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Election 2006 Before voting, consider the alternatives © By Peter Barry Chowka (November 1, 2006) As I write, it’s less than a week until Election 2006. It’s a mid-term election with one-third of the seats in the U.S. Senate and all 435 members in the House of Representatives to be decided on by voters. Less is at stake than in a presidential election year. And yet, according to most analysts, 2006 has the potential to bring significant, and maybe unprecedented, change in the national political landscape and the direction of the country. After twelve years of almost continuous control of the Congress, the Republicans may be ousted from the leadership of the House and possibly the Senate, too. On the eve of the 2000 and 2004 elections, I wrote articles analyzing the presidential races in the context of health care and, in particular, how the outcomes might influence alternative medicine. Based on three decades’ worth of experience, much of it first hand, reporting on and deconstructing myriad subjects including the politics of health care, I concluded that the Republicans would be better, at least marginally, for the future of alt med. In summing up everything, I quoted a comment by the 1996 and 2000 Libertarian presidential candidate Harry Browne (who died at age 72 on March 1, 2006 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – Lou Gehrig's disease). In a debate in October 2000, Browne said that, in his view, many people who favored personal freedom and a more limited role for the federal government planned to vote for Texas Republican Gov. George W. Bush on the theory that Bush would “take us to hell [socialism, I think Browne meant] more slowly” [than the Democrat candidate, Al Gore].
Harry Browne (1933 – 2006) (It is worth recalling that Browne also observed, “Today, the government spends half of all health care dollars in America, but it has no incentive to spend these health care dollars wisely. As a result this massive federal intrusion has run up the price of doctor visits, hospital stays, and health insurance — far outpacing the rate of general inflation. So in reality America's health care problem is really a government problem. . . There was a time when health insurance was accessible to almost anyone at a modest price. But after 30 years of government intervention, insurance companies have been forced to restrict their polices and charge far more than many people can afford. “Before the federal government intruded into health care in the 1960s, health care cost a fraction of today's prices, hospital stays didn't cost a year's wages, health insurance was a lot less expensive and accessible to virtually everyone on some basis, and doctors even made house calls.”) Without getting into other areas of policy that have emerged in the past six years, in terms of health and medicine Bush has pretty much proven Harry Browne correct: Since January 2001 the Bush Administration has proceeded somewhat more cautiously towards complete socialism in medicine than a Democrat president would have – to the advantage of alternative medicine and personal freedom, in this writer’s opinion. While objections to President Bush’s foreign policy especially in Iraq dominate most Democrat talking points in 2006, when the subject turns to domestic issues, the Dems, true to form, can be counted on to promote (as most of their leadership has since the late 1940s) more government involvement in health care – up to and including for many Democrats concepts like “universal coverage,” a more benign term for socialized medicine. Among the Democrats who may reclaim leadership positions in the new
Congress is Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA), who would become chairman of the
Senate Health, Education, and Labor Committee. An AP story on
October 26th reports that, following an expected victory at the
polls on November 7, 2006, “Democrats would. . . be
pushing legislative ideas that don't stand a chance of passage but would
distinguish the party from Republicans in the 2008 elections. Health care is
one such issue. ‘My own sense would be to move toward a Medicare-for-all
system,’ Kennedy said [emphasis added]. ‘We can raise this over this
period of time and then have Democratic candidates raising this as an issue
