A Doctor’s Declaration of Independence
It’s time to defy health-care mandates issued by bureaucrats not in the healing profession.
By
DANIEL F. CRAVIOTTO JR.
Updated April 28, 2014 7:34 p.m. ET
In my 23 years as a practicing physician, I’ve learned that the only thing that matters is the doctor-patient relationship. How we interact and treat our patients is the practice of medicine. I acknowledge that there is a problem with the rising cost of health care, but there is also a problem when the individual physician in the trenches does not have a voice in the debate and is being told what to do and how to do it.
As a group, the nearly 880,000 licensed physicians in the U.S. are, for the most part, well-intentioned. We strive to do our best even while we sometimes contend with unrealistic expectations. The demands are great, and many of our families pay a huge price for our not being around. We do the things we do because it is right and our patients expect us to.
So when do we say damn the mandates and requirements from bureaucrats who are not in the healing profession? When do we stand up and say we are not going to take it any more?
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Change your profession if you do not like it! You will find almost everything in this country and elsewhere is regulated to some degree some more than others.
#1, look at the lawyers and the light touch they apply as an organized group of high-minded professionals when envisioning necessary restrictions on their individual practice flexibility, and erecting toll booths or qualifications-related obstacles along the road that individual attorneys must take to their business and economic goals. Then consider the fact that no other group or body of elected officials dares encroach on their authority to police themselves. Finally, imagine the current situation in health care in this country and the obvious extent to which doctors are told what they can and can’t do by non-doctors (actually, mostly by statist attorneys!). This is approaching involuntary servitude and if I were a doctor I would be wondering what kind of country we’ve become.