If that's how your conscience is served, sure.
But that's not a parallel argument.
You're not in the profession of cliff-hanger-saving. If you were, you would have competition and there would be an established comparable fee schedule for services rendered. I could choose to use a different cliff-hanger-saver, and you would be aware of that. If I were climbing a dangerous cliff known to be tricky, there might be several cliff-hanger-savers loitering nearby and you each have competed for several years to establish a base price and then have relative prices that differ slightly based on prior success rate or inventiveness of technique.
If you weren't a professional cliff-hanger-saver, then you're a peer climber and would expect similar salvation from other climbers if the roles were reversed.
In the case of medicine, it's the Free $hit Army again.
Single payer, medicine becomes a practice where compensation is dictated. Then it's just a matter of the government deciding that:
1. All doctors are worth the same for procedures rendered, regardless of inventiveness or skill.
2. All procedures can be compensated less and less until the income of doctors is dictated by government fiat.
It may be a nice looking plantation, but it's still slavery. And the plantation will get less and less money as other money is wanted elsewhere.
Eventually your doctor is on par with your postman or county court clerk.
It is exactly a parallel argument. When my wife's aneurysm ruptured, we didn't have an opportunity to interview neurosurgical teams, nursing teams, respiratory therapy teams, hospital administrators, or even the janitorial services whose job it was to keep the place sanitary so she didn't get MRSA - which she got, by the way - another probably lifelong ticking bomb she will carry.
We didn't get to find the best at each job and then take services from the best for each step of the journey. We went to a local ER. They drove her to Tulsa with lights and sirens because there were severe storms going on and the lifeflight helicopter couldn't fly. The local ER chose the hospital to take her to based on their partnership agreements and availability. No price lists, no resumes, no customer testimonials.
That's the nature of medical care. It is a large team that you don't get to choose. When you get to make a superficial choice because you have a couple non-emergency visits to a doctor ahead of any surgery or critical care, you only barely touch the surface. While my wife waits for surgery in a week, her condition gets worse. If she makes it the week, we have full confidence in the doctor who is going to do it. Since we're in a capitalistic society, we can choose to wait for the week or, if her condition worsens to a critical point - and it might - we can choose to wait and risk death or go to the ER and have whatever surgeon is on duty or call. But you're right, the system is so wonderful to give us that choice. Liberty,freedom, and unbridled capitalism at its finest. If we don't like it we can choose to go ER hopping. If we can't afford it or insurance won't pay for ER hopping, well, then we just can't afford it. Capitalism.
Medical mistakes are the 6th biggest killer in the US.
http://www.justice.org/cps/rde/justice/hs.xsl/8677.htmIf you take the GAO's numbers for hospital deaths, disregarding deaths from medical mistakes outside the hospital, you get 44,000 per year, still #8 if you insert their number into justice.org's list.
http://www.gao.gov/cghome/healthcare/img44.htmlEventually your doctor is on par with your postman or county court clerk.
Well, we agree on one thing: doctors should not be slaves. If they don't want to be doctors they can always choose to be postmen or county clerks. Or computer programmers or car mechanics. If at any time they feel like the rewards for being a doctor don't meet their needs, they should quit being doctors. Thank goodness we live in a free society where they get to choose their career by weighing the reward, both financial and personal, that they would receive.
We have a broken for-profit medical industry. We do not have a medical care system.