[1] He completed his surgical residency at Cook County Graduate School of Surgery.
From January 1961 to June 1962, Annis made a series of speeches against the King Anderson bill, which would authorize the use of Social Security taxes to pay for health care benefits for retirees.
Dr. Annis warned that cost-plus financing of Medicare would doom it to bankruptcy and trigger destruction of the doctor-patient relationship.
"This bill would put the government smack into your hospital," he said, "defining services, setting standards, establishing committees, calling for reports, deciding who gets in and who gets out, what they get and what they do not get, even getting into the teaching of medicine.
"[4] Annis believed that what people against Medicare called "socialized medicine" would have consequences for American healthcare including loss of physician autonomy to bureaucratic control and the imposition of government regulation into the patient-physician relationship.
Annis authored the partly autobiographical, Code Blue: Health Care In Crisis (ISBN 089526515X) in which he reprises his analysis of Medicare's effects, laying most of what he felt is wrong with American health care at the feet of what he viewed as socialist changes without mention of its benefits.
He saw the solution as ending the current third party payer system, eliminating state-mandated insurance, and tort reform.