Government meddling a huge mistake

How stupid can we be? Letting the federal government get into the auto industry and the banking and finance industry are huge mistakes. Why would we want to increase their further entanglement into the medical services field? It will end up with serious problems like all the other places socialized medicine has been introduced. Do we really want to have a federal bureaucrat decide whether our doctor-advised treatments will be acceptable or denied?

It speaks volumes that a bill was introduced that would require those in the Congress to be under the same healthcare plan as the rest of us. Guess what? Not a single co-sponsor of the bill could be found. Do readers think that it’s smart to have a plan that would put citizens under one government-run plan, but leave congress under a different plan?

We’ll soon find out the truth of, “If you think medical care is expensive, wait until it’s free!”

An attorney who writes for TownHall, Carol Liebau, warns just this last Monday in “Obamacare Will Make America Sick” that, “For powerful government officials, the plan would work well. Their political influence will guarantee that they (and their friends) will receive the finest treatment available under a government-run system.”

And an article on CNSNews.com on Tuesday warns that “… President Obama is hurrying health care reform in order to ratify it before the public has time to protest… he knows that momentum will inevitably slow for something that’s extraordinarily costly, will deny people the coverage that they already have, will ration their health care, and could provide some kind of government insurance company that’s going to drive out the private insurance companies that provide all these options.”

Obamacare will certainly impose significant new taxes, place increased burdens on hospitals, and limit motivation for young people to enter the medical field. Since 1999, the percentage of medical school graduates who intend to go into primary health care has dropped from over 35 percent to under 20 percent. Why would they want to enter a field in which the federal government will dictate almost everything?

Unfortunately, ideology as well as costs will be dictated. In “Life and death: Death is upon us. ‘Us’ being doctors,” Matt Anderson (a practicing OB/GYN in Minnesota) builds a good case about wrong ideology in WORLD Magazine (June 20th). Mortality, of course, stalks us all, he notes. But “the death culture – abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia” shouldn’t come by government dictates.

He notes the demise of the Hippocratic Oath, a change of which I was unaware. “New doctors recite a much changed charge filled with superficial, contemporary language, if they recite anything at all.” Most readers probably would at least think of part of the oath, “First, do no harm.”

The good news is that pro-life doctor groups around the world are joining together to form a “Hippocratic Registry of Physicians … who value life and the tenets of Hippocrates’ Oath.”

Dr. Malcolm Cutchins is an emeritus professor of engineering of Auburn University and wrote a weekly column for The Opelika-Auburn News from 1992 to 2009.