The administrators who create the schedule for the surgeons, are the one denying lifesaving care to people.
There is no "doctor's guild". No one is required to join the AMA to practice medicine, nor are they involved in medical school accreditation.
Blaming congress too is fine, but let's be clear: someone has to fight to increase every budget and the AMA didn't just know this when they were structuring their proposal, didn't just count on it not happening, they considered this an implementation detail subordinate to the openly admitted primary objective of propping up physician wages as the Greatest Generation passed. That was always the goal, they were extremely open about it, and about 15 years ago I was attending a talk on demographics in medicine with a primarily physician audience, one of them asked what the plans were to change this to staff up for the Boomer wave (the bump was on the slide, begging the question) and the presenter waved his hand and said maybe they could do something... or not, and then he laughed, and the rest of the room laughed with him.
I'm glad that the AMA has changed their stated position now that it's too late to change course (for the Boomers anyway) and their squeeze is bearing fruit for them and suffering for their patients, but I'll always remember that room full of doctors and doctors-to-be laughing about the prospect of intentionally understaffing for profit. I have it filed in my memory right next to the phone call of Enron traders giggling as they ordered power plants offline to scare up prices, except it's about a million times worse.
- Their skills.
- Their time.
- The required materials to properly perform the surgery.
They can't volunteer:
- The support staff around them required to do surgery.
- The space to do the surgery.
Surgery isn't a one-man show.
What did you mean by "Surely they could volunteer to do some charity surgery in their own time. They aren't slaves?"
Even if that's a bad example, there are innumerable examples where individuals do choose not to help others in the same way that corporations don't.
Frankly, nearly every individual is doing that by not volunteering every single extra dollar and minute they don't need to survive.
What you suggest requires entire organizations to execute properly. These organizations do exist, such as Doctors Without Borders.
I don't think your original claim is fair, which amounts to "any surgeon who does not participate in Doctors Without Borders is just as bad as a landlord who evicts a family during winter".
What do you think we owe to one another, philosophically?
My point is that individuals choose not to help others constantly. Every time I see a homeless person, I don't offer them a couch to sleep on. I could, at least once, but I don't. We all do that, most days multiple times.
And yes, that does apply to doctors who don't volunteer services. It applies to me too and, I bet, to the OP as well.
Secondly, as discussed, the "individuals don't turn people away, corporations do" dynamic really does apply to doctors. If you were, say, on an airplane with a doctor sitting next to you, and you managed to cut yourself or burn yourself or something, I would bet they would render aid.
Basically you're equating turning someone away, and withdrawing something that someone has, with failing to actively seek out people who could need help. But I don't think those are morally equivalent. Maybe you're a utilitarian and that's fine, but I'm a virtue ethicist and I do not agree that equality of outcome means equality of morality.