Michael Cannon, Mike Tanner, and other libertarian health care gurus may appreciate this. I recently came across an intriguing quote by Founding Father Benjamin Rush, surgeon general of the Continental Army and signer of the Declaration of Independence. So I did what everyone does these days and went to Wikipedia. There I learned that:

Rush believed that Americans should enshrine the right to medical freedom in their Constitution, much as the right to freedom of religion is expressly guaranteed in that document.

Rush is reported to have argued that “Unless we put Medical Freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship … to restrict the art of healing to one class of men, and deny equal privilege to others, will be to constitute the Bastille of Medical Science. All such laws are un-American and despotic and have no place in a Republic … The Constitution of this Republic should make special privilege for Medical Freedom as well as Religious Freedom.”

(Of course, if you read a little further, you learn that some of his medical theories were not so hot).

Rush was also a rabid antimilitarist who proposed in 1792 that two captions be painted “over the portals of the Department of War”: “An office for butchering the human species” and “A Widow and Orphan making office”–though that’s an idea that would probably be even less popular today.