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HEALTH FREEDOM VS. HEALTH FASCISM |
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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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Thursday, 28 May 2009 |
In April of 1994, in
response to Bill & Hillary Clinton's attempt to seize control of the entire
health care system of the United
States, I wrote a report to Congress
under the auspices of the Freedom Research Foundation entitled "Health Freedom
vs. Health Fascism."
It outlined ten specific means by which health care can be
better provided to more Americans at greatly reduced cost.
Fifteen years later, none of these means have been
implemented, we still have the same "health crisis," and we have another Dem
president determined to use this "crisis" to further his fascist agenda.
So here are the report's ten means to achieve health freedom
rather than health fascism. This is
verbatim from 15 years ago. Any updates
are in brackets.
***
Health
Fascism
The immediate, fundamental point to grasp about the "health
care crisis" in America today
is that it hasn't got anything to do with health care. There is a big difference between an excuse
and a purpose. The issue of health care is
the excuse for the crisis. The purpose,
like that of its predecessors - the Poverty Crisis, the Drug Crisis, the Energy
Crisis, the Environmental Crisis [most especially today, "global warming"] - is
to be a rationale for the expansion of
governmental power.
For all of these alleged crises, their promoters offered one
and only one type of solution: vast
government programs at taxpayers' expense.
None ever offered free market solutions, or were used to increase
individual freedom, rather than diminish it.
It is necessary, however, to understand that the Clinton
[now Obama] Health Care Plan, like its predecessor crisis-solutions, is not
socialist. It is often denounced as such
by its critics, and they are wrong. It is fascist.
Socialism is government seizure of ownership of private businesses, i.e., nationalization. Fascism is
government seizure of control of
private property, i.e., thoroughgoing bureaucratic regulation of business which
retains only a Potemkin-like façade of private ownership. Fascism is the
authoritarian imposition of raw, naked government power - guns and prisons - to
control people's economic lives.
The Clinton [Obama] plan does not nationalize the U.S. health
care system, and make all doctors, nurses, and medical technicians government
employees. It simply puts a gun in their
faces and orders them to do as they are told or they face fines and/or
imprisonment. This is fascism.
Health
Freedom
But it is not enough to denounce Health Fascism, and it is
counter-productive in the extreme to pander to certain voters' desire for
another free lunch (an "entitlement" to "universal coverage") by offering them
a watered-down, me-too Casper Milquetoast version of the same thing.
Thus the second stage in an effective offensive against ClintonCare
[ObamaCare] is to proudly offer a genuinely free market alternative: Health
Freedom.
The
basic propositions of the Health Freedom proposal are:
1.
Health Care is so incredibly expensive in America because of government intervention into
the medical marketplace.
2.
Health care costs can only be radically reduced by an equally radical reduction
of government regulations and subsidies.
3. Both
the availability and the quality of health care will be substantially increased
by such a reduction of government intervention.
Ten
Specific Means By Which Health Freedom Can Be Achieved
One:
Open Enrollments in Medical Schools.
The American Medical Association (AMA) colludes with State
Medical Boards throughout the 50 states to severely limit the number of medical
and nursing schools, class size, number of teachers, and number of admitted
students.
Each year, tens of thousands of qualified students are
unable to get into medical or nursing school because of these artificial
restrictions. There are an estimated 10
to 20 qualified applicants for every vacancy available in U.S.
medical schools. Despite a chronic shortage of nurses, most nursing schools
have a two to three year waiting period for admittance [in 2009 as in 1994].
An instructive question to ask in this regard is: Why is there no shortage of
chiropractors? The answer is that
chiropractors do not have a medieval guild which has the political power to
restrict entry into their profession.
Chiropractor colleges accept virtually all qualified applicants. Those
who can't complete the curriculum or pass the licensing exams are weeded
out. The number of chiropractors is
controlled by the market - not by a medieval guild like the AMA.
Health
freedom legislation would terminate the AMA's monopoly over the medical
profession, allow open enrollment at current medical schools, and the
construction of as many new medical schools as the market will bear.
Licensing and testing must, of course, remain strict and
reliable. But as the number of
physicians and nurses rises, competition between them for patients will
concomitantly increase, and thus their fees and salaries will go down with the
law of supply and demand.
This also applies to the cost of a medical education in the
first place: it will decrease as the number
of students and new schools increases.
Further,
health freedom legislation would end the AMA's guildification of medical
practices.
Most things done by doctors can be done by physicians'
assistants, most things done by them can in turn be done by registered nurses,
and them in turn by nurse practitioners.
You don't need a Ferrari racing mechanic to fix a Toyota. You need free market medicine with several
layers of medical practitioners.
