October — 2009 — VOICES for REASON

Investor’s Business Daily recently released the disturbing results of a survey of doctors’ reaction to the government’s proposed “reform.” The most dramatic finding is that 45% of doctors would consider retirement if the plan were imposed. 45%. Can you imagine the devastation that would occur if anywhere near this percentage of doctors left the field?

Now, one survey doesn’t prove anything—but that raises the question: Why don’t we hear about surveys like this all the time, from anyone and everyone who conducts polls on health care? Why are there so few inquiries into what a given health care policy will do to doctors, the primary people producing the health care we are talking about every day?

Think about how many statistics, sob-stories, joy-stories, etc you have heard about patients under any number of systems — compared to the amount of concern you have heard about doctors; I’ve hardly heard any. Yet doctors are the people who provide the care that the patient consumes. Any discussion of health care that does not recognize the rights and achievements of doctors is morally and economically warped.

Four years ago this week, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons featuring Mohammad. What followed, some months later, was an outright assault by Muslim activists and regimes on our freedom of speech. Aftershocks from that crisis continue to erode free speech in the West. A recent example was the decision by Yale University Press to cut all images of Mohammad from a book on the cartoons crisis(!). The stated reason for that move was the publisher’s fear of violent Muslim reprisals.

In an interview with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Flemming Rose, the editor behind the notorious cartoons, talks about the incident at Yale and free speech. One of his comments — about the response of U.S. publishers to a book he’s writing on the crisis — was particularly illuminating:

[FR] Yes, I am still in the process of writing this book. Hopefully it will be published in Denmark next year. In fact, I already have had contact with some top publishers in the U.S., but it was my impression—though I can’t prove it—that they were quite positive to the book, but when I said that I couldn’t imagine a book without the cartoons, they lost interest.

I wonder just how much self-censorship is going on today.

Regarding the Yale U.P. book that was stripped of all visual depictions of Mohammad, Mr. Flemming quips that it seems “…Al-Qaeda has been appointed editor-in-chief of Yale University Press.” To me that aptly names the stakes: until our government takes a principled stand and firmly upholds our right to free speech in the face of intimidation and threats, we in effect subordinate our liberty to Islamic religious dogma.