While many physicians are increasingly avoiding government run health care, House of God author Stephen Bergman, proposes we strike for more governmental oversight…
I propose a doctors strike (or a healthcare workers strike, but I can only speak as a doctor). First, doctors would recruit enough colleagues to pledge that if, in two years (say, by July 4, 2009), there is not a federal law for a single-payer, universal coverage health system, we will go on strike.
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{ 8 comments }
This is your mind on drugs.
This guy must live on another planet. I am an independent small businessman, not an employee. We do not “go on strike” like a spoiled child who doesn’t get his way. Very unprofessional and worthy of a public rebuke.
So we are are going to say: “Make me a government employee or I won’t work!” Basically criminal extortion that would justify rounding all of us up and kicking us out of the country or putting us in concentration camps as enemies of the nation. How stupid would the country be to set up a universal government payor system forewarned that the doctors will hold the entire country hostage, like French bus drivers, if we don’t get what we want?
He can go on strike agains the HMO’s anytime he is ready. I have. Don’t deal with them and work only in the free market. He doesn’t like the free market? He wants to just be a government piece worker? He can even go on strike against all private payment and accept only Medicare and Medicaid patients.
I would be willing to go on strike if such a policy was ever enacted not to force it to occur.
You’ll have that choice–not as a collective action but as an individual. You can call it a strike if you wish. I will call it a “career change”. Medicine is worth a lot but not worth giving up my freedom. Not even life is worth that.
Google the term “Doctor” AND “Strike”. Narrow down by country if you want.
Doctors go on strike all over the world.
In most places in the world, physicians are trained as technicians, are not really educated, and work in socialist systems. They not only have an employee mentality but a collectivized union mentality at that.
We are among the few societies who demand that our physicians be educated men and women, with at least some liberal education, prior to technical training. We think the public best served by independent thinking gentlemen, not a merely technically proficient cogs.
Bergman is Harvard faculty. They are all a bunch of Reds. Support the regulation of everything except the tuition of overrated silk stocking universities.
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