Doctors On Strike: What if They Just Said “No” to the Healthcare Hairball?
I’ve been listening to some of President Obama’s press conference tonight, and ran across an interesting blog, called Doctors On Strike. It’s great for some laughs, but the undertone is serious. It’s not a good idea to make the lives of medical professionals a living hell. Who do politicians think they are, really? I mean, honestly?
What kind of doctors would the Obama administration’s system create? Who will go into medicine in years hence? I’ll certainly advise my children, should they become medically inclined, to be veterinarians, cosmetic surgeons that refuse “insurance” (so-called)–anything but a doctor tethered to the Healthcare Hairball, should it actually be enacted. And the President talked about health insurance companies–as if there would or could actually be such a thing in the corrupted system he intends to impose. What insurance companies? I mean, honestly? Who would ever start an actual health insurance company again?
Doctors went on strike in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and the warning, albeit fictional, bears attention. The fictional brain surgeon in Atlas Shrugged is Dr. Thomas Hendricks. When asked why he went on “strike” against collectivized medicine, answered this way:
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 table under my hands? Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it–and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.