The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town

by Brian Alexander

Cameron was Morris Fishbein’s apex exemplar of the doctor as Caesar, master of his own empire. Like Fishbein, he despised even a hint of government involvement in medical care. He despised taxes, welfare, and regulation, too. He believed “there should be available to taxpayers a list of the recipients of welfare in each county” because “a little more available publicity would keep the names of a fair number off the dependency roll.” Taxpayers, he argued, “could at least dream about … a requirement that the name of every citizen put on the welfare recipient list be automatically removed from the voter list. Candidates for public office would not have to cater to this class of citizens.” In the United States, Cameron believed, there was almost never a good excuse for anybody to be receiving aid from the government. Poverty was evidence of moral failure. While medicine’s newfound abilities to save lives proved a boon to mankind, “among indigents, a medical triumph often adds to the taxpayer’s burden.”