King for a Day

Scott Sturman
fliesinyoureyes.com

Aw, to be king for a day! This was Senator Ben Nelson's day to be king. Swooned by the President and cajoled by fellow democrats, he cast the deciding vote in support of health care reform legislation. What was so utterly appalling was his vote was purchased with tax payers' money, so Nebraskans could receive additional funds for Medicaid. The democratic leadership used my children's, my friends', my wife's, my relatives' and my tax money, so Senator Nelson's state could have better health care than the rest of the country. Perhaps this is business as usual for the United States Congress, but if someone bought my vote it would be a crime.

“Just last month the Association of Medical Colleges released findings indicating that 15 years from now the United States will have 159,000 fewer doctors than we need.” - Senator Max Baucus - Democrat Montana

The proposed legislation which Senators Baucus and Nelson support will cover an additional 30,000,000 patients. With the projected shortage of physicians patients will experience indirect rationing where services are not denied, but with too few clinicians long waiting periods will ensue.

Senator Nelson, I could respect you if you made your choice based on principle and reason, but you accepted other people's money for your vote. This is the way you will be remembered!

I read Atlas Shrugged for the first time in 1972 five years before I went to medical school, and when my oldest child was born in 1982, we gave her the middle name Ayn. In the book Dr. Hendricks, the neurosurgeon who opted out of an increasingly corrupt system, gives a powerful speech which still is underlined in my book. The message was delivered by Ayn Rand in 1957. Read it to see if one can find any similarities between what is occurring now and what she prophesied fifty years ago.



Dr. Hendricks from Atlas Shrugged - 1957

“ I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years ago,” said Dr. Hendricks. “Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything – except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the 'welfare' of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, only 'to serve.' That a man who's willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards - never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind – yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it – and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn't.”