Any mandatory and comprehensive plan 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. – AYN RAND
Politics often supersedes medical science as the determining factor behind the Food and Drug Administration's granting or denying of approval of prescription drugs. This is the result of a long-term trend that has come sharply into focus with the FDA's handling of the...
Federal Judge Henry E. Hudson ruled Monday in favor of Virginia's claim that the requirement for people to purchase health care exceeds the power of Congress under the Constitution's Commerce Clause or under the General Welfare Clause. "It is not the effect on...
The writers of the U.S. Constitution were very much aware of the need to set firm and specific limits on the powers of government. Hundreds of years of the British Monarchy, and study of the failures of republican forms of government as far back as ancient Greece and...
President Barack Obama’s signatures on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act do not end the national debate on federal control of health care.[1] The debate merely enters a new and perhaps...
The federal government's Web site HealthCare.gov extols the trillion-dollar Patient Protection and (anything but) Affordable Care Act as only government propaganda can. It offers boldface contradictions and evasions in defiance of one's very sanity. Its apparent...
Paul Hsieh, MD, is a co-founder of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine or FIRM, a project which promotes and educates Americans about free market health care reforms. He is also a practicing physician in the Denver, Colorado area. His writings have appeared in...
We live in an age when the secretary of the Interior and the White House press secretary proudly and publicly proclaim that they will keep their "boot on the neck" of an oil company. This new manifestation of "hope" and "change" is ominous at a time when the...
Does American history move in only one direction—toward government domination of every detail of our daily lives? Did we reach a high-water mark of government power when ObamaCare was signed into law? Or was that just the crest of a wave that will sweep away the...
Forbidding profit in medical care replaces life with death, liberty with force, and the pursuit of happiness with self-sacrifice. Let’s not kill health care and our freedom at the same time.
Do we want a government-run medical system which forces doctors to choose between treating their patients in accordance with their best judgment or sacrificing their patients to keep their jobs?
A government that penalizes innovation could dramatically slow the pace of medical progress, leading to millions of preventable deaths. And this may be one of the worst long-range consequences of the recently passed ObamaCare health legislation.
Those who advocate for government controls in medicine cry, "People, not profits." They say profits are unacceptable in medicine because our health is so important. But it is precisely because our health is so important that profits must be vigorously defended. If...
Drug companies should never have to look toward Washington, D.C., bowing and begging for bureaucratic permission to save lives–a million lives, or just one.
During President Obama's final push for "universal health care" legislation, his biggest obstacle was not Republicans but rather anti-abortion Democrats let by Congressman Bart Stupak (D-Michigan). Stupak eventually reached a last-minute deal with the White House on...
What passes for "reform" in Congress would eliminate health insurance firms. Why? Because, we are told, it is immoral for anyone to make a profit providing health insurance. Virtue, in this view, is restricted to those who impose government insurance on everyone...
These government-mandated “quality” and “cost effectiveness” measures will thus place doctors in a position where they are punished for upholding their Hippocratic Oath to treat patients according to their best ability and rewarded for violating it.
The most effective means of destroying the rights of individual Americans is by replacing those rights with new powers for the government. Then, instead of the right to the pursuit of happiness, the political class declares that everyone has a right to be supplied...
The President's summit on health care revealed major schisms between public policy and reality. Those who feel that they must keep repeating to Americans that their health care is "broken" overlook a more fundamental problem. Most Americans, based on a lifetime of...
As the U.S. Social Security system moves ever closer to bankruptcy, the billions of dollars Americans have saved in their private retirement accounts will become an increasingly tempting target for our politicians.
There is now a pause in the inept debate on health care in Congress. After a year of struggle, some comfort might be taken from the fact that neither of the monstrosities passed by the House or the Senate has become law. However, truer than ever is the 200-year-old...
What passes for "reform" in Congress would eliminate health insurance firms. Why? Because, we are told, it is immoral for anyone to make a profit providing health insurance. Virtue, in this view, is restricted to those who impose government insurance on everyone...
Health care legislation now being debated in the Senate will do nothing to make health care more affordable but quite a lot to make it more expensive. It serves the purpose of a massive and permanent expansion of the size and power of government and the political...
The most effective means of destroying the rights of individual Americans is by replacing those rights with new powers for the government. Then, instead of the right to the pursuit of happiness, the political class declares that everyone has the right to...
The Great Prevaricator spoke again on Wednesday, attempting to return us to tribal morality and tribal medicine. The speech was smoothly delivered, but extremely evasive and dishonest. For instance, just as one small thing, I came away from the speech thinking he was...
Nearly a century ago, the Federal Reserve Board was created to eliminate the supposed economic problems of a free market. A century of inflation, recessions, one or two depressions, huge expansion in government debt, and wild swings in unemployment tells us the system...
The debate on health care reform is starting to turn ugly. Those who want to increase government power to rule American medicine are adding physicians to their list of "enemies of the people." We hear frequently that insurance companies and drug companies are...
Amid talk that the administration will re-name its plan for socialized medicine after the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy and re-package the national health care campaign as an American tribute to a 47-year veteran of the U.S. Senate who persistently opposed...
When famed bank robber Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he said: "Because that's where the money is." For the same reason, it is as predictable as the sunrise that medical care for the elderly will be cut back under a government-controlled medical...
Many years ago America started down a path that has gradually limited the free practice of medicine and the relationship between physicians and patients. You can never really have a private meeting with your doctor anymore, because the government is always in the room...
George Orwell is alive and writing new fiction about Congress legislating expanded government control of health care. Or at least it seems that way. A growing and ominous trend lately is the inversion of language to couch further government intervention in the name of...
Before I developed a detailed interest in government management of health care, I was unwillingly introduced to the subject after I was badly injured in a head-on collision in a taxi to LaGuardia Airport in New York City in 1993. To my everlasting regret, the...
There can be no such thing as a “right” to products or services created by the effort of others, and this most definitely includes medical products and services.
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