Real Health Care Reform

What would our founding fathers say about the leftists current attempts to nationalize health care in this country? We don’t have to guess. This isn’t a new idea.

Thomas Jefferson, probably the most wise of our founding fathers, wrote “If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as the souls who live under tyranny. ”

Doctor Benjamin Rush, another signer of the Declaration of Independence and America’s first Surgeon General, wrote:

The Constitution of this republic should make special provisions for Medical Freedom.

To restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic. They are fragments of monarchy and have no place in a republic.

Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an underground dictatorship.

Note that Doctor Rush didn’t write “Constitution of this republic should make special provisions for Medical care“.  He didn’t want the government in charge of medical care — he wanted the Bill of Rights to protect medical freedom.

The founding fathers like Doctor Rush were not just against nationalized health-care, they were against the government being involved even to the level of licensing physicians.  And yet today, practicing medicine without a government license will earn you a long prison term.

The eminent economist Milton Friedman studied this issue and wrote “I am persuaded that licensure has reduced both the quantity and quality of medical practice…. It has reduced the opportunities for people to become physicians, it has forced the public to pay more for less satisfactory service, and it has retarded technological development…. I conclude that licensure should be eliminated as a requirement for the practice of medicine.”

This is pretty heady stuff for most Americans, because we have allowed ourselves to become sheep.  Our forefathers crossed a great ocean in tiny wooden ships and then build a nation with sweat and ingenuity.  We’re afraid to make decisions about our own health.  How far the mighty have fallen!

If we don’t regain our freedom, and soon, our “bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as the souls who live under tyranny. “