About BRI

Healthcare is one of the most important policy issues today. BRI asserts that no public policy issue impacts American lives more profoundly than healthcare. Yet most medical students fail to understand the true impact of the Affordable Care Act and other key healthcare policies on both their future practices and on their relationships with patients.

In spite of receiving the best medical education in the world, the days are gone when doctors could practice their profession without significant regulatory interference. Because healthcare policy has such a direct and pervasive effect on patient care, medical students must understand healthcare policy in addition to medical sciences.

Yet, medical schools rarely present health policy in a balanced way. Instead of examining competing ideas and holding open discussions about the best healthcare options, students are presented solutions permeated by the assumption that government rightly must play a predominant role.

If discussed at all, private options and freedom of choice are dismissed as unrealistic, inherently corrupt or unjust. On some campuses, the government’s role is not even to be questioned.

As reported in a recent email we received (italics added):

“I initially heard about Benjamin Rush Institute after a simple Google search for free market healthcare groups at med schools. Half of my education here at U—- is intense sciences, and the other half is advocating for national healthcare systems, raising the minimum wage, income redistribution, and a variety of other public health policies. I got fed up with it and found your organization online.”

A clinical professor of medicine reported this experience:

“I recently gave a forum on private practice to first year medical students at [a northeastern university]. An older student … said that he and a classmate raised questions about ‘single payer medical financing’ with one of their public health teachers. She complained to the school administration and word came down that students are not to criticize single payer. He is afraid to start a Benjamin Rush Institute chapter.”

BRI seeks to be the voice of moderated reason, reaching medical students and healthcare professionals who yearn for liberty and preserving the direct patient-doctor relationship without undue government and regulatory intervention. We give medical students a voice and empowerment to overcome the push towards socialized, over-regulated healthcare.

BRI chapters are our avenues to educate medical students, re-focus healthcare policy on inviolate doctor-patient autonomy, and create a lasting legacy of healthcare freedom and medical excellence.

In 2008, Sally Pipes, founder of the Pacific Research Institute, saw a need to counter the encroaching government regulation of American healthcare. Having lost her mother to the Canadian “single-payer” system, Ms. Pipes, an American citizen, was very concerned about the direction American healthcare was going. She founded Benjamin Rush Institute, and in 2013 BRI became an independent institute focused on educating medical students around the world on the benefits of free market enterprise in healthcare.

No public policy issue impacts American lives more profoundly than healthcare. BRI believes that the best way to deliver quality, affordable medical care is through a free enterprise system. Yet, most medical students today are instructed overwhelmingly in healthcare policy that promotes a government-centric approach to healthcare, and rarely—if ever—encounter a voice promoting free markets and the sanctity of the patient-doctor relationship. On some campuses the government’s role in healthcare is not even to be questioned.

It’s no wonder that most medical students fail to understand the true impact of the Affordable Care Act and other key healthcare policies currently deliberated in Washington DC and states across the nation.

Today, medical students must understand healthcare policy in addition to medical sciences. BRI fills the gap where free enterprise healthcare policy discussion is absent or under-represented.

BRI is a 501(c)3 tax-deductible public charity.

Dr. Rush was a leading doctor in the American founding era and one of five physician signers of the Declaration of Independence. He believed in medicine as a profession and that America’s founding principles of freedom complemented and protected the patient-doctor relationship.

According to Dr. Rush and the Founders, government doesn’t bestow human rights. Rather, it is government’s duty to protect natural human rights. In order to secure the blessings of liberty—which includes doctors’ ability to treat their patients without stifling regulation—government must be limited and operate similarly to medicine’s guiding principle:

First, do no harm.