How Government Killed the Medical Profession | Cato Institute:
"Doctors Going Galt?
...It has certainly affected my plans.
Starting in 2012, I cut back on my general surgery practice.
...
While I had originally planned to practice at least another 12 to 14 years, I am now heading for an exit—and a career change—in the next four years.
I didn’t sign up for the kind of medical profession that awaits me a few years from now.
Many of my generational peers in medicine have made similar arrangements, taken early retirement, or quit practice and gone to work for hospitals or as consultants to insurance companies.
Some of my colleagues who practice primary care are starting cash-only “concierge” medical practices, in which they accept no Medicare, Medicaid, or any private insurance...
Medicine in the Future
In the not-too-distant future, a small but healthy market will arise for cash-only, personalized, private care.
For those who can afford it, there will always be competitive, market-driven clinics, hospitals, surgicenters, and other arrangements—including “medical tourism,” whereby health care packages are offered at competitive rates in overseas medical centers.
Similar healthy markets already exist in areas such as Lasik eye surgery and cosmetic procedures. The medical profession will survive and even thrive in these small private niches.
In other words, we’re about to experience the two-tiered system that already exists in most parts of the world that provide “universal coverage.”
Those who have the financial means will still be able to get prompt, courteous, personalized, state-of-the-art health care from providers who consider themselves professionals.
But the majority can expect long lines, mediocre and impersonal care from shift-working providers, subtle but definite rationing, and slowly deteriorating outcomes.
We already see this in Canada, where cash-only clinics are beginning to spring up, and the United Kingdom, where a small but healthy private system exists side-by-side with the National Health Service, providing high-end, fee-for-service, private health care, with little or no waiting.
Ayn Rand’s philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged describes a dystopian near-future America.
One of its characters is Dr. Thomas Hendricks, a prominent and innovative neurosurgeon who one day just disappears.
He could no longer be a part of a medical system that denied him autonomy and dignity.
Dr. Hendricks’ warning deserves repeating:
“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.”"
“A bunch of hoodlums that are throwing their lives away punched my son from behind who is serving his country and has his stuff together,” he said to reporters.
