as nothing compared to a person’s inalienable right to choose, think and act as he sees fit. In the case of a doctor, he has chosen to devote his life to thinking and acting to improve and protect the health of his patients. Protect his individual rights, and you ensure the kind of health care we have created and come to expect in this country, for individual rights apply to doctors as well as their patients, to providers as well as consumers. When both are free to think and act, each by his best judgment, their common goals define the relationship and speed progress to those ends.

Your sincerely, 

Thomas Hendricks, MD (retired)

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From "Doctors and the Police State" by Leonard Peikoff, June 1962, The Objectivist Newsletter (special supplement):

In a free society, a man cannot force his terms on others; those who dissent are free to deal elsewhere. A patient who disapproves of a doctor’s methods of treatment can seek out another doctor; a doctor who considers a patient’s demands irrational is not compelled to give in to them. And, in the long run, it is the best and ablest doctors—those who achieve the cures and demonstrate their value—that rise to the top and set the example for the rest of the profession.

But when the government sets the terms, they are enforced by the police power of the State. The standards of the government become the laws of the country, and no others are legally permitted. Should any doctor object to the decrees of the officials who staff the State Health Board—should he attempt to act on his own best judgment and make an unauthorized use of the drugs, the hospital beds, the operating rooms being paid for by the State—he becomes thereby a criminal, and he is legally subject to retribution: to loss of license, or fine, or jail-sentence. There is no one to whom he can turn: the government is his sole employer. He either submits—or he leaves medicine—or he escapes from the country.

Moral Health Care vs. "Universal Health Care"
Lin Zinser and Paul Hsieh

Synopsis: surveys the history of government interference in health insurance and medicine in America, specifying the rights violations and economic problems caused thereby; enumerates the failed attempts to solve those economic problems by means of further government interference; and shows that the only viable solution to the debacle at hand is to gradually and systematically transition to a rights-respecting, fully free market in these industries. Read the article.

Update 6/25/08: The New York Times has an essay on physicians’ growing frustration and reluctance to practicing medicine, and how its the bureacracy that’s making their profession intolerable.