Socialize the Patients First, the Doctors Later

With Obamacare shaping up as a public policy disaster that is the equivalent of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the Hindenburg, the Bay of Pigs, and Desert One combined, perhaps we should go back and take in Ronald Reagan’s warning about this back in 1961.  Reagan said that socializing health care would require socializing the patients, and voila, we have Obamacare canceling insurance plans previously agreed to between consenting adults.

But Reagan also warned that doctors would come to be regulated, too:

Today, the relationship between patient and doctor in this country is something to be envied any place. The privacy, the care that is given to a person, the right to chose a doctor, the right to go from one doctor to the other.

But let’s also look from the other side, at the freedom the doctor loses. A doctor would be reluctant to say this. Well, like you, I am only a patient, so I can say it in his behalf. The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.

So what do we see happening?  A Democrat in Virginia is advocating that doctors be required to see Medicare and Medicaid patients.  We can see where this is going:

FYI last night at the Great Falls Grange debate, Democrat delegate candidate Kathleen Murphy said that since many doctors are not accepting medicaid and medicare patients, she advocates making it a legal requirement for those people to be accepted.

She did not recognize that the payments are inadequate to cover the doctors’ costs.  She also did not recognize there is a shortage of over 45,000 physicians now and that it is forecast to be 90,000 in a few years.

Democrats appear to want to make physicians slaves of the state, but Democrats don’t admit they would just drive more doctors out of practice into retirement and other occupations.

As Reagan said in 1961, don’t say you weren’t warned.

By the way, here’s the whole 10-minute Reagan recording on Medicare if you’d like to take it in:

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