Judging by their unprecedented use of the word “unprecedented” to describe everything the Obama administration has done it appears that they truly think they have fundamentally changed the national landscape in one short year.

Of course, those outside the delusional bubble of the White House know that the only truly unprecedented thing this administration has done is to destroy its own popularity faster than any other modern president, primarily thanks to its ham-handed push for a left-of-center realignment of the nation.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the titanic health care “reform” struggle.  The administration cannot seem to grasp the reality or the reasons for the public’s rejection of Obamacare.  The White House is correct that Americans want to reform health care and make it more affordable, accessible and understandable.  But the people know intuitively that a government takeover, or just a much bigger government role, won’t achieve those goals.

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My last article, Medicare is Already Rationing Care, focused on one small aspect of a much larger story, a story every American needs to know. The battle over the meaning of medicine began 2,500 years ago, not last spring.

In the late 1990’s I gave a lecture entitled “Post-Hippocratic Medicine in the Shadow of Nietzsche” in response to Peter Singer, the chair of bioethics at Princeton University. Singer had proposed we not consider humans “fully human” until they reached five weeks of age (after birth). During the first four weeks, he argued, we should allow the overt killing of infants with disabilities. This was “cost-effective.” It served the “greater good” by controlling the skyrocketing cost of healthcare.

For a decade I studied the question ”How did America reach a place in her history where we could seriously consider resurrecting the ancient practice of infanticide?” What I discovered changed my life.

For the past 2,500 years physicians served only one of two roles in Western culture. They either followed Hippocrates and served the wellbeing of their patients, or they followed Plato and served the greater welfare of the State. The philosophy of Peter Singer is not new—it has been with us for millennia. We once again stand at these same fated crossroads of Plato and Hippocrates as we debate the future of American healthcare.

Based on my study of history, philosophy, and current events, I feared we were rapidly returning to the world of Plato; a world where physicians worked at the behest of government, not solely for the patient. To help Americans understand what was about to transpire, I launched  Physicians for Reform in 2006.

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