This was an article I wrote just after my good friend Bill Bradford died of cancer.  I believe that I originally entitled it “It All Began with Goldwater”, since our friendship began in the Goldwater campaign.

After Bill died, I began thinking about the notion that the state had the right to dictate what a dying individual could ingest, and further to justify such regulation in terms of protecting the patient.  I gradually came to the view that, while nationalizing the mechanism for distributing health care was bad, the impact of a stifling regulatory framework was probably far worse.