Miguel A. Faria, Jr., M.D. Medical Sentinel, Volume 4, Number 4, July/August 1999, pp. 125-127. – “Is There a Right to Health Care?” – “The unintended consequences of this federal creation of a myriad of welfare rights and entitlements is that government is forging dependency upon one class of citizens and oppression on another; and in the case of health care, it’s building the keystone of the arch of socialism using government medicine as the scaffold.(5)
Medical care as a right would require physicians to provide their services while violating their professional code of free association and negating their legal prerogative to participate in voluntary binding agreements — i.e., the legal basis for the establishment of the patient-doctor relationship, as well as our professional and ethical bases according to the Oath and ethics of Hippocrates. It would also set the precedent that physicians will be bound by whatever standards are set by the state. This action not only infringes upon a physician’s autonomy, but also, as Frederic Bastiat asserted over a century ago, constitutes legal plunder and organized injustice.(8) The physician becomes an indentured servant bound to the state. Moreover, the patient owes the physician no gratitude for his/her labors because they are supposedly entitled by right to his/her labors.”
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