ObamaCare Vs. The Hippocratic Oath

Twenty-nine years ago I stood with my 150 classmates in Thorn Hall, at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, as Dean James Eckenhoff asked us to raise our right hands and repeat after him:    

I will apply measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm and injustice.

I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect.  In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.

I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from stone, but will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this work.

Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice.

Those words, from The Hippocratic Oath written in 400 B.C., changed my life and the lives of the thousands of patients my classmates and I have touched over the past twenty-nine years. 

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