attorney will have a field day if I don't -- and my rival down the
street, who heads the local PRO [Peer Review Organization], favors a CAT
scan in these cases, I can't afford to antagonize him, but the CON boys
disagree and they won't authorize a CAT scanner for our hospital -- and
besides the FDA prohibits the drug I should be prescribing, even though
it is widely used in Europe, and the IRS might not allow the patient a
tax deduction for it, anyhow, and I can't get a specialist's advice
because the latest Medicare rules prohibit a consultation with this
diagnosis, and maybe I shouldn't even take this patient, he's so sick --
after all, some doctors are manipulating their slate of patients, they
accept only the healthiest ones, so their average costs are coming in
lower than mine, and it looks bad for my staff privileges.'  Would you
like your case to be treated this way -- by a doctor who takes into
account your objective medical needs *and* the contradictory,
unintelligible demands of some ninety different state and Federal
government agencies?  If you were a doctor could you comply with all of
it?  Could you plan or work around or deal with the unknowable?  But how
could you not?  Those agencies are real and they are rapidly gaining
total power over you and your mind and your patients.  In this kind of
nightmare world, if and when it takes hold fully, thought is helpless;
no one can decide by rational means what to do.  A doctor either obeys
the loudest authority -- *or* he tries to sneak by unnoticed,
bootlegging some good health care occasionally *or,* as so many are
doing now, he simply gives up and quits the field."

The Clinton plan will finish off quality medicine in this country --
because it will finish off the medical profession.  It will deliver
doctors bound hands and feet to the mercies of the bureaucracy.

The only hope -- for the doctors, for their patients, for all of us
-- is for the doctors to assert a *moral* principle.  I mean: to assert
their own personal individual rights -- their real rights in this issue
-- their right to their lives, their liberty, their property, *their*
pursuit of happiness.  The Declaration of Independence applies to the
medical profession too.  We must reject the idea that doctors are slaves
destined to serve others at the behest of the state.

I'd like to conclude with a sentence from Ayn Rand.  Doctors, she
wrote, are not servants of their patients.  They are "traders, like
everyone else in a free society, and they should bear that title
proudly, considering the crucial importance of the services they offer."

The battle against the Clinton plan, in my opinion, depends on the
doctors speaking out against the plan -- but not only on practical
grounds -- rather, first of all, on *moral* grounds.  The doctors must
defend themselves and their own interests as a matter of solemn justice,
upholding a moral principle, the first moral principle: self-
preservation.  If they can do it, all of us will still have a chance.  I
hope it is not already too late.  Thank you.

---------------------------------------------

Copies of this address in pamphlet form are available for $15 per 100 copies
or $125 per 1000 copies from: Americans for Free Choice in Medicine, 1525
Superior Ave., Suite 100, Newport Beach, CA 92663, Phone (714) 645-2622, Fax
(714) 645-4624.  Copies of Dr. Peikoff's lecture, "Medicine: The Death of a
Profession" may be purchased in pamphlet form for $2.50 each (catalog number
LP04E) from: Second Renaissance Books, 110 Copperwood Way, P.O. Box 4625,
Oceanside, CA 92052, Phone (800) 729-6149.  (Quantity discounts are also
available: $1.85 each for 10-99 copies, catalog number LP66E, $1.50 each for
100-499 copies, LP77E; $1.25 each for 500-999 copies, LP88E; and $1 each for
1000 copies and over, LP99E.)

Also available from Second Renaissance is the pamphlet "The Forgotten Man of
Socialized Medicine: The Doctor," containing articles by Ayn Rand and
Leonard Peikoff.  (Catalog number AR10E, $2.95)

Additional information on why national health care programs don't work is
available from:  Objectivist Health Care Professionals Network,
P.O. Box 4315, South Colby, WA 98384-0315, Phone (206) 876-5868, FAX
(206) 876-2902.  This organization publishes a newsletter on health care
and distributes a copy of it in their health care information package.

   -----------

Almost ten years ago, Leonard Peikoff predicted that our medical system
would be dismantled.  Looking at the young people in the crowd,
he remarked:

   "If  you are looking for a crusade,  there is none that is more
    idealistic or more practical.  This one  is  devoted  to  protecting

--- FleetStreet 1.19+