in Kennedy has been pushing a socialized medicine plan for the United States since at least 1971. That year, I covered a speech by Kennedy at the Georgetown University School of Medicine. In it, Kennedy challenged America to provide free health care for everyone. I remember thinking, several years later as I erased the audiocassette tape that I had used to record Kennedy’s speech in order to free it up for a more important use, “This is an idea that will go nowhere.” Medicare, which began in 1965, part of the “Great Society” proposed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson and passed into law by the overwhelmingly Democrat 89th Congress, opened the door significantly to socialized medicine in the United States. In 2001, Sue Blevins, founder and president of the Institute for Health Freedom, wrote a particularly insightful book about the subject, Medicare’s Midlife Crisis. A reviewer at Amazon.com succinctly summarizes her points: “Medicare's ‘midlife crisis’ includes, among other things, the inexorable rise in Medicare spending, the beneficiaries’ ever-rising out-of-pocket medical costs, the reduction in the number of taxpaying workers per Medicare beneficiary because of the retirement of the ‘baby-boom’ generation, the threat to medical privacy associated with efforts to reduce Medicare fraud, and Medicare's impending bankruptcy.” (The Institute for Health Freedom maintains a Web page with links to many articles about Medicare issues.) Specific to alternative medicine, growing federal influence and state control of science and medicine have resulted in the increasing enforcement of “cookbook medicine” which today includes a modicum of “CAM” (complementary alternative medicine, or alt med light) but little that is truly alternative. Most Democrats like Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) (and, in fairness it must be noted, some Republicans) are also enthralled by the prospect of fast tracking the mandatory adoption of electronic medical records (EHRs) for all Americans. EHR is an Orwellian concept that is antithetical to personal liberty, autonomy, and choice. According to Long Island Newsday (June 22, 2006), Clinton “told a healthcare symposium sponsored by HSBC Bank that computerized medical records would help fix the healthcare system by reducing inefficiency, redundancy and medical errors.” Another Democrat pol who will become a major leader in Congress if the Republicans lose control is Henry Waxman (D-CA). Waxman would become chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform, a position once held by Indiana Republican Rep. Dan Burton, who held many hearings in support of medical freedom, alternative therapies, and the possible association of autism and mercury in vaccines. First elected to the Congress in 1974 and a permanent member since then, Waxman, in contrast, has consistently been one of the most vocal legislative opponents of nutritional supplements and alt med/CAM therapies. In 1992, journalist Jon Rappoport challenged Waxman in the Democratic party primary for the nomination in the 30th Congressional district in California. Rappoport was inspired by, as one observer wrote at the time (1992), Waxman’s “work(ing) tirelessly to push through legislation empowering the FDA to destroy the nutritional supplement industry.” In recent years, Waxman has co-sponsored legislation (none of it has passed because his party has been in the minority), including H.R. 3156, “The Dietary Supplement Access & Awareness Act,” that would, according to some observers, “Eliminate Vitamin & Herbal Supplements in America.” One would think that more Americans who are interested in alternative medicine, particularly the leaders of the alt med or CAM field, would be concerned about putting more power into the hands of the state, specifically people like Waxman. But since many proponents of alt med, particularly the self-selected leaders, are on the left politically, any concern they might have about government hegemony in health and medicine, or even a clear analysis of the medical-political status quo, is rarely offered. Typically, there are just calls for more of the same — more “integration” (of alt med light and conventional medicine) or more CAM. In the final week before the election, more articles and editorials from
the mainstream media are appearing, trying to predict what a possible
Democrat majority in Congress will do vis-à-vis
a variety of issues including health care. With the 2006 campaign in its home stretch, in order to avoid re-inventing the wheel, and to save time, I am excerpting (below) some of my past published observations about alternative medicine and politics. Despite having been written a few years ago, everything is still pretty much relevant to the political discourse today – except that the threats to freedom have increased with the passage of time, just as the costs of medical care have escalated. Also, with the political center (on domestic issues, at least) having been pushed way to the left, it is not unusual to hear even Republicans echo the Democrat mantra of universal access to health care, or to drugs for treating HIV-AIDS, as constituting a new “right.”
