“I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years ago,” said Dr. Hendricks. “Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not 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…” –from “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand

In a debate last Friday, Kathleen Murphy, a Democrat running for the House of Delegates in the state of Virginia, decided that government’s ability to enforce their wishes at the so-called point of a gun was an idea whose time has come.

She advocated a law that would force doctors to accept Medicare and Medicaid patients.

Now, there is probably some segment of the American public that finds such an obviously totalitarian reflex despicable. But in 2013, I would be lying to you if I said I could assure you that such a segment represents a majority. Ask an American if they believe healthcare is a right, and the reflexive answer in most cases is yes. I say reflexive because so many Americans have been so poisoned by a sense of entitlement, they can no longer discern the difference between rights and privileges.

If one is entitled to be made well when one is sick, then that “right” is based on the idea that it supersedes someone else’s right to choose whether or not to provide goods and services to the sick individual. In other words, the “right” to health care implies that one can, for example, compel a doctor to operate, a nurse to perform certain hospital procedures, or a drug company to manufacture a live-saving medicine.

Despite the addled thinking of Kathleen Murphy, we are not at the point where, aside from laws which codify that which one must adhere to in the process of providing health care, no one can be forced to provide it per se. This is not to confuse laws in most states which require hospitals to accept and treat anyone who shows up in the emergency room. Such a requirement is based on the idea that if one wants to operate a hospital, certain rules apply. But no one is required to operate a hospital. Similar laws regulate the conduct of doctors and drug companies. But again, no one is required to become a doctor or open a pharmaceutical business.

At least not yet. And that, my fellow Americans, is the fatal flaw that lies at the heart of Obamacare. In the process of expanding access to health insurance, progressives – once again displaying their gargantuan level of ignorance regarding human nature – failed to understand that access to health insurance and actual health care are completely different realities.

Thus the question arises: would the American left dare to compel doctors to take patients they don’t want?

A partial answer to that question is already available, and National Review’s Larry Kudlow provides it. “As a 60-something, relatively healthy person, I don’t want lactation and maternity services, abortion services, speech therapy, mammograms, fertility treatments, or Viagra,” he writes. “I don’t want it. So why should I have to tear up my existing health-care plan, and then buy a plan with far more expensive premiums and deductibilities and with services I don’t need or want? Why? Because Team Obama says I have to.”

Thus we have reached the point where millions of Americans are not only required to buy health insurance or pay a fine, they are required to buy insurance containing elements they don’t want, and will never need. In other words, regardless of we like it or not, Americans are beholden to progressives “enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun.” The “gun” in this case is an IRS that has already demonstrated a contemptuous capacity to kick the rule of law to the curb in pursuit of a political agenda.

Does anyone seriously think Kathleen Murphy is an anomaly?

Note where the American left has been willing to go so far. Here is a video compilation of President Barack Obama telling the American public the bald-faced lie that they if they liked their health insurance plans and/or doctor, they can keep them. As the video reveals, he did so on twenty-four separate occasions. The lying that drove Richard Nixon from office, and Bill Clinton into impeachment, a subsequent loss of his legal license, and a $90,000 fine, pales in comparison to this breath-taking level of outright mendacity.

Has a single politician demanded his resignation? Is there even a remotely comparable level of media-fueled indignation that attended either Nixon or Clinton? During the Congressional hearing last week, did a single politician ask HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius the simplest of simple questions: what did the president know and when did he know it?

Obama’s popularity rating did take a “hit” – all the way down to 42 percent. Trust me when I tell you, despite all the faux hand-wringing by the American left, they are enormously encouraged by the reality that Obama has emerged relatively unscathed. For the rest of America, as incredible as it may seem, Obama’s lie represents the tip of the iceberg. Page 34,551 of the Federal Register, Vol. 75, No. 116, dated Thursday, June, 17, 2010, reveals what this administration knew and when they knew it:

“In total, approximately 66 percent of small employers and 48 percent of large employers made a change in either cost sharing or premium contribution during 2009 that would require them to relinquish grandfather status if the same change were made in 2011.”

Forbes Magazine’s Avik Roy explains the implication. “All in all, more than half of employer-sponsored plans will lose their ‘grandfather status’ and become illegal,” he explains. “According to the Congressional Budget Office, 156 million Americans – more than half the population – was covered by employer-sponsored insurance in 2013… As to the number of people facing cancellations, 51 percent of the employer-based market plus 53.5 percent of the non-group market (the middle of the administration’s range) amounts to 93 million Americans.”

Again, does anyone seriously believe an administration that knew for three years it would be compelling 93 million Americans to change their current health insurance policies, isn’t busy at work figuring out how they can compel doctors to fall into line?

“I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind – yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands?”

“Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of a man who resents it – and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.”

Once suspects the Kathleen Murphys of the world don’t have a clue regarding the ultimate destination of their jackboot impulses. In that regard, she is like every progressive do-gooder who ever lived. As I have said many times before, only progressives believe that incentive and coercion are interchangeable terms. No doubt whatever happens, some doctors will fall into line. And perhaps a brave new future does await, one where the government will impose the kind of licensing requirement for the medial profession envisioned by Kathleen Murphy. At that point, one of two things will happen: the current doctor shortage will be exponentially exacerbated – or Americans will be receiving medical treatment from the kind of mediocre hacks willing to prostrate themselves before the state.

Stay healthy, my fellow Americans.

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