Doctors and hospitals are strangling in the mass of forms required by the government and fined or denied payment if they fail to follow the rules. A prominent politician receives organ transplants while those anonymous patients in more dire straits are forced to wait. Doctors overbook appointments, scheduling more patients than they can possibly see in any given hour, zooming in and out like someone in a frenetic Marx Brothers movie. A young, promising doctor abandons the demands and frustrations of medicine to become a semi-truck driver. Obstetricians give up their specialty rather than face endless lawsuits encouraged by arcane government directives which interfere with their professional judgments and by courts which have destroyed any rational basis for assessing personal responsibility.
Costs skyrocket every year.
The number of bureaucrats mounts even more rapidly. States begin to institute rationing of health care for Medicaid patients. Hospital facilities can be built and new technology purchased only with government permission. As you can see, Dr. Peikoff has captured the essence of today's health care crisis. What would be funny if it were not so sad and ultimately so scary is that he wrote those words in 1962, over thirty years ago.