The Kress Collection

Exorbitant Fees

Honesty, integrity, justice, mercy, love, compassion, and sympathy are embraced in medical missionary work. In all this work the religion of the Bible is to be practised. The Lord does not want anyone to labor as His representative who follows the wrong customs and practice of worldly physicians in treating suffering humanity. Our physicians need to reform in the matter of making high charges for critical operations. And the reform should extend farther than this. Often an exorbitant fee is charged for even small services, because physicians are supposed to be governed in their charges by the practices of worldly physicians. There are those who follow worldly policy in order to accumulate means, as they say, for God's service. But God does not accept such offerings. He says, “I hate robbery for burnt offering.” Isaiah 61:8. Those who deal unjustly with their fellow-men while professing to believe My word, I will judge for thus misrepresenting Me. KC 59.3

As those things were presented before me, my Teacher said, “The institutions that depend upon God and receive His co-operation must ever work according to the principles of the law of God.” To charge a large sum for a few moments work is not just and right. Physicians who are under the discipline of the greatest Physician the world ever knew must let the principles of the gospel regulate every fee. Let mercy and the love of God be written on every dollar received. KC 59.4

When our sanitariums are conducted as they should be, a large medical missionary work will be done. Every worker will do his work in such a way and with such a spirit that he will shine as a light in the world. KC 59.5

God calls for the doing of practical, Christ-like work. The patients who come to our sanitariums are to see carried out the principles laid down in the fifty-eighth chapter of Isaiah. Those who have accepted the truth are to practise it because it is the truth. In the work of God in our institutions the truth is to be preserved in all its sacred influence. KC 59.6

The medical practitioner should in all places keep his religious principles clear and untarnished. Truth should be paramount in his practice. He is to use his influence as a means of cleansing the soul by the healing beams of the Sun of Righteousness. When a time comes that physicians cannot do this, the Lord would have no more medical institutions established among Seventh-day Adventists. KC 60.1