“Like the monster in a Hollywood horror film, the idea of government-run health care never seems to stay dead for long,” write Michael Tanner and Naomi Lopez of the Cato Institute in the Washington Times (February 11, 1997). In fact, the push to expand the federal government's role in health care is once again a major issue. . . The health care delivery system in the U.S. represents over one-seventh of the Gross National Product, or about $2.2 trillion a year [figures adjusted to 2006]. Already, the government pays about one-half of all the costs of medical care. The media have given scant attention to how the further centralization of medical care in the U.S. might effect the practice of medicine and individual citizens overall, and complementary alternative medicine (CAM) and its proponents in particular. A little history, however, suggests that the impacts, especially on CAM, would be major — and not at all positive. Medicare: boon or bust? The federal government is at the root of many of the problems — both real and perceived — facing American medicine. After World War Two, as orthodox medicine began growing into a very big business, the federal government moved to play a prominent role, quickly becoming intimately involved in reshaping the whole context and practice of health care. Traditional arts of healing dating back centuries were redirected away from practices that relied on local, small scale, preventive, and nontoxic therapeutic options and more toward modern scientism — a reductionist, allopathic model that is mechanistic, symptomatic, drug-based, high-tech, and increasingly expensive. Almost overnight, things like nutrition, herbs, homeopathy, other nontoxic therapies, and primary prevention were passé, while “state of the art” came to mean pharmaceutical drugs, radiation, surgery, vaccinations, and, more recently, artificial hearts, genetic engineering, bone marrow transplants, and so on. In the early 1960s, one of the first examples of national health care “reform” appeared on the landscape, as the emerging medical-industrial complex joined forces with ambitious politicians to champion Medicare — guaranteed government health care for older Americans. Modeled on Social Security which began in the 1930s, Medicare was enacted into law in 1965 by an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress and went a long way toward nationalizing medicine for the elderly, an influential and growing segment of the population. The actual improvement of elderly Americans’ health during the subsequent three decades, however, is arguable. During the same period, though, driven by Medicare, profits and the inflation of everyone’s health care costs skyrocketed. Today, Americans age 65 and older actually pay as much or more out of pocket for medical care, even with Medicare in place, than elderly Americans did in the 1950s before Medicare. And the nation’s total annual health care bill has shot up to an astronomical $2.2 trillion [figures adjusted to 2006] — about 16 percent of the Gross National Product (GNP). For many Americans today, medical care has simply become unaffordable — and over 40 million citizens reportedly lack health insurance (though, as analysts point out, only a small percentage completely lack access to care because of the presence of a variety of safety net provisions). As noted by scores of mainstream scientists and in hundreds of published studies — and this is surely one of the most underreported and underappreciated facts of modern life — society’s unprecedented investment in state of the art conventional medicine has rarely been associated with demonstrable improvements in health, survival, or longevity. In fact, a whole new category of illness and disability caused by medicine has appeared: iatrogenesis — doctor-caused injury and death — which has now reached epidemic proportions. In December 1999, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released the report, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System. The IOM found that as many as 98,000 Americans die every year as the result of medical errors and that even larger numbers suffer temporary or permanent harm. “Even when using the lower estimates” the authors of the IOM study write, “more people die in a given year as a result of medical errors than from motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS.” Ivan Illich predicted this troubling scenario when he wrote (in his 1976 classic work, Medical Nemesis) that modern medicine has become “a major threat to our health.” The federal government bears major responsibility for this situation. Self-aggrandizing elected officials, arrogant inside-the-Beltway bureaucrats, and self-appointed “experts,” in league with a variety of special interests to whom the key players are all inextricably beholden, have worked together to corrupt the practice of medicine in ways both obvious and subtle: by giving billions of dollars in low-interest loans and direct grants to favored allopathic hospitals and academic medical institutions; by paying for and promoting toxic drug development; by