Character and the Healthcare Crisis

A friend of FEE, Dr. Robert Berry, gave this speech last March.  It deals with the ‘healthcare crisis’ in America today.  The author ultimately attributes it to a crisis of character. I commend this speech to the attention of our readers. It may provoke thought and controversy, but it offers many essential truths and valuable, personal observations from a physician about the travails of our semi-socialized health care system.

Here are a few paragraphs:

The only thing universal about healthcare in [Canada and Britain] is that it is in short supply and requires waits that can only be described as inhumane or unethical.

Consider another demon lurking outside. For coverage to be truly universal, all doctors must sign contracts with the State and agree to accept its payment. That means the voting majority has the power to dictate to medical professionals their terms of employment – their hours, their schedule, their
pay, their ethics.

“The tyranny of a multitude is multiplied tyranny,” Edmund Burke once rightly noted.  National health insurance advocates would do well to dust off their constitutions and read where “involuntary servitude” was outlawed in 1865 by the 13th Amendment .

Read the whole thing.

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