Tomorrow, March 31, is the deadline for Obamacare. Sign up or you will be fined.

Dr. Margaret Flowers doesn’t have health insurance. She’s not eligible for Medicaid and she’s too young to qualify for Medicare.

If she doesn’t sign up, she will be fined.

Dr. Flowers is not going to sign up.

And she’s not going to sign up as an act of civil disobedience.

“I am required to buy private insurance or pay a penalty,” Flowers wrote recently in an article titled ACA’s a Scam, We Need Medicare for All. “But I find myself in the position of not being able to do either. I can’t in good conscience give money to the health insurance industry that I am fighting to eliminate. And I can’t in good conscience pay a tax penalty that will be given to that industry. So, I am going to be a Conscientious Objector to the Affordable Care Act (ACA).”

Dr. Flowers has been an outspoken advocate for a single payer, Medicare for all health system.

Flowers said that during the health reform process, she did all that she could to push for single payer, including being arrested three times for civil disobedience.

“I was one of fifty doctors who filed a brief in the Supreme Court which expressed opposition to forcing people to buy private health insurance, a defective product,” Flowers said. “It pains me to see that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) siphons billions of public dollars to create more bureaucracy and transfers hundreds of billions of  public dollars directly to the private insurance industry when I know that those dollars should be paying for the health care that so many in our country desperately need.”

“The mass media and politicians are constantly talking about the health care marketplace,” Flowers says. “We are being indoctrinated with market rhetoric. Patients are called consumers and health insurance plans are called products. The problem with this is that health care doesn’t belong in the marketplace whose logic dictates that care should be denied if a profit cannot be made. Health care is a public good and something that everyone needs throughout their lifetime.”

“Focusing solely on the number of people who are insured is what the private health insurance industry wants the public to believe is most important. The industry spent tremendous amounts of money and time to get a law that would force people to buy insurance in order to protect and enhance their assets. They want everyone to buy their products and to make people feel reckless or irresponsible if they don’t. This is a massive campaign to distract people from asking the questions that really matter, such as whether people with insurance will be able to afford health care, whether bankruptcies from medical debt will continue and whether overall health outcomes will improve.”