Political Intervnention in Medicine; R. E. Hunt

Man is a being of volitional con sciousness. He is constantly faced with the choice of thinking ration ally or evading reality. Knowledge comes from his conscious percep tion of his environment, that is the real world in which he lives, concepts are then formed based on reality as it exists and the in tegration of these concepts leads to advances as yet undreamed of. We all have only one basic right and that is the right to lead our own life and seek our own happi ness. Man has sole, individual reDr. Hunt is in the solo private practice of anes thesiology in Santa Rosa, Calif. He received his doctor of medicine degree from Cornell U. Med ical College, New York. His article is reprinted here by permission from The AMA (American Medical Association) News of October 28,1968. 436 sponsibility for his actions (his life) and must assume these re sponsibilities. We are not all equal in any ability. Each one of us is different. Each one of us has strengths and weaknesses in mind and body, and it is immoral for one to gain strength by exploiting the weakness of another; just as it is immoral for one to use his weakness as a claim on another's strength. Only through evasions, lies, and tricks is one able to avoid punishment for his errors and reward for his accomplishments.

There is no status quo; there are no guarantees of success; there is no basic minimum; and by the same line of reasoning there are no limits to the productivity of men's minds under a system of free, voluntary cooperation. Our country was founded to as sure "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" for all who would pursue these goals, not for any 1969 POLITICAL INTERVENTION IN MEDICINE 437 one segment of the population, not just for the politicians, not just for the white people, not just for the Negro people. We all have the right to lead our own Iives. All the other things currently referred to as such are not rights. They are privileges. Education, automobiles, medical care, color TV, good hous ing, etc. are all basically produced by the conscious effort of men's minds and they must be earned by the recipients. If they are not, if they are taken by force, legislative action, lies or tricks from the peo ple who produce them and given to others simply because someone says he needs them, there is the immediate creation of the old slave-master relationship. In this case we have the absurd situation of the producer being the slave of the man· who "needs" his product because the government.has forced it to be so. The products of men's minds and labor both tangible and intangible are being taken out of the hands of the producers by political intervention in every seg ment of our lives.

Political intervention is respon sible for the moral degradation and misery we are rushing to ward. Those people in government who feel they can improve on reality, who feel they can "plan" things and do better than the law of supply and demand are thor oughly evil and immoral because of the inevitable lowering of living standards their planning creates. It makes no difference whether they do this with conscious intent or are merely well meaning but naive. The ·end result is the same - misery, poverty, lack of respect for law and order, and bloodshed. I hold the politicians who advocate this intervention as well as those who would cooperate with them in the "planning," be they physicians or businessmen, personally respon sible for the mess this country is in today. Most. physicians believe in free enterprise. They recognize that the affluence and high standard ofliv ing which Americans and others in the free world enj oy today is due to voluntary cooperation of thoughtful, rational men in a free market. The high standard of med ical care we· have today is due to the freedom under which we have practiced in the past, and most patients realize this, too. We are tradel'S in a free market. We trade services for money which repre sents the productivity of our pa tients in their respective fields.

Because our services are so im portant, we occupy a position of relatively greater influence in our society. We are well educated and do our best for our patients be cause it is in our rational self-in terest and the interest of our pa438 THE FREEMAN July tients to do so. We are not. in fallible. We aremen, not gods. We make errors and we do our best to learn· from them. But today the malpractice suits against doctors are att.empting to penalize physi cians for not being infallible! The grotesqueness of this travesty of justice staggers the imagination of any rational man. Many people feel today that cap italism is good for t.he rich people, for the "Wall Street financiers" or for the privileged and that capi talism is designed to keep the poor people in a position of subservi ence and poverty. Nothing could be further from. the t.ruth. This is a lie which has been furthered and nurtured ad nauseam by every collective political system in his tory both current and past. I refer now to the Nazis, all forms of com munism or socialism, and to the welfare statists and social planners in this country today. The truth is that capitalism is the only sys tem which has ever given every citizen a chance to improve him self and puts a stop to coercive monopolies which tend to fix prices and wages thereby insuring that those in a lower economic position will never be able to improve their lot. Coercive monopolies, price and wage fixing, and poverty are re sults only of governmental inter ference. There is no other way it can be done except by legislation.

The free market operates in ex actly the opposite way and is therefore the only moral choice for rational men to make today. With the above in mind it is with intense regret that I see the medical profession publicly demon strate its willingness to cooperate in governmental schemes which overtly claim to have interest in improving medical care. You doc tors are in error who say that if the medical profession supports and collaborates with these gov ernmental health programs, they will succeed in improving the quality of medical care. This is another way of saying that if the programs fail to live up to the gre~t expectations of the politi cians, it will be the physicians who are to blame. The programs were doomed to failure as efforts to ben efit mankind just as every other socialistic plan has caused poverty, misery, and bloodshed in the past. Only naive men would accept such blame and guilt. We as physicians in our own self-interest and that of our patients should never ac cept such a position whether it is placed on us by the government or by another physician. We must place the guilt where it belongs on the men who drew up the laws and on those who support govern mental interference in the prac tice of medicine. ~ A CASE STUDY IN MARKET DEVEL.OPMENT SUDHA R. SHENOY WITHIN the past twenty years Hong Kong has grown from a minor trading port into a center of manufactur ing, with exports to some seventy nations round the world. Hong Kong seems to have found a formula for development that is not widely understood.