Two:
Reduce Hospital Administrative Costs
For an average stay in a hospital, fifty to seventy-five
percent of the charges are due to administrative costs.
As an example, a routine appendectomy costs $12,000 or more
in most U.S.
hospitals today. A cost breakdown would
be: surgeon, $600; anesthesiologist, $500; hospital fess for surgical suite,
equipment, and techs, $600; five days' recovery in semi-private room @ $200
night (the cost of a good hotel room), $1,000; nursing services @ $200 day,
$1,000; food and normal medication,
$300. That's $4,000. Where does the remaining $8,000 (or more)
go? Up in administrative smoke. [Triple all these costs for 2009.]
The primary cause of exorbitant administrative hospital
costs is the requirements of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health
Care Organizations (JCOAHCO), a collusion of bureaucratic health care
organizations and government regulators.
JCOAHCO imposes such a morass of regulations that hospital
administrators must focus their efforts on "compliance" with JCOAHCO
requirements, rather than on the welfare of their patients.
Further, not every patient needs to stay in a tertiary-care
hi-tech hospital, replete with MRI and CT scanners, with a capability for
coronary by-pass and heart transplant surgery.
Some patients merely need a few days of IV antibiotics and rehydration,
along with TLC observation. This could
be provided by a small low-tech hospital or overnight clinic.
But the JCOAHCO requirements, which set the standards of
hospital compliance, do not differentiate between large and small
hospitals. All must meet the same
excessive criteria necessitating huge administrative costs, making low-tech
hospitals economically impossible.
Health
Freedom legislation would eliminate "one-size-fits-all" JCOAHCO hospital
compliance standards, allowing the operation of "low-tech" small hospitals with
minimal administrative overhead.
[An example from 2009:
computer system/recording needs are not the same for small vs. large
hospitals, yet ObamaCare will force all, big or small, to buy big expensive
systems.]
Three:
Eliminate State Mandates and Regulatory Barriers on Health Insurance
One primary reason for the high cost of health insurance
today is the monumental number of required benefits health insurance policies
must provide imposed by state regulators.
Today there are over one thousand
mandates on everything from hairpieces to marriage counseling. As a result, insurers are legally prohibited
from supplying low-cost basic health insurance.
Health
Freedom Legislation would allow insurers to offer low-cost, basic health
insurance policies with no state mandated benefits whatever.
Such legislation, according to the National Center for
Policy Analysis, would reduce health insurance policy cost by twenty percent or
more.
Another major cause of high health insurance costs is the
regulatory barriers inhibiting small businesses from forming risk pools. Two-thirds of all employed but uninsured
workers are either self-employed or work for firms with fewer than 100
employees, and cannot afford individual or small group policies.
Health
Freedom Legislation would eliminate all regulatory barriers such as business
commonality and geographic proximity requirements to small businesses from
freely combining into common insurance risk pools. It would further allow non-business organizations
- churches, unions, or any group of people formed for whatever reason - to form
similar pools for their members.
Such "small market" reform would make health insurance
dramatically more affordable to millions of Americans. Unfortunately, such reform will be bitterly
opposed by the large major insurance companies, because it would result in
competition from deregulated small insurance companies.
Four:
Give Health Care Providers A Tax Credit For Charity Work
One of the major sources of the "health care crisis"
necessitating the Clinton [Obama] plan, its advocates say, is the tens of
millions of uninsured Americans who cannot afford medical care. They are regarded by the medical industry as
"non-payers" to be "turfed" to the county hospital and receive minimal
treatment.
The quality of their medical care would be very different if
they were looked upon not as a liability, but as a tax credit.
Health
Freedom legislation would allow health care providers - physicians, nurses,
medical technicians, pharmacies, and hospitals - to deduct from their personal
or corporate income taxes an appreciable amount of the income they would have
derived if their charity patients paid the normal fees.
Such legislation would result in physicians, hospitals, and
other health care providers fighting among
themselves to provide free (to charity patients), tax deductible (to them)
health care.
Such an
incentive to provide free care would dramatically reduce, perhaps even
eliminate, Medicaid and Medicare costs - more than compensating
for loss of income tax revenues. The
ultimate savings to the taxpayers would be astronomical.
Five: Restore the 100% Deductibility of Health Care
Expenses
Throughout most of this century, individuals were not taxed
on the money they spent on health care.
When Congress eliminated the tax deductibility of most medical expenses,
it made medical care and health insurance prohibitively expensive for
individuals to pay for on their own.
As a result, employer-provided health care and insurance -
the costs of which corporations can deduct and does not count as income to the
employee - is the only option for workers.
