July 4, 2009
Declaration of Independence for Doctors
A Call for Doctors to Strike
ACTION ALERT: Sign The Petition to Protect Doctor Patient Rights
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for doctors to go on strike and dissolve the bonds which have connected them with groups of patients enrolled in government healthcare plans because these plans violate the inalienable rights of doctors and patients, rights which the laws of nature entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of human beings requires that doctors should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We, the undersigned doctors, fully embrace the fundamental truths found in the founding documents of the United States of America and justified by the political philosophy of individualism that inspired our founding fathers to pursue these truths,
— That Saturday, July 4, 2009 marks the 233rd anniversary of Independence Day - that momentous day in our nation’s history when our founding fathers formally acknowledged that we are endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that our government was instituted to secure these rights, and that government itself derives its powers from the consent of the governed;
— That our founding fathers embraced the political philosophy of individualism - the theory that individuals are ends-in-themselves, that each one of us owns our own life, that each one of us has the right to exist for our own sake, that no one has the right to force anyone to live for the sake of others, that each one of us has the right to be left alone to pursue our own ends in life as long as we don’t infringe on the liberty of others to do the same, that we should deal with one another by voluntary means, that the proper role of government is to protect our inalienable rights by legislating, adjudicating, and enforcing laws that prohibit other individuals or groups - foreign and domestic - from initiating force against us;
— That our founding fathers repudiated the political philosophy of collectivism - the theory that the interests of the collective take priority over the interests of each individual in it, that the individual has value only insofar as he or she serves the collective, that the proper role of government is to subjugate the individual to the collective, that the government is entitled to own, use, and dispose of the land, the means of production, personal property, and even the lives of individuals, as necessary to promote the welfare of the collective;
— That producers and consumers - as citizens - have inalienable rights, including the right to voluntarily sell and buy goods and services in a free market; that citizens have the right to negotiate mutually acceptable terms and conditions in their trading relationships with others - without governmental interference;
— That patients - as citizens - have inalienable rights, including the right to voluntarily buy healthcare services in a free market; that patients have the right to negotiate mutually acceptable terms and conditions in their trading relationships with their doctors - without governmental interference; that patients have the same rights in their trading relationships with other providers of healthcare goods and services, including but not limited to all other healthcare practitioners, hospitals, nursing homes, pharmacies, drug companies, and medical equipment manufacturers;
— That doctors - as citizens - have inalienable rights, including the right to voluntarily sell healthcare services in a free market; that doctors have the right to negotiate mutually acceptable terms and conditions in their trading relationships with their patients - without governmental interference; that the same rights apply to all other providers of healthcare goods and services, including, but not limited to, all other healthcare practitioners, hospitals, nursing homes, pharmacies, drug companies, and medical equipment manufacturers;
— That government does not have any constitutional or moral authority to force any doctors to serve the healthcare needs of any patients on any terms and conditions dictated by government; that doing this would be nothing more than a stealthy form of involuntary servitude, which is immoral and unconstitutional; that for similar reasons government does not have authority to dictate the production, pricing, availability, or delivery of any other healthcare goods and services provided by any healthcare provider to any patients;
— That there is no inalienable right to healthcare; that healthcare products and services are to be bought and sold as are any other products or services in the free market system; that government healthcare is unconstitutional; that the onus of proof lies with those who make the positive assertion that there is a constitutional right to healthcare; that people so burdened can search as long and hard as they like, but will not find a right to healthcare in the Federalist Papers, Declaration of Independence, or U.S. Constitution;
— That government does not have any constitutional or moral authority to mandate or otherwise compel individuals to be covered by healthcare insurance, or penalize individuals if they don’t chose to be covered by health insurance; that this mandate is immoral and unconstitutional because it violates the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;
— That government does not have any constitutional or moral authority to mandate or otherwise compel any employers of any size to provide healthcare insurance to their employees, or penalize employers if they don’t; that this mandate is nothing more than stealthy stealing - an unjust expropriation and transfer of wealth; that this is immoral and unconstitutional because it violates the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;
— That government does not have any constitutional or moral authority to force one group - taxpayers - to pay for the healthcare of any other group - patients; that this is a nothing more than stealthy stealing - an unjust expropriation and transfer of wealth that is immoral and unconstitutional because it violates the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;