enforcing a myopic allopathic research policy; by declaring no-win “wars” on diseases; and by joining other conventional players in many well-documented instances of collusion and conspiracy to denigrate or destroy nontoxic alternatives, thereby eliminating most real competition. Disturbingly, most of the discussion of national health care reform proposals inevitably concerns the degree of future federal meddling in the intimate details of the nation's medical delivery system. The late Robert Maver was a vice president and director of research of Mutual Benefit and Life (a major insurance company). He was an industry insider of unusual integrity and insight. In 1994 he noted, “The purpose of [health care] ‘reform’ is not to manage care, although that's what the proponents are saying. What they're really trying to do is just to manage costs.” In the 1950s, the share of the U.S. GNP consumed by medical spending was only three to four percent. Today, it is 16 percent and rising. As Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, wrote in the Washington Times on January 12, 1999 , “At Medicare’s inception, the House Ways and Means Committee predicted the hospital insurance portion would cost $9 billion in 1990; outlays actually exceeded $9 billion in 1974. Within eight years of Medicare’s passage, its tax rate was running twice the initial projections. Other federal health programs have also rapidly spiraled out of control.” How did the explosion of costs and inflation in Medicare and medicine as a whole happen? Tom Miller, in a commentary at the Cato Institute’s Web site dated July 17, 2000, refers to “the Medicare Money Pit [that] stimulates demand with irresponsible promises [and] triggers an explosion of benefit costs.” In other words, a lack of competition accompanied by draconian bureaucratic mandates, thousands of pages of regulations, and restrictions on competition — while the government promises “free” health care and writes a blank check to back up the promises — result in an inexorable upward spiral of health care costs for everyone. Guy King, former chief actuary for the Health Care Financing Administration, confirmed that third-party payment is one of the primary causes of the rapid growth in Medicare expenditures. As King explained, “When people, either patients or doctors, are spending other people's money, they do not worry about the cost or number of services consumed” (see "The Right Way to Reform Medicare" by Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, December 19, 1996). Health care “reform”: the end of alternative medicine? In an interview in 1994, at the height of the Clinton-Gore national health care reform debate, Nicholas Gonzalez, M.D., the New York City specialist in nutritional cancer therapy, said that the kind of national health care reform proposed by the Democrats “could be the end of alternative medicine.” The government health care reformers, according to Gonzalez, “think that the reason people are sick is that they don't have enough high-tech medicine. But high-tech medicine doesn't even work for rich people! The real reason that people are sick is that orthodox medicine is asking the wrong questions.” Robert Maver, the insurance industry insider who died in 1997, agreed with Gonzalez. “The popular wisdom,” Maver commented in 1994, “is that American health care is the best in the world, and that we just have to figure out a more efficient way of delivering that health care. Alternatives really start from a completely different point. They say, ‘There's a far better health care that's possible.’” Many millions of Americans appear to agree with Gonzalez and Maver. A variety of studies confirm that alternative medicine is thriving — despite the considerable limitations placed on competitiveness by the current system and the many other long-standing hostilities on the part of orthodoxy, including the federal government, toward unconventional medical options. In his now famous study, David Eisenberg, M.D. of Harvard University and his colleagues reported in “Unconventional Medicine in the United States — Prevalence, Costs, and Patterns of Use” in the New England Journal of Medicine (Vol 328 No. 4, January 28, 1993), for example, that one in three Americans used some form of alternative healing in 1990, and Americans during that same year made more visits to alternative health care practitioners than they did to conventional general practice M.D.s. Eisenberg's paper and other authors’ more recent studies confirming the increasing popularity of a wide range of nontoxic approaches for the prevention and treatment of illness, suggest that the core of the current problem with American health care is not the lack of Americans’ unrestricted access to conventional medicine. Excessive malpractice activity, rising costs, large numbers of uninsured people, and other limitations of the current health care delivery system are actually symptoms of a larger malaise. The core problem is the failure of conventional medicine to successfully and cost-effectively prevent and treat most illnesses.
