The political, legal, and financial issues that plastic surgery is facing and how to develop a plan to cope.

Our specialty has been a creative wonder and an outright blessing to mankind. We have honed the arts of soft-tissue reconstruction to a level never thought possible just 100 years ago. We have found solutions to wound problems long after others have given up. We have restored the destroyed features of people ravaged by disease, life circumstances, and the acts of war. We have treated the deformed child, the patient with cancer, and reversed the signs of age. But as Thomas Sowell states in his article in 1994 in Forbes Magazine on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Fredrich Hayek, the author of The Road to Serfdom, the rule of law, which Hayek saw as crucial to the economy and to the survival of freedom, is nowhere in greater danger than in the supreme court of the United States. Sowell warned of the process going on that would bring socialism to our health care delivery system. He goes on to assert that it will be paid for by "loss of freedom to make our own decisions about medical care that are literally questions of life and death. The key to the future of medicine is now in our hands. This key will open the door to every doctor's dream of having the technologies that will allow physicians to diagnose and treat all the physical ills of the human race. Or the key, on the other hand, could open the exit door through which the best and brightest will leave medicine, feeling that they no longer can take on the legal and the financial risks to themselves and their families. The road to freedom from the controlling factors noted will require a change in culture. Knowing these facts will allow the plastic surgeon in practice to accept these factors and work with them to provide better care for their patients.