(October 1, 2005) The medical-industrial complex in the United States, which spends $2 trillion annually or about fifteen percent of the U.S. Gross National Product, is the biggest business in the world - dwarfing military spending and every other endeavor in the commercial and public sectors. Medicine, Inc. now even includes most leaders, practitioners, and schools of "complementary alternative medicine" (CAM) as it moves quickly to expand its hegemony, in the form of total control, over everyone and every healing method in the U.S.
A number of alarming developments during the past year point to the expansion of organized medicine's power on numerous fronts, in sync with the Machiavellian designs of other elitists at the highest levels of public policy and driven by a self-serving agenda that includes, among other things, total centralized monitoring, databasing, and control.
Some of these developments have received limited attention in the media while others have scarcely been reported on at all. They include:
Ultimately, these and other recent developments have disempowering and severely disabling effects on both society and individuals as they work together in a synchronous manner to incrementally remove decision making and truly broad based medical choices from American citizens, instead transferring personal decision making over to higher powers like bureaucrats, licensed professionals, and self-appointed medical experts including supposed CAM authorities.
The propaganda that has resulted in most of the public accepting - and in many cases, actually welcoming - these changes is - in what may be the understatement of the decade - world class.
The spin in recent decades has been especially effective in convincing masses of people that there are crises in the American medical system that can be addressed only by putting more control of health care in the hands of the government. An attempt was tried by President Bill and First Lady Hillary Clinton in 1993 to nationalize health care but it was rejected by the public and the Congress. The Clintons' national health care reform legislation would have criminalized the practice of alternative medicine. Incrementally since 1994, however, many of the proposals in the Clintons' failed plan have been enacted into law at both federal and state levels and with the complicity of both political parties, always expanding government's role in people's medical treatment and the percentage of total American health care costs that are paid for by government (among other things, a prescription for uncontrolled inflation).
SB840 - Socialist Medicine Comes to California
Now, in the year 2005, in what may be the greatest single threat to the autonomy and freedom of millions of Americans to control their own health care decision making, California, the nation's largest and arguably most politically and culturally influential state, is moving ahead to create a state-run system of government health care, effectively ending and criminalizing the system of privately financed health care that has been in effect in the United States since the country was founded.
The vehicle for this change is SB840, the California Health Insurance Reliability Act (CHIRA), a bill in the California state legislature that would establish a single payer system, outlaw private insurance, and set up a huge bureaucracy to decide how medicine is practiced in the state right down to the level of individual doctors and all other licensed health care providers. The head of this unprecedented program would be a political position elected by the public to an eight year term. Strongly supported by the California Democrat party, SB840 has already passed the California Senate by a vote of 25-15 and is set to be voted on in the California Assembly after the November 2005 elections.
Health care has been moving towards a complete government takeover since the onset of Medicare and Medicaid at the federal level in the mid-1960s. SB840 would put all of health care for all Californians in a new state-controlled bureaucracy, with the costs for expanded care - including all medical treatments, prescription drugs, and even dental and vision care (eyeglasses) for everyone in the state including millions of illegal aliens - paid for by a new tax on all state residents.
Despite the enormous importance of this legislation in a state with 34 million residents that spends over $200 billion a year on health care, there has been hardly any national, and relatively little state, reporting by the news media on the subject. An exception is "A prescription for scarcity," an opinion column in the Orange County Register on September 11, 2005 by John R. Graham which critiqued SB840.
"Under SB840," Graham writes, "it will be illegal to buy health insurance that competes against that offered by the state agency. Nor will privately operated hospitals have the right to compete to serve patients. SB840 gives the state immediate control over hospitals' operating budgets and control over capital budgets in the near future. Hospitals will need to seek approval from the state for operating budgets every three years based on estimates of procedures it will do. SB840 envisions a state health insurance agency that will sweep out all Californians from other programs. Even Medicare patients will be pulled out of the federal program, which allows a role for private insurers, and into the new state monopoly. While a provider may theoretically opt out of the system, he cannot bill extra. Technically, the [Sheila] Kuehl [Democrat Senator from Santa Monica who authored SB840] system would not limit coverage of any particular condition or procedure. But total spending will be limited to a certain share of the state GDP. When that limit is approached or breached, it is inevitable that services will be cut back. If a doctor thinks that his services are worth more than the fee determined by the state, he cannot ask the patient to pay the difference. In any case, the ability of providers to opt out is limited by reality. The state will tax all Californians to fund the system, and outlaw private insurance."