According to the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner, we need “political leaders who will be honest with the American people — who will tell them that Medicare cannot continue in its current form. We cannot continue to have the government provide virtually first-dollar insurance coverage for every senior. Instead, Medicare should be transformed into a back-up catastrophic program that protects seniors from serious illnesses but leaves people increasingly responsible for the majority of their health care expenses.” A commentary by Walter Williams (“Political Greed and Exploitation,” October 24, 2000) notes, “This year's political demagogues whine that treatment decisions should be left with patients and their doctors, not some HMO ‘bean counter.’ But early in the Clinton-Gore administration, there was that failed attempt to socialize our entire health care system. Had Clinton and Gore been successful, there would have been government ‘bean counters’ who would have been dictating to doctors. “Right now if you are dissatisfied with your HMO, you can purchase other
forms of medical insurance or even pay out of your pocket. Under the
Clinton-Gore socialized medicine scheme, those options would not have
existed. You would have no recourse to federal government medical edicts. In
countries with socialized medicine, the government decides who does and who
does not get medical treatment. For example, 20 percent of kidney dialysis
centers in Europe, and 50 percent in England, refuse to treat patients over In a 1995 Cato Institute policy analysis (“The Medical Monopoly: Protecting Consumers or Limiting Competition?”), Sue Blevins writes, “It is imperative to examine critically the extent to which government policies are responsible for rising health costs and the unavailability of health services. Eliminating the roadblocks to competition among health care providers could improve access to health services, lower health costs, and reduce government spending. . . The underlying reason for. . . problems [in the health care system] is the lack of a functioning free market in health care in this country. There is privately owned health care, but there is not a living, vibrant free marketplace in health care like there is in other products and services. . . True health care reform must involve ending the government-imposed medical monopoly and providing consumers with a full array of health care choices.” If one looks at the constellation of computer/high tech/Internet/information-based industries (the IT sector) that are contributing so much to the economy today, a significant contrast with the conventional medical-industrial complex can be observed. There is a much more competitive, free-market, level-playing-field (and a much less regulated) aspect to IT than to official medicine. The result? The cost of computers and software today, especially considering their exponentially growing power, is minuscule compared to five or ten years ago. In American medicine, the reverse is true. Proponents of increasing federal funding for American medicine insist that advances in medicine are based on high tech, that technology is expensive, and that exponentially rising costs are therefore inevitable. But as Al Gore pointed out in a speech in 2000, the power of his own Palm Pilot hand held computing device (retail cost at the time: perhaps five hundred dollars) is greater than all of the computing power inside of the first Apollo spacecraft that landed two American astronauts on the moon in 1969 — at an infinitesimal fraction of the cost of the spacecraft’s onboard computers. Why should the advanced technology associated with medicine — if unleashed to competition and the true free market — be any less cost effective than what has evolved in the IT field? No exit Beyond the financial bottom line, the indications of what’s in store for Americans under the kind of centralized national health care system are troubling. Al Gore and even many Republicans insist that any new federal health plans must eventually cover everyone and be mandatory, like filing an income tax return. If such a scenario comes to pass, every American would be required to have a mandatory “national health identifier” number, which would be used to track every interaction with the health care delivery system, even including encounters with an alternative clinician paid for in cash out of pocket. As Elizabeth McCaughey writes in the New Republic (February 7, 1994), once this kind of national health care reform has been voted into law, there will be, as in Jean Paul Sartre’s existential play, “No Exit.” We'll all have to be part of, pay for, and be subject to the rules and constraints of conventional medicine, whether we agree with and want it or not. In an interview in December 1999, Sue Blevins commented about the prospect of a mandatory national health ID number: “Freedom and privacy are directly related. You can’t take away someone’s freedom until you first invade their privacy. . . Doctors and other providers will be coerced into practicing cookbook medicine according to specific ‘standards’ of care. Those standards won't necessarily include minority views or alternative ways of treating patients.” In the view of New York clinician Gonzalez, “The goal of health care reform is to have a dictionary in Washington listing ‘acceptable’ treatments. If you look up ‘breast cancer,’ there are the ‘acceptable’ treatments — and anything else will be disallowed. They essentially want all doctors to conform to government standards.” Most Americans (and there are at least 100 million now) who choose some form of alternative