On July 4, 2026, when our country commemorates its 250th birthday, Americans will celebrate the Constitution and the freedoms it bestows. There is, however, one freedom missing that we need to reclaim: medical autonomy.
Americans are free to speak their minds, except when they contradict the official medical narrative, shown by the government’s response to Covid-19. Americans are free to gather, to work, and to pray until a federal bureaucrat declares a public health emergency. Americans have legally protected medical autonomy (freedom to choose their medical care) except when Washington mandates injections of an experimental genetic treatment.
The Covid response was a clear demonstration of medical tyranny in the United States, but it was not the beginning. Erosion of our medical autonomy began nearly a century ago with the best of intentions.
Prior to 1929, Americans paid directly out of pocket for their own health care. They had medical autonomy. Health insurance was mainly for lost wages when ill or injured. Charity organizations and some patient fees supported hospitals. As medical knowledge and capabilities grew in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, cost of care grew exponentially along with medical miracles.
The principle of third-party pre-payment plans started in Dallas, Texas during the Great Depression. Baylor Hospital offered local schoolteachers up to 21 days per year of hospital care for an annual prepayment contract of 50 cents per person per month. Gradually, the idea of prepayment for care expanded from Texas to national and from hospital care (Blue Cross) to physician services (Blue Shield). The passage of employer-sponsored health insurance (ESHI) in 1942 to compensate for wartime wage freezes accelerated the spread of insurance-based, third-party payment for care.
By 1965, with the ESHI still in force, nearly 80 percent of working class Americans had prepayment medical insurance through their employers. Since retirees, children, the unemployed, and chronically ill patients were left out, Congress passed Medicare and Medicaid as part of the 1965 Social Security Amendments.
At present, virtually all Americans have medical coverage through an insurance-based, third-party payment system via private or government insurance. The uninsured receive care via the Emergency Medical Transport and Labor Act of 1986.
He who controls the gold makes the rules. Nowhere is this truer than in health care. Through their control of health care spending, third parties decide what care people get (or don’t), when, where, and by whom. Patients are not free to decide their own care even though medical autonomy is supposedly protected by law.
Americans are not free to choose their care because they cannot control their health care dollars. Neither Washington nor insurance companies have any money of their own. The only funds they have to spend as “health care dollars” are monies taxpayers give them, or more precisely, $5.23 trillion that Washington took as taxes and $2.26 trillion that employers took from workers’ wages.
That is the acme of irony — we generate the instruments of our own tyranny.
While technically third party insurance companies expend health care dollars, they spend according to government rules and regulations. Thus, the ultimate medical authority, the true tyrant in control, is Big Brother. When insurance denies you care or takes forever to provide, they are simply playing the game to optimize their profit within rules established by Washington.
We need to reclaim our medical autonomy for three reasons. First, individuals always make better medical decisions for themselves (with a physician’s advice) than some unnamed, faceless and unaccountable bureaucrat. Second, if patients control their own health care dollars, spending will decline dramatically. And most important, restoring American medical freedom is the right thing to do, morally, ethically, legally, and economically.
There is a way to reclaim our heritage of freedom. President Trump quipped the answer, “Give the money to the people.” Start with repeal of employer-sponsored insurance and expansion of health savings accounts so there are no limits.
After World War II, all the wartime wage and price freezes were repealed except one: ESHI. This, too, should be repealed to give 84 million American employees their full wages. In 2025, the average amount employers sent per employee to insurance companies was $26,993. Add that money to their paychecks. Allow them to put that money in a new no-limit health savings account. They will be free to shop for care and insurance. No third party deciding “for” the patients. Including employees’ family members, half the U.S. would suddenly have a free market with $2.26 trillion to spend on health care.
Restoring medical freedom offers three powerful advantages. First, Americans regain their full constitutional birthright. Second, health care spending currently diverted to the health care bureaucracy will decrease substantially. Third, by removing third parties from the medical transaction, medical fraud becomes nearly impossible.
This Fourth of July, Americans should give themselves a special birthday present. Demand your medical freedom back!
