A Stitch in Haste

One of the points I try to emphasize from time to time is that a purported "right to health care" requires, as a matter of basic metaphysics, a "right to enslave health care providers." This is not histrionics: How, exactly, are you to enjoy your "right to an emergency appendectomy" without a surgeon to perform it? If your "right" truly is a right, and if no willing surgeon is available, then an unwilling one will have to be conscripted.

Health care socialists would respond that, no no no, they do not mean to enslave physicians (not to mention nurses, dentists, lab technicians, physical therapists, pharmacists, optometrists, etc.). They merely intend to enslave taxpayers — because if the government throws enough money at enough people, surely health care providers will come forward (i.e., for the right price) to provide the "health care" to which there is a purported "right."

Put aside the Kafkaesque implications of that reasoning: "private parties paying private money for private services" (i.e., throwing money around) is "compassionless" (and therefore immoral) but "government extracting taxpayer money for private services" (i.e., throwing money around) is "enlightened" (and therefore moral). Somehow.

My point instead is that, should push come to shove (and why wouldn't it?), even that perverse economic model might, indeed eventually almost certainly would, give way to something worse: Compulsory service — enslaved physicians.

Think it can't happen?

Under Arizona law, all superior court cases with less than $65,000 at stake go to arbitration. In Maricopa County, the arbitrators are drawn from a pool of local lawyers who get paid $75 a day. That's chump change for lawyers, many of whom would scoff at $75 an hour.

But the arbitration program is mandatory. All County attorneys with at least five years of experience must serve at least two days per year, if asked. [Mark] Scheehle was asked three times in two years. The third time, he refused, and the County fined him $900. So Scheehle sued, challenging the arbitration service as an unconstitutional taking and a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. ... But ultimately, the Ninth Circuit concludes that the Maricopa County program survives Scheehle's constitutional claims.

You can balk at the term "enslaved" all you want, but the premise is sound: Anyone who wants the privilege of being an attorney in Arizona must provide their services, on behalf of the government, for almost no compensation whenever instructed to. If that's not "slavery," it's close enough.

Now, how preposterous a leap would it be to replace "attorney" with "physician" in this fact pattern? To require — not just as a condition of eligibility for socialized medicine reimbursement, but as a condition of keeping your medical license — that you provide your services for free or essentially free on a regular basis and at the whim of the state, based solely on its "need" for your services?

And you thought compulsory jury duty was irksome.

This is the unacknowledged asymptote of socialized medicine: a surgeon, hovering over you with a scalpel, who is not only paid by the government, not only employed by the government, but actually a feudal serf of the government and in the operating room against his will. This, to health care socialists, is utopia.

Madness. Sheer madness.

The case is Scheehle v. Justices of the Supreme Court of Arizona, No. 05-17063 (9th Cir., Nov. 15, 2007) (PDF - 17 pages).

For Discussion: Of course, the state cannot enslave a physician who does not exist. So how, exactly, would there be a "right to health care" if people stop becoming physicians (not to mention nurses, dentists, lab technicians, physical therapists, pharmacists, optometrists, etc.)? Think it can't happen?