This question clouds an important issue. We absolutely need to restore our freedoms in gun ownership and healthcare and across the board. Every one of our freedoms is under assault. By whom? By the very people we put in authority to protect them.
The good news is that it is precisely those rights most detested by our political class that have best withstood the assault. They have succeeded in curbing our freedom of speech only in their own enclaves, such as campus speech codes. They are attempting to suggest that freedom of the press refers to the news media, but it was 150 years after the Bill of Rights was written that "the press" came to refer to people who write the news for a living. We know freedom of the press refers to our right, each and every one of us, to put our words into print as well as speech.
How idiotic that our elected Senators go around talking about freedom of the press as though it is an exclusive property of the news media, but that is precisely how they work at eroding our freedoms. For the time being, we have made our right to bear arms too toxic for them to keep nibbling at. Still, it was the clear intent of our founding fathers that our gun rights provide us parity with the military. We have work to do to reclaim our birthright.
The first-wave progressives who started the assault on our healthcare rights with the Flexner Report just prior to WWI, were able to get Congress to shut down all medical schools not in the mold of Harvard and Johns Hopkins. I have no idea what wisdom there was in homeopathy, naturopathy and eclectic medicine, but whatever promise they may have held for us was wiped out by government edict.
Osteopathy hung on by the skin of its teeth. I remember as a grade schooler asking my mother what "charlatans" and "quacks" were having heard on the radio that there was a sheriff's campaign afoot to get rid of them. Turns out it was the American Medical Association's decades-long battle to rid society of the scourge of its last remaining competition. It only inflamed the AMA more that osteopaths famously got better results, such as in dealing with the Spanish Flu epidemic at the end of WWI.
Someone near the top of this thread talked about the duty of government to protect us by licensing physicians. Under pressure from the AMA, many states refused to license osteopathic physicians; the last state only relented in the 1980s. Job licensing was another freedom eliminator of first-wave progressives, who wanted all to be beholden to government for their livelihoods in the name of assuring quality to the public.
Anyone who has seen Dallas Buyers Club knows that the FDA, the AMA and our government officials do not necessarily have the best interest of We the People at heart. Even vitamin and mineral supplement providers have to spend large sums to thwart the FDA from imposing killing restrictions on them, sometimes with the goal of bringing supplements under prescription control--another profit monopoly for the AMA. All of this is of course backed by government-funded studies, studies that show the world is too full of risk for us to make our own decisions.
The final step in the assault on our freedoms, healthcare and otherwise, is to portray the opposite as freedom. "We need the right to healthcare," they tell us. The precise meaning of this is that we need to be able to impose the cost burden of healthcare on others so that we don't have to look for cost-cutting. The goal is to avoid true consumers. Consumers demand what they want. Charity cases are willing to take what's offered.
"Oh, but the poor!" goes the cry. Nothing in the history of the world has provided a boon to the poor like truly free markets. "Innovations that drive down costs!? Not on our watch," says the AMA. Before we leap into offering up our freedoms to the people charged with guaranteeing them, why don't we give freedom a real chance?
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