Doctor For Single-Payer - Why?

This letter-to-the-editor appeared in the New Jersey Star-Ledger Reader Forum of 9/18/09.

Single pay is the way

I am deeply disgusted by the health-care debate. Single-payer health care is the only good solution. I am treating more and more patients for free, as they lost their jobs and health insurance. But this is not a long-term solution. The U.S. is destroying itself by not passing single payer -- and it well deserves it.

Judith Simon, M.D., Millburn

Here is my commentary, which is essentially repeated from my post of 4/17/09:

Posted by Zemack on 09/18/09 at 4:22PM

As a lay person, I have wondered about doctors who support some form of socialized medicine, such as the single payer system advocated by Dr. Judith Simon of Millburn. What would make a doctor want to sacrifice control of his/her career, judgement, and profession to the dictates of government bureaucrats wielding arbitrary powers? And make no mistake. We are talking here about a healthcare dictatorship. There is no getting around the fact that government is force, and nothing else. And when the government pays, the government sets the terms.

I suppose doctors that support socialized medicine have varied reasons for doing so...some innocent, some not. Here are a few of my suppositions.

Perhaps some doctors do not understand the free market alternative to our current system, and see total government control as an undesirable but necessary evil.

Perhaps some may want to take the intellectually lazy career path and avoid the rigors of the free market. They would rather come to work every day, picking canned, off-the-bureaucratic-shelf solutions to their patients' healthcare problems in exchange for some guaranteed unit price from a central governmental authority. (This is what philosopher Leonard Peikoff identified as the "new bureaucratic doctors" practicing "assembly-line medicine". See his essay "Medicine, The Death of a Profession" in the book, The Voice of Reason, page 299).

Some may not like having to deal with patients who want to exercise their right to act upon their own judgement by demanding, say, some test or prescription drug that the doctor may not think is warranted. They would rather deny him that right by imposing the "rational" dictates of some unknown central planner.

Much of the medical profession, I suppose, sees a government-run health care dictatorship as inevitable, and believes that the "practical" course is to make a deal with the devil at the expense of their professional integrity.

Some may be motivated by a desire to help those who cannot afford adequate healthcare, but would rather avoid the responsibility of deciding when, how, and in what capacity to extend charitable care to their indigent patients...by forcing others to foot the bill for their compassion through taxes.

There are also undoubtedly many doctors who are egalitarian ideologues who don't like the fact that some people can afford to pay their own way and some cannot, and thus seek to impose "social justice" at the expense of actual justice.

Whatever their reasons, doctors who support state-run medicine should all recognize that by betraying their own freedom of judgement, careers, professional integrity, and rights, they are also selling out the rest of America...especially America's best blood. Those of us who do not want to trade our independence and freedom for a free appendectomy or cholesterol pill will also be victims.