— That government does not have any constitutional or moral authority to shift the financial burden of healthcare from one group - the present generation of patients - onto the backs of another group - the next generation of taxpayers; that this is generational theft - a form of stealthy stealing - an unjust expropriation and transfer of wealth that is immoral and unconstitutional because it violates the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We, the undersigned doctors, fully recognize that there are serious problems in our healthcare system. We encounter these problems in our practices every day. However, many factual claims used to justify government intervention in healthcare are grossly inaccurate. Statists blow many of these problems out of proportion. And statists, playing a diversionary game of “Blame-the-Victim,” point to capitalism as the culprit for our healthcare woes while shamelessly evading any responsibility for the wreckage they wreak themselves. To support this, let these facts be submitted to a candid world,
— President Obama in May 2009 referred to “46 million uninsured Americans” to bolster his clarion call for a government takeover of healthcare. However, this statistic is grossly misleading. Data from the Census Bureau show that nearly ten million of the uninsured are not citizens. Moreover, many uninsured - 25 to 75 percent - could afford to buy healthcare insurance coverage, but choose not to do so (National Bureau of Economic Research). Uninsured people on average get $1,500 of free healthcare per year, or $6,000 per family of four (National Center for Policy Analysis). Twenty-five percent of the uninsured already qualify for government health insurance programs (Urban Institute).
— Capitalism is unfairly blamed for causing many problems in the healthcare sector of the economy. We do not actually live in a fully free market economy. Government’s super-sized intrusion into medicine causes many problems in healthcare. Our economy is really a “mixed economy” in which government is a gorilla-sized “player” that can easily and thuggishly overpower all the other players. In the healthcare sector, our Godzilla-government is armed with an awesome arsenal of weapons to wield intimidating influence on the production, pricing, availability, and delivery of healthcare goods and services. Public spending accounts for between 45% and 56.1% of U.S. healthcare spending (Health Affairs). The healthcare industry is arguably the most heavily regulated industry in the United States (CATO Institute).
— Local, state, and federal governments impose heavy regulatory burdens on the healthcare industry, distorting supply and demand dynamics and causing inflation in healthcare. The sordid history of state and federal intervention into the healthcare marketplace need not be regurgitated here (see CATO Institute).
We, the undersigned doctors, fully recognize that those who fail to learn from the mistakes of history are condemned to repeat them. We have witnessed a history of repeated injuries and usurpations by government, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute control over doctors and their patients. We now see the President of the United States conspiring with Congress to write another collectivist chapter in this hapless history of healthcare statism. To support this, let these facts be submitted to a candid world,
— That President Barack Obama and Congress are poised to detonate a weapon of mass destruction in the marketplace for healthcare; that unless doctors and patients take decisive political action to disarm this doomsday device, “ObamaCare” will explode with enough force to irreparably infect our already over-regulated healthcare system with virulent forms of regulation and control;
— That the President’s crew of congressional cronies - that tiresome trio of bombastic bombardiers, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D), and that longtime champion of statism in medicine, Senator Ted Kennedy (D), have been conspiring behind closed doors in Congress to make sure that ObamaCare is legislatively weaponized and politically detonated on schedule;
— That these snarlingly self-righteous statists have secured sufficient sympathetic support for statism in healthcare from their slobbering sweethearts in the self-satisfied, sycophantic media;
— That these lip-locked liberals have been cavorting and consorting with the Administration to manufacture a persuasive, emotionally compelling call to action by monotonously mouthing the mendacious myth that the “healthcare crisis” is so severe and urgent that we must curtail the national debate on the complicated issues of healthcare and continue scurrying like lemmings, mindlessly hell-bent on jumping into that sea of statism, ObamaCare;
— That the Congressional Budget Office recently released mind-blowing, eye-popping, jaw-dropping projections of the cost of ObamaCare - or GodzillaCare - a behemoth of a plan that threatens to crush our struggling economy with mountains of debt, higher taxes on businesses and individuals, rising inflation, higher interest rates, slower job growth, and continued stagnation;
— That our already diseased healthcare system - newly infected with a deadly dose of ObamaCare - would ineluctably exhibit increasingly severe symptoms of disturbance, including price controls, doctor shortages, waiting periods, and rationing;
— That an ever-widening web of crippling controls would entangle healthcare; that these regulations would stifle innovation and creativity; that mediocrity in medicine would prevail; that doctors, increasingly underpaid and overworked, would retire in droves; that fewer and fewer young people would be willing to invest the needed time, energy, and money to become doctors - only to be enslaved by the state to serve disgruntled, demanding patients imbued with a government-sanctioned, insatiable sense of entitlement;
— That these disturbances would become so distressing to Americans that Alinsky-inspired statists - opportunists that they are - would use each new “healthcare crisis” as an excuse to inject yet another dastardly dose of statism into the system;
— That - lest we ever forget - the President’s Chief-of-Staff, Rahm “The Enforcer” Emanuel, gave us a bone-chilling look into the scheming soul of an opportunistic statist when he shifted his shifty eyes, smirked his smirky smile, and uttered his unutterable utterance: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
— That viable market-based solutions to our healthcare problems are available, but these proposals have not received much attention in the media.
