Hey Doctors, thanks for voting DemocRat all these years.

Here's a nice present for your faithful service to the DemocRat Party.

In addition to the burden of mandated electronic-record entry, doctors also face board recertification in the various medical specialties that has become time-consuming, expensive, imposing and a convenient method for our specialty societies and boards to make money.

Meanwhile, our Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements have significantly declined, let alone kept up with inflation. In orthopedic surgery, for example, Medicare reimbursement for a total knee replacement decreased by about 68% between 1992 and 2010, based on the value of 1992 dollars. How can this be? Don't doctors have control over what they charge for their services? For the most part, no. Our medical documentation is pored over and insurers and government then determine the appropriate level of reimbursement.

I don't know about other physicians but I am tired—tired of the mandates, tired of outside interference, tired of anything that unnecessarily interferes with the way I practice medicine. No other profession would put up with this kind of scrutiny and coercion from outside forces. The legal profession would not. The labor unions would not. We as physicians continue to plod along and take care of our patients while those on the outside continue to intrude and interfere with the practice of medicine.

The title of this piece is "A Doctor's Declaration of Independence: It's time to defy health-care mandates issued by bureaucrats not in the healing profession." I'm quite sure there were any number of columns like this written in Saskatchewan back 1962. That was when the doctors actually went on strike to defeat Tommy "Not Dead Enough" Douglas's government seizure of the medical profession, usually called "medicare". That strike lasted three weeks.

They LOST. The forces of socialism WON. Big time. Fast forward to the 1967, just five years, socialized medicine goes national in Canada. Thank you Mr. Pearson and Mr. Douglas.

So here we are, 2014. The socialized medicine system in Canada is a shambling, crumbling wreck, kept alive by an IV drip of cubic megadollars and foreign doctors from Saudi Arabia and Russia, because Canadian doctors burned out ten years ago. They go back to their home countries and tell horror stories of Canadian hospitals, where patients are treated in hallways or left to die in ambulances in the parking lot.

You know what? You American doctors, you've been BEGGING for this since the 1970s. You've been overwhelmingly voting DemocRat/socialist, and you've been whining that single payer is the way to go, and you've been putting up with anything and everything the insurance companies throw at you, and you've been working for HMOs where the policy is Don't Treat No Matter What, and you've been first and foremost among the crowds of Leftists screaming that medical care is a Right!

So now you finally get what you voted for.

You get to be a data-entry clerk making less money than a truck driver. Very Soviet Union, da?

My advice: Don't let your strike collapse in three weeks.

The Phantom