Origins of Americans for Free Choice in Medicine
Americans for Free Choice in Medicine was formed in 1993 in response to the Clinton Health Care Plan. American healthcare was in dire need of reforms, such as tackling the runaway medical inflation caused by previous government interventions.
While the American people were weary of further increasing the role of government in their healthcare (as they still are now), the primary case made against the Clinton Health Care Plan was that it was morally noble in theory but dangerous in practice.
But as Leonard Peikoff explained in his AFCM town hall speech ‘Health Care is Not a Right’ in response to the Clinton Health Care Plan, “So long as people believe that socialized medicine is a noble plan, there is no way to fight it. You cannot stop a noble plan—not if it really is noble. The only way you can defeat it is to unmask it—to show that it is the very opposite of noble. Then at least you have a fighting chance”.
The belief that government control of healthcare is noble stands in stark contrast to the spirit of freedom that America was founded on. Many Americans still have this spirit of freedom. Yet most intellectuals have either attacked or failed to properly defend the philosophical basis of the American spirit of freedom, the concept of individual rights: the radical idea that individuals have an inalienable right to their own lives and to liberty, and that the sole purpose of government is to secure these rights.
Individual rights is the noble idea that intellectuals should be fighting for. Instead, intellectuals have betrayed this idea, and with it, the American people.
Nowhere is the betrayal of individual rights as an idea and their violation in practice both so pervasive and misunderstood as it is in the American healthcare system. Often touted as a ‘free market’, American healthcare is anything but free. With everything from the supply of doctors, to how they are trained and paid, to how they can interact with other professionals and especially with patients, it is all controlled, in some way or another, by the government. American medical innovation exists despite these government controls and persists due to the few pockets of freedom that remains, which itself only exists by permission from the government, not by right.
The American healthcare system is fundamentally unfree, i.e., it is un-American.
It was with this moral clarity in their minds that in 1993 three courageous doctors, Arthur Astorino, Peter LePort, and Cristina Rizza, stood up for themselves to form Americans for Free Choice in Medicine to defeat the Clinton Health Care Plan.
Yet Americans for Free Choice in Medicine was not formed just to defeat the Clinton Health Care Plan. It was formed to provide what was, and still is, missing from our national debate about healthcare reform: an intellectual defence of the noble idea of individuals rights as the moral foundation for a completely free market in healthcare.
In other words, Americans for Free Choice in Medicine was formed primarily to create a positive vision of and practical steps towards a truly American healthcare system.
AFCM’s origins story continues to inform and motivate our dedication to our mission.
You can learn more about the founding of Americans for Free Choice in Medicine here.
Read or listen to Leonard Peikoff’s speech ‘Health Care is Not a Right’ here.