healing pay for these freely chosen preventive and therapeutic options out of their own pockets. This ability will be severely restricted if everyone is taxed additionally to support an expansion of government’s role in medicine. In addition, research into medical alternatives, which often begins in a holistic practitioner’s office because of a lack of opportunities elsewhere, will be impaired if alternative clinicians are restricted. . . History shows that the Democrats (some exceptions like a few Democratic party politicians’ bipartisan support for the National Center for Complementary Alternative Medicine notwithstanding) have consistently advanced policies and taken actions that are detrimental to alternative medicine. Examples include the hostility of the Clinton-Gore Department of Health and Human Services and Food and Drug Administration to medical freedom in the Thomas Navarro case, the [Vice President Al] Gore pledge — if elected President — to incrementally move towards mandatory national health care for all Americans and to quadruple spending for the failed conventional “war on cancer,” and the abysmal record on alt med and medical freedom of the Congress and committees, such as the one chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), when the Democrats controlled both Houses for fifty years until 1995. . . It is particularly troubling that, while some legislators support creating new programs and commissions and spending increasing amounts of federal money on CAM, the enforcement arms of federal agencies continue to act with prejudice, disfavor, and hostility towards many CAM practitioners, not to mention citizens like the [family of young cancer patient Thomas Navarro] who want nothing more than personal health freedom. The fact is that the prosecution of credible clinicians like Stanislaw Burzynski, M.D., Ph.D., indicted twice by the Clinton Administration's Department of Justice, and what some have described as the persecution of people like the Navarros, represent the work of officials appointed by a Democratic administration, with little apparent oversight or criticism from Democratic members of Congress. Meanwhile, in 2000, meaningful support for individuals like Burzynski, his patients, and the Navarros came not primarily from Democrats but from Republicans (including Alan Keyes, Ph.D., Rep. Dan Burton — and also President-elect George W. Bush when he signed Keyes' letter in support of the Navarros in February 2000). During the 1970s, I reported extensively on the bipartisan nature of the federal government's activities in what might be termed the “pre-CAM era” — for example, the research into diet and degenerative diseases championed by Sen. George McGovern (D-S.D.) and Sen. Bob Dole (R-IA). In 1992-93, I was appointed to two of the first program advisory panels of the NIH’s Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM). At the same time, President and Mrs. Clinton were proposing a massive national Health Care Reform Plan that enjoyed major Democratic support. Key elements of that plan, especially in terms of their potential impact on alt med practitioners and practices, were very alarming. I wrote about these issues in some detail at the time. While efforts during the same period on the part of Sens. Harkin and Thomas Daschle (D-IA) to support the OAM or the Access to Medical Treatment Act may be laudable, they have unfortunately paled, in my view, in comparison to the Democratic Party’s overarching agenda: a mandatory, centralized national health system that inevitably entails more and more consolidation and power for government and less freedom and autonomy for individuals — typified by the advocacy of universal coverage by [former] Vice President Al Gore and a majority of his Democratic supporters in the Congress during the 2000 election campaign. The fact that Gore supported moving incrementally to universal coverage, as opposed to all at once, is not reassuring. Meanwhile, the reality is that the government’s support of CAM in 2001 [when the budget was still controlled by a Democratic administration] — almost a decade after the creation of the OAM — accounted for less than one percent of the annual budget of HHS. Even more telling, the situation today that faces an innovative clinician/researcher or a person seeking medical freedom of choice is arguably little better or it might even be worse than it was before the creation of the OAM in 1992. Back then, had I and many of the other early advisors to the OAM foreseen this future, we would have been terribly disappointed at what lay ahead. I have no particular axe to grind politically, but my conclusions arrived at over the past several decades is that Republicans have generally adopted positions and acted more in sync with medical freedom, innovation, and autonomy. This analysis is based on first hand reporting about a wide variety of health and medical issues, at both the national and grassroots local levels. Finally, for many people today, a
number of critical issues including health care are really beyond traditional
political solutions. It is, after all, growing consumer interest and choice
and the free marketplace that are driving the growth of CAM and making
innovative health options possible and more accessible. Consumers are
becoming better informed and educated and are taking more responsibility for
their own health. Too often, in my experience, new government programs just
get in the way. At the moment, Republicans appear to be more willing than
Democrats to stay out of the way of the consumers and the providers of
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