For them, their choice is restricted to whatever plan(s) the employer
offers, and they lose their coverage once they quit or are fired. For those millions of workers who can't get
employer-provided insurance, they simply must do without.
The solution is 100% deducibility for medical expenses. One Congressman consulted for this report
estimates that "this one simple reform
will enable as many as 15 million Americans who cannot now afford it to gain
access to healthcare and health insurance."
This measure would greatly expand the health insurance risk
pool, enabling insurers to offer more options and coverages while reducing
premiums. Further, the Congressman
observes, it would "dramatically increase marketplace competition for
healthcare and health insurance, as perhaps 100 million more people enter the
market to shop for the best among all available services and insurance plans."
Health Freedom legislation would broaden the category of
deductible medical expenses to include expenses for alternative and preventive
health care. Traditional establishment
medicine is limited primarily to medication, surgery, and medical devices. It should more properly be called "disease
care." Genuine health care would have its primary focus on prevention of
illness and health maintenance, and subsequent focus upon intervention to
restore health.
Alternative therapies as acupuncture, nutritional and herbal
supplementation, EDTA chelation, and applied kinesiology have this primary
focus. Surely, the absolute best way to
reduce health care costs is for people not to get sick in the first place.
Health
Freedom legislation would grant 100% tax deductibility to individual ta payers
for all healthcare expenses, including health insurance, and medical,
pharmaceutical, and alternative/preventative expenses. It would further encourage insurers to
include alternative/preventative therapies in their coverage.
Health
Freedom Legislation would also create tax-exempt Medical Savings Accounts
(MSAs, or Medical IRAs), allowing individuals to set aside tax-free up to
$3,000 per year for medical expenses.
In
addition, Health Freedom Legislation would make health insurance portable,
through minor changes in existing COBRA legislation, by allowing workers
between jobs to pay (tax-deductible) premiums directly to the insurer.
Many employees feel trapped in their jobs today because they
cannot afford to lose their employer-provided medical coverage. These proposals would liberate them to seek
their own coverage, give them the opinion of taking their coverage with them
after they leave their job, and provide them worth tax incentives for life-long
savings for their health care needs.
Six:
Reduce Malpractice Insurance Costs
Malpractice insurance costs are a major source of higher
health care expenses. The insurance premiums have skyrocketed due to
multi-million dollar awards made for "pain and suffering," which are orders of
magnitude beyond the plaintiff's medical expenses.
Health
Freedom legislation would eliminate "pain and suffering" malpractice
settlements; limit malpractice settlements to all costs of the patient's
malpractice-related medical bills; and limit payment to patient attorneys to
normal fees, prohibiting attorney commissions of a substantial percentage of
the total settlement.
This legislation would cause a drastic reduction of
malpractice premiums, enabling doctors and other health care providers to lower
fees. (Remember that the increase in
competition via proposal #1 above gives the incentive to do so.)
In addition, physicians
should be encouraged to forego buying malpractice insurance at all, supplanting
it with: legally-binding agreements with their patients to purchase their own
malpractice insurance (as an airline passenger; prior to a flight, may
purchase flight insurance). If the
physician performed malpractice, the patient's own insurance company would pay
him.
Seven: Repeal the Kefauver Amendment
Prior to 1962, for a pharmaceutical company to gain FDA
approval for a new drug, it had to prove that the drug was safe. But in the wake of the Thalidomide scare, the
Kefauver Amendment was passed, requiring that a new drug, to gain FDA approval,
must be proven not only safe but effective in curing or ameliorating a specific
disease.
Proving a drug's safety is not that difficult or
costly. It is proving its effectivity
that is primarily responsible for the current situation: it now
costs an average of over $200 million[in 2009 over $800 million], takes up to
twelve years and requires an average of 40,000 pages of documentation to get
one new drug approved by the FDA.
The primarily public concern should, appropriately, be with
the safety of given medication. But the individual
patient, in consultation with his doctor or health professional, should be the
judge of whether the medication is working out or not.
Health
Freedom legislation would repeal the Kefauver Amendment, making proof of a
drug's safety only requirement for FDA approval.
No
legislative act could more contribute to reducing pharmaceutical costs than
this.
Further, the Kefauver Amendment is the primary bottleneck in
the flow of medicinal progress. It creates an enormous logjam delaying for
years getting new drugs on the market which could have been saying countless
lives during those years. It creates
such impossible expenses and regulatory disincentives that many promising drugs
are never developed at all.
Thus,
no single legislative act could save more lives and contribute more to the
health of Americans that the repeal of the Kefauver Amendment.
