Washington, D.C., April 28, 2011—Noted physician and health care advocate Hal C. Scherz of Atlanta today was awarded The Heritage Foundation’s 2011 Salvatori Prize for American Citizenship.
Dr. Scherz, managing partner of Georgia Pediatric Urology, in 2009 founded Docs 4 Patient Care, a voluntary association of medical practitioners. The group’s mission: to champion sensible health care reform while promoting quality of care and affordable access for all.
“A modern-day Paul Revere, Hal Scherz set out to warn his profession and his fellow citizens of the federal government’s bureaucratic destruction of the American health care system through the takeover that came to be known as Obamacare,” said Matthew Spalding, vice president of American studies at The Heritage Foundation.
The leading Washington think tank annually presents the $25,000 prize, named for the late entrepreneur and philanthropist Henry Salvatori, to an American who advances the principles and virtues of the nation’s Founders. Dr. Scherz said he will donate the prize money to Docs 4 Patient Care (D4PC).
D4PC “seeks to preserve the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship rather than allow medical practitioners to become mere instruments of the state,” said Spalding, also director of Heritage’s B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies. Edwin Meese III, chairman of Heritage's Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, joined Spalding to present the Salvatori Prize to Dr. Scherz during a luncheon opening the think tank’s 34th annual Resource Bank gathering in Dallas, Texas.
Dr. Scherz, former president of Georgia Urology P.A., also practices at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, having relocated from San Diego in 1994. He is past president of the American Association of Pediatric Urologists. The author of more than 75 peer-reviewed articles, he has served on the faculty of Emory University and the University of California-San Diego.
Recent winners of the Salvatori Prize include the Tea Party movement (2010), historian David McCollough (2009) and Princeton University professor Robert P. George (2008).
The Heritage Foundation is the nation’s most broadly supported public policy research institute, with more than 710,000 individual, foundation and corporate donors. Founded in 1973, it has a staff of 255 and an annual expense budget of more than $75.3 million.