Some doctors can't wait to become slaves of the state. According to the Oakland Tribune, 7,782 pill-pushers are demanding the federal takeover of doctoring duties. At least, that's how many scrawled their traditionally illegible signatures on a JAMA article touting a plan to provide "free" health care for all.

Spokesdoctors for a California plan called "Physicians' Proposal for National Health Insurance" assure us that a FedMed scheme would need only "modest" new taxes, save $200 billion in administrative costs nationally, and "physician compensation would not change under the plan."

This diagnosis needs to be admitted for observation:

1. When have new taxes ever been -- or remained -- "modest"?

2. How will another massive centralized program "save" billions in administrative costs when it will take thousands of additional bureaucrats to administer it?

3. Physicians are sniffing their own anesthesia if they think their compensation won't change. The same article reported that Medicaid reimbursements are being cut by 4.2 percent, and the Gray Davis budget has amputated Medi-Cal payments by 5 percent. Do docs think they'll be calling the shots while they're giving the shots? According to the Iron Rule of Bureaucracy, that all bureaucracies exist primarily to benefit the people who run the bureaucracy, national health care will not exist to protect patient's interests or pill peddler's pocketbooks. FedMed will exist to protect the medicrats who run FedMed. Expect their compensation to metastasize while medical practitioner's bank accounts grow anemic.

Dr. James Kahn of San Francisco General sniffs, "The AMA in the 1960s was against the creation of Medicare, calling it socialized medicine. Unfortunately, they haven't moved past that view."

The AMA was right. Medicare is socialized medicine. Unfortunately, Dr. Kahn hasn't moved past that view.

Alas, the AMA actually has moved past that view. Today they prescribe refundable tax credits for the uninsured to buy health care and a mix of public and private financing. This is the infamous "public/private partnership" scam whereby taxpayers have moneyectomies performed on their pockets so private interests can line theirs.

The healers' health chart for nationalized nurture would "expand Medicare into a single-payer system akin to Canada."

But do we really want to dance to the Maple Leaf Rag? Michael Tanner, in a policy paper for the libertarian Cato Institute, points out two fatal symptoms of federalized physician fare: shortages of service and denial of treatment.

On average, he reports, our northern neighbors wait ten weeks for mammograms, five months for pap smears, ten months for hip replacements and "the danger of dying on the waiting list now exceeds the danger of dying on the operating table."

Canadian docs themselves are in crisis. The Toronto Star reports that they're burned out, emotionally exhausted, and their suicide rate is twice the general public's. Is that what the 7,782 American signatories want for themselves?

And someone should remind them that it'll be bureaucrats, not doctors, deciding who gets treatment. Who do you think will be awarded that next life-saving adam's apple transplant, the 80-year-old geezer hooked up to the social security/military retirement/welfare benefit life support system, or that 30ish middle manager with many productive years ahead of him? Hint: to a bureaucrat, "productive years" translates to "taxable income."

Then there's this wonderful Tribune quote from Dr. Ursula Rolfe, who's been pining away for national health care since the 1950s: "This country has public schools, public libraries, even public golf courses. Why not public healthcare?" By simply applying her own logic we could say, "This country has cancer, heart disease, even diabetes. Why not bubonic plague?"

So let's try a more libertarian rejoinder: this country (at least theoretically) has freedom of speech, freedom of press, even freedom of religion. Why not freedom of medical care? And, if their plan will save us $200 billion in administrative costs, freedom from bureaucracy should save us quadruple that.

No, it's probably pointless to point out to these government worshipers that our Constitution nowhere authorizes the US government to dip so much as its collective pinky into the bedpan of medicine. And while I confess that I haven't read all 50 constitutions, I doubt that the peoples of our individual states enshrined the "right" to "free" medical care in their historic parchments either.

But because of that Constitution, sawbones who want to be good little Soviet surgeons, giving according to their abilities and receiving according to their bureaucratically determined needs, are free to apply for citizenship in their Canadian utopia. If only they don't die on the waiting list first.