As politics is, in Bismarck’s words, “the art of the possible,” it is difficult at best to reverse-engineer passed legislation into a clear understanding of the underlying principles that generated it.
However, it does appear that the Florida “medical freedom” legislation attempts to address aspects of 3 problems that became obvious during the Covid-19 era. These are 1) the medical and public health infringement on citizens’ fundamental civil liberties, 2) the systematic and oppressive control and silencing of physicians during the pandemic, and 3) the apparently out-of-control, dangerous, and unethical research that spawned the pandemic in the first place.
Extrapolated further, these pieces of legislation appear to be steps toward reestablishing 3 things: patient autonomy, physician autonomy, and truly ethical practice across all of medicine, from bench research to bedside patient care.
[All of these are good first steps, but the real problem is government control of health care. That needs to be unwound, along with the third-party payer system more generally. If we want medical freedom, we’d better be prepared to accept responsibility for the choices we make, and rational pricing signals are absolutely necessary to that process. — Ed]
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