We, the undersigned doctors, fully recognizing this ominous political landscape before us, and, in unity of purpose, virtually assembled on this website, appealing to all relevant facts of reality firmly grasped by the full power of reason for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by authority of justice in the practice of medicine in this nation, solemnly publish and declare,
— That prudence, indeed, dictates that the healthcare system long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience has shown that doctors and patients are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms of government healthcare to which they are accustomed; but that when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is our right, it is our duty, to throw off such government intrusion, and to provide new safeguards for the mutual security of doctors and patients in the future;
— That such has been the patient sufferance of doctors and patients; that such is now the necessity which constrains us to alter our relationship to government healthcare; that the healthcare agenda of the President promises repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute control over healthcare;
— That whenever any form of government intervention into healthcare becomes destructive of healthcare, it is the right and duty of the doctors and patients to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new, voluntary, mutually beneficial trading relationships between doctors and patients;
— That we, the undersigned doctors, are, and of right ought to be, free and independent traders who pursue our own rational interests in the healthcare marketplace without infringing on the liberty of others doing the same;
— That we stand with all doctors who gently serve their patients as benevolent, caring, sympathetic professionals, but who firmly repudiate the moral philosophy of altruism and the political philosophy of collectivism, which together are being used by statists to justify the government’s takeover of healthcare with the rationale that we have no right to exist for our own sake, that we have a moral obligation to live selflessly for the sake of others, that government has the moral and constitutional authority to make us serve some purpose higher than self, that government may sacrifice our individual interests and welfare to promote the greater interests and welfare of the collective;
— That we stand with all patients who renounce any so-called “right to heath care” along with the seductive sense of self-entitlement engendered by this “right”;
— That we stand with all patients who wash their hands of the wolfishly wishful thinking patterns that permit them to think they are morally entitled to get the government to force their doctors to provide healthcare on terms not acceptable to their doctors;
— That we stand with all patients who abandon any avaricious aim of getting free or subsidized healthcare from the government because these patients recognize that free or subsidized healthcare can only be paid for by taxing others - a thinly disguised form of theft from people in the present generation or future generations;
— That we stand with all elected officials who truly understand and appreciate the power of capitalism and, with this understanding, make legislative or executive decisions in full recognition of the fact that government interference inexorably induces destructive distortions in the marketplace for healthcare - distortions that inevitably invite insidiously increasing levels of intervention from overeagerly opportunistic officials to correct a continuing cascade of crises, causing conditions that are ultimately unacceptable to patients as well as doctors (e.g., rationing);
— That we stand with everyone who realizes that in a truly free market economy anyone unable to meet a vital need for healthcare must rely on the benevolence of others - the voluntary, charitable giving from private individuals donating money and from doctors providing services at a reduced fee or no fee at all; that people have been voluntarily practicing the virtue of benevolence for centuries without being forced by any self-righteous statists; that a state of need does not ethically or constitutionally warrant the government to force private citizens and doctors to satisfy that need; that the fact that someone may suffer or die from inadequate healthcare is in principle no different from the fact that someone may suffer or die if needs for other vitally important goods or services are not fulfilled (e.g., housing, food, water, clothing, etc.);
— That we stand with all doctors, all patients, all human beings who join us by personally and publicly taking this oath (inspired byJohn Galt, the hero of the novel, Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand):
