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Medical Warrior: Fighting Corporate Socialized Medicine

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Dr. Faria, a neurosurgeon who left Cuba as a child, sees events with the clarity that so often comes from having lived under tyranny. In a collection of his published essays, Faria offers a depressing look at the continuing statist re-invention of our health-care system. Readers are introduced to an impending health-care dictatorship the author describes as "corporate socialism," dominated by federal regulations and finanaced by billions of taxpayer dollars, but indifferent to the desires and welfare of the patients. The last of Faria's essays is dated July 1995. Events since then have proven him correct.

This is as self-serving and hypocritical book as you will find. Faria aggressively counters the trend toward "managed care" in all its manifestations, including the complete takeover of care by the government. But Faria seems perfectly content with some important forms of medical socialization, such as licensing and drug prohibition. He has not a word of criticism for the cartelization of physicians afforded by medical licensing and government regulated education. Those, of course, are essential for limiting competition with and among physicians. There are many negative effects from licensure, among them physician salaries that are not market-based, and an imbalance of power in favor of physicians over consumers. As Milton Friedman noted decades ago, licensure empowers physicians to resist innovation. This leads to sloppy, overpriced services with doctors resisting efforts to mechanize and rationalize care to reduce errors. Even at this date we are discussing the fact that the handwriting of physicians is so sloppy that prescribing errors result. The medical cartel, a creation of socialist licensing, turns a blind eye to the abysmal percentage of physicians who engage in proper hand sanitation.

The second critical aspect of medical socialism that Faria ignores is the government-mandated control of drug prescribing by physicians. Faria is a fan of the U.S. constitution and the American founders when it suits his purpose, but he chooses to ignore that the founders gave no authority to the federal government to control what Americans ingest, medicines included. So, the prescription drug laws are a grave infringement on the rights of individual, and the absolute prohibition of drugs even more so. Yet Faria seems to have no objection to the government assuming collectivist control over drugs -- so long as they anoint physicians with sole power to dispense those drugs.

The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, whose publication Faria edits (according to the book flap), actually advocates that physicians work hand-in-hand with law enforcement to catch "drug abusers." A "drug abuser" is, of course, a person who takes a drug without permission of the government, or its physician collaborators.

Faria expresses no objection to the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of people each year for drug offenses. Nor is he apparently bothered by power ceded to psychiatrists by the state to imprison, forcibly drug, and otherwise coerce people diagnosed as "mentally ill." That physicians are given immense power to control the lives of Americans in a "therapeutic state," to use Thomas Szasz's term, is not a type of socialism that perturbs Faria. If forcing children to take psychiatric drugs is of any concern to Faria, he doesn't reveal it in this book.

For Dr. Faria, socialism that limits the powers and freedoms of physicians is bad, while socialism that enshrines the powers and privileges of physicians is good.