Most people (that is, ordinary citizens - apart from the growing number of special interests that advocate statism, entitlements, bureaucracy, and/or socialism) know only what has been drummed into them for decades: that there are crises in modern medicine and that centralized, statist concepts like "single payer" supposedly offer solutions. Single payer, however, is a Utopian panacea that exists apart from and in contradiction to history and the facts.
In recent years, the idea that health care is a "right" that needs to be provided by the government has taken hold widely around the country and become, for many Americans, an article of faith. For example, in a public forum on health care held in Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts on August 18, 2005, according to an article in the Martha's Vineyard Times, everyone in the audience including the panelists raised his or her hand to indicate "yes" when asked "if health care is a basic human right."
Myth Vs. Reality
In a Policy Analysis published by the Cato Institute on January 27, 2005, John C. Goodman examines twelve myths of government controlled medicine. His deconstruction of one of the twelve myths is instructive.
"Myth No. 1: In Countries with National Health Insurance Systems, People Have a Right to Health Care
"In fact, no country with national health insurance has established a right to health care. Citizens of Canada, for example, have no right to any particular health care service. They have no right to an MRI scan. They have no right to heart surgery. They do not even have the right to a place in line. The 100th person waiting for heart surgery is not entitled to the 100th surgery. Other people can and do jump the queue. One could even argue that Canadians have fewer rights to health services than their pets. While Canadian pet owners can purchase an MRI scan for their cat or dog, purchasing a scan for themselves is illegal (although more and more human patients are finding legal loopholes). Countries with national health insurance limit health care spending by limiting supply. They do so primarily by imposing global budgets on hospitals and area health authorities and skimping on high-tech equipment. The result is rationing by waiting. In Britain, with a population of almost 60 million, government statistics show that more than 1 million are waiting to be admitted to hospitals at any one time. In Canada, with a population of more than 31 million, the independent Fraser Institute found that more than 876,584 are waiting for treatment of all types."
The proposed California single payer law relies on electronic data basing of everyone in the state. The word "electronic" is mentioned in the proposed law over three dozen times. For example, quoting from page 16 of the proposed law:
and from page 67:
California is not the only state to move in the direction of government-controlled and -financed medicine. In 2003, the legislature in the state of Maine, prompted by Democratic Gov. John Baldacci, passed into law the Dirigo Health Reform Act - which according to a FAQ at its official Web site "represents a broad strategy to improve Maine's health care system and includes three inter-related approaches: a new health plan (DirigoChoice) to achieve universal access to health coverage; new and improved systems to control health care costs; and, initiatives to ensure the highest quality of care statewide." The law promises to replace the current system of private health care with "a system-wide health reform law designed to afford access to coverage to every man, woman and child in Maine within five years."
Something called "Certificate of Need" is one small example of the control that Dirigo exerts on health care in Maine:
"When providers [that is, any health care entity within the state including a hospital, clinic, or private doctor's office] seek to invest in capital improvements costing over $2.4 million or in new technologies over $1.2 million, they must apply to the state for Certificate of Need approval. The State Health Plan and Maine Quality Forum will strengthen this process."
Rep. Ken Lindell, R-Frankfort, a first-term Republican legislator in Maine who is not enamored of Dirigo, wrote an article in the Bangor Daily News on September 22, 2005:
"While it is true that Dirigo is about trying to control costs, the problem is that it is using a flawed model to do so. Dirigo seeks to use central planning and spending controls to force down hospital costs and ration services. Meanwhile, it increases Medicaid coverage by making it easier to qualify for a program that provides totally free medical and dental care - no co-pays, no premiums. With Dirigo and Medicaid, the state has designed a dual, subsidized government-run health insurance system to compete for business with the private health insurance market. It is a socialist's dream modeled after the Canadian single-payer system.
"The Canadian model may be cheaper than ours, but only because it relies on rationing to contain costs. It fails miserably in delivering quality care when it's critically needed. The joke in Canada is that there is a 12-month waiting list for maternity wards.
"There is no way to supply all medical services to everybody - the cost would be astronomical. What do you do for a 6-year-old Montreal girl with a rare form of leukemia who can be cured only in a Wisconsin hospital at a cost of $350,000? That's a real case. Paradoxically for a socialized health system, the family had to appeal to public charity, an increasingly common occurrence in Canada. In the first two months, the family received more than $100,000, including a single anonymous donation of $40,000."
