Healthcare reform part II

Since I dipped my toes in the water of posting political stuff, and it didn’t go too bad, I think I will give it another shot.
 Let me tell you where I sit before I stand.  I am a stanch conservative.  I believe in limited government, national security, personal responsibility and fiscal responsibility.  I am not afraid to discuss my beliefs with anyone, outside of work of course.  I will listen with an open mind to whatever anybody else has to say, think about what I have been told, but just know before hand, you are not going to convince me to change my mind.  In fact, I had been what is now considered a Blue Dog Democrat at one time in my life, but as I grew, learned more and looked at my own beliefs, I evolved into what I am today.

Saying all of that, there is a book that really changed my life and how I think and feel.  I know that sounds a little cheesy to say that a book changed my life, but I guess it actually validated what I already thought about economics, society and my own political beliefs.  That book was Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

 In this book, it is discussed how the government took over the banking industry, transportation industry, imposed laws on business, raised taxes (sound familiar yet) and then eventually brought the country to its knees and to the edge of socialism.  They also took over the health care industry.

 Last week I said that the reform decisions should come from those of us in the trenches, nurses and physicians, not elected officials.  There is a line in the book that I was thinking when I was writing that, “That [my skills] was not what I would place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun.  I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward.  I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything — except the desires of doctors”.

 That was written in 1956, long before what is going on now, but it sounds just like what is happening in Washington right now……politicians that have no idea about the science of nursing or medicine, telling us how we are going to practice, without getting our input