We, the undersigned doctors, fully recognizing that Congress may soon pass and the President may soon sign into law a new government healthcare plan; informed by the foregoing facts concerning the sordid history of government intervention into healthcare in our country; alarmed by the Administration’s plans to take over the healthcare system; inspired by the respect given to individual rights by our founding fathers - including the several doctors who at great risk to themselves signed the Declaration of Independence; loyally committed to the Republic established by the Constitution; and guided by of the political philosophy of individualism, solemnly publish and openly declare,
— That we cannot in good conscience do nothing as the President plays doctor in the White House, preening and posing for the public and the press, opining on medical matters of life or death; as this self-appointed “Quack-in-Chief,” arrogantly and absurdly acting as if he is licensed to practice medicine, engages in medical malpractice by precipitously prescribing a massive dose of statism - exactly the wrong medicine at the wrong time for what ails our economy, in general, and our healthcare system, in particular;
— That we cannot in good conscience do nothing in the hope that help is soon on the way from Congress because these quintessential quacks are serving statist second opinions of their own;
— That we cannot in good conscience do nothing in the hope that help is soon on its way from the media because these left-winged birds-of-a-feather are waddling around, quacking the same quackery, ducking their obligation to air both sides of the healthcare story, virtually assuring that a half-assed hatchling of a healthcare plan will soon be hatched;
— That we cannot in good conscience do nothing in the hope that help is soon on its way from the intellectuals debating the philosophical issues underlying the healthcare debate because the philosophical allies of freedom - rational self-interest and individualism - are unlikely to win a decisive battle any time soon against the philosophical allies of statism - altruism and collectivism;
— That we cannot in good conscience do nothing because the Administration's proposed government healthcare plan may soon be signed into law, causing grave harm to the health of the healthcare system, adversely affecting doctors and their patients everywhere;
— That we, acting in the spirit of the Hippocratic Oath (“Above all, do no harm!”), must act now to stop the ObamaCare bomb from exploding in the faces of doctors and patients;
— That we declare openly and publish widely our firm resolve to go on strike if and when the President signs into law any new government-run healthcare plan; that we hereby provide advance warning of this doctors’ strike with the hope that others will be motivated to stand with us in preventing the enactment of any legislation that would do grave harm to the health of the healthcare system;
— That we, as doctors on strike, would most certainly refuse to participate in any new government healthcare plans;
— That we, as doctors on strike, would resign from any existing government healthcare plans, including, but not limited to Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare, and CHIPs; that we would thereby be absolved from any obligation to continue our participation in any government health plans; that all connection between these plans and us, is and ought to be totally dissolved;
— That if we, as doctors on strike, find that any of our patients in these government health plans are unable or unwilling to continue under our care - without the regulative burdens imposed by these plans - they would be referred to other healthcare professionals, who elect to continue participating in these plans; that these patients would remain under our care until a reasonable, timely, and appropriate referral process is completed; that we would make every effort to make sure that these difficult transitions run smoothy for all parties;
— That we, as doctors on strike, would be free and independent healthcare practitioners, with full power to negotiate our own fees, terms, and conditions of service with our patients and other third parties, including private insurance carriers, and to do all other acts and things which independent healthcare practitioners may of right do;
— That we, as doctors on strike, would refuse to treat any elected officials who, by voting for government health care, work to destroy the independent practice of medicine; that we would reconsider this denial of service on a case by care basis when the elected official treats each doctor as a trader among traders, not a servant among masters.
And for the support of this Declaration of Independence, we, the undersigned doctors, mutually pledge to each other our full support and our sacred honor - with firm reliance on the protections of the founding documents, including the Federalist Papers, Declaration of Independence of 1776, and United States Constitution; the philosophers, historians, economists, and other thinkers who help us understand and appreciate the foundations of liberty; the elected officials and servants in government who share our beliefs about the morality, constitutionality, and economic soundness of free market medicine; and the support of all rational and fair-minded patients in our country,
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