CAM Proponents Support Statist, Socialist, and Even Communist Medicine
Naturopathic doctors are licensed in thirteen states now, including (since 2004) in California. Naturopaths, or N.D.s, like to say that they are in the vanguard of natural healing. In recent years, leaders of U.S. and Canadian naturopathic medicine, however, have taken positions which make one wonder. In response to my questions about the direction of naturopathy, a veteran practitioner who is licensed in California, Robert Broadwell, N.D., commented in 2003: "Someone was asking me the other day what we could do to keep naturopathy alive. And I said, from my own perspective, you're talking about something that's already dead."
In recent years, as Broadwell implied by his comments, leading naturopaths have advocated a variety of anti-alt med views including taxing the nutritional supplement industry to give more regulatory power to the FDA and the FTC, publishing scientific journal articles claiming that health food stores are a threat to public health, championing a variety of conventional allopathic treatments including radiation and chemotherapy to treat cancer, and expanding licensed naturopaths' scope of practice to allow them to prescribe pharmaceutical drugs to their patients.
It may not be all that surprising, then, that the California Naturopathic Doctors Association or CNDA (formerly the CANP), which represents licensed N.D.s in the state, announces support for SB840 at its Web site and offers a downloadable form letter which California residents are encouraged to use to demand that their representatives in the legislature support SB840.
As national radio talk show host Rollye James commented recently during a discussion on the air, socialism runs deep among many proponents of CAM - many of whom have left wing backgrounds and beliefs. (James, a supporter of alternative medicine, appears to be the only figure in the national electronic media to have discussed SB840 and some of its implications.) A significant irony is that much of alternative medicine (in days past when it was truly alternative) was inspired by core beliefs of personal responsibility, self reliance, independence from big institutions, and small scale, local, grassroots solutions - all of them antithetical to state-controlled health care.
In recent years, however, with the mainstreaming of CAM, things have surely changed.
An indication of the statist-socialist impulse on the part of many individuals in CAM leadership positions today is apparent in a document on the Web site of the National Foundation for Alternative Medicine (NFAM), a prestigious and influential group founded by former Congressman Berkley Bedell (D-IA). Bedell takes much of the credit for the creation of the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine/National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
After a "field investigation" in Cuba in 2004 by one of its advisors, Cuban-born Beatriz Miyar, M.D., Bedell's NFAM rhapsodizes about Cuba as "a model for alternative medicine." The NFAM report asserts: "Today, Cuba's healthcare system is a model of integrative medicine. . .A key to Cuba's successful healthcare system is its policy, which for the past 45 years has been based on preventive medicine, health promotion, and the constitutional right to free access to healthcare. . .Dr. Miyar's investigation of the Cuban healthcare model confirms NFAM's vision of alternative medicine as a legitimately recognized and scientifically researched practice."
The NFAM is overlooking the fact that Cuba remains a thoroughly undemocratic communist state ruled by an unelected dictator, Fidel Castro, who summarily imprisons, tortures, and murders political prisoners (in addition to restricting the basic freedom of Cuban citizens on every level). A favorite means of torture and killing of political prisoners in Cuba, as chillingly reported in the 2005 PBS American Experience documentary Fidel Castro, is to withhold food and water from prisoners in their hellhole cells until they die painful, horrible deaths (hastened by the failure of critical organs like the kidneys) after suffering for approximately fifty days. One is left to wonder if, for certain U.S. proponents of CAM, such appalling treatment and executions might be seen as somehow "holistic" since they could be construed as relying on "natural" methods - death by hunger and thirst rather than by external means like a lethal injection, electrocution, or a firing squad.
In Part Two of this analysis, New York City clinician and researcher Nicholas Gonzalez, M.D. will discuss the history and modern ramifications of socialized medicine, including proposals like the one in California modeled after the Canadian single payer system, from the perspective of a clinical practitioner of innovative, nutritional medicine. A preview of his comments:
"Medical science always thrives when there's freedom to think independently. Socialized medicine doesn't allow that because it requires physicians to practice according to pre-set standards. That's the way the Canadian system is. You can't deviate from those standards at all. The trouble is that medicine is not a fixed science. It requires creativity, originality in thinking in new ways. Socialized medicine doesn't allow that. If socialized medicine worked, they would have had to build a Berlin Wall to keep people out. Instead, they had to build the Berlin Wall to keep people in because they were trying to escape socialism and socialized medicine."