Eight:
Allow Truthful Health Claims for Nutritional Supplements
If there is one legislative act that could compete with the
repeal of the Kefauver Amendment in saving lives and reducing health care
costs, it is this.
The evidence that such nutrients as Vitamin C, Vitamin E,
and selenium can radically reduce the incidence of heart disease and cancer -
the two diseases which cause more deaths and are responsible for more health
care spending than anything else - is simply overwhelming.
Yet the FDA has - let it be stated candidly - a perverse
bias against nutritional supplements. The "knife-and-fork" mythology
prevails: that "you can get all the
nutrients you need from a well-balanced diet."
Getting several grams of Vitamin C daily (the optimal amount for
reducing risk of heart disease and cancer) from oranges would require eating
dozens and dozens of oranges - and be far
more expensive than taking one or two capsules.
The FDA enforces this bias by threatening a nutrient
manufacturer who supplies information about the health value of his products
with prosecution if he does so without FDA's express approval. No matter how truthful and supported by
scientific evidence are the health claims, the FDA will attempt to fine or
imprison the manufacturer for making an "unapproved health claim."
This policy is such an egregiously clear violation of the
First Amendment protection of free speech it is now being challenged in court. Judicial procedures, however, can be lengthy,
and while this is being adjudicated people continue to die.
Current estimates are that widespread dissemination through
nutritional advertising of how 400 i.u. of E and 2,000 mgs. of C per day via
supplements can reduce one's chances of heart disease or cancer by over 40%
would save hundreds of thousands of lives and save billions of dollars in
health care costs each year.
This is just one example with two nutrients. The savings in lives and money applied to all
nutrients is far greater.
Health
Freedom legislation would, therefore, prohibit the FDA from prosecuting any
nutritional or medicinal manufacturer or supplier for making an "unapproved
health claim" if that claim is truthful and non-misleading.
[Update: in January
1999, the Ninth Circuit Federal Court in Pearson v. Shalala determined
that FDA regulations regarding unapproved health claims for certain nutrients was
a violation of the First Amendment.
The FDA's implementation of the ruling has been slow and
begrudging ever since. Its latest attack
on the nutrition industry is to require the same "good manufacturing practices"
(GMP) requirements as for pharmaceutical companies. The purpose is to make it too expensive to
produce supplements. The solution is to replace GMPs entirely
with purity standards. All that
should matter is the purity of the supplement or pharmaceutical, however that
purity is achieved.]
Nine: Remove Government Restrictions Regarding the
Importation of Foreign Drugs.
While not widely known, it is currently legal for an
individual to import a "reasonable" amount (e.g., a three-month supply) of a
medication for personal use. Yet it
remains illegal to promote or profit from such importation.
Most Americans are consequently unaware of their drug
importation rights and do not know how to obtain medication overseas. Further, those who do are frequently harassed
by the Postal service, DEA, FDA, and Customs.
Health
Freedom legislation would allow the promotion of and profit from importation of
foreign pharmaceuticals. It is important
to note that most medications sold in the U.S. are sold overseas for pennies on the
dollar over the U.S. price.
These medications are manufactured by foreign divisions of the same
companies that make them here in the U.S.
Quite often, in fact, many medications sold in the U.S. are
actually relabled foreign-manufactured drugs.
Ten:
Allow the Purchase of Non-Controlled Medications Without Prescriptions
An American visiting a pharmacy overseas, say in Europe, for
the first time, is astounded to discover that the medications he needs cost a
fraction of their U.S. cost -
and that he can purchase them over the counter without a prescription. Medications requiring a doctor's prescription
is the exception, not the rule, in most countries in the world.
The incidence of adverse drug reactions is no higher in
these countries than in the U.S. Nor is medication abuse. What is different is that in America, you
must schedule an appointment with a doctor, take the time to see him, pay him
$40 to $75 for an office visit, so that you can get a prescription.
And because you can only get the medication needed by
prescription, the pharmaceutical company may charge much more money for
it. Over-the-counter medications usually
cost much less than prescription medications.
Health
Freedom legislation would allow all non-controlled, non-addictive medications to be purchased over the counter without a
prescription.
Dramatically reducing unnecessary doctor visits, and
reducing prescriptions prices to over-the-counter price, would greatly
contribute to lowering health care costs.
Conclusion
Government programs and regulations are not the solution to
health care problems. They are the cause
of the problems in the first place.
What must be avoided absolutely is capitulation to the
demand for free lunch entitlements such as "universal coverage." Such capitulation to fascist intrusion will
guarantee the destruction of the health insurance industry and pave the way for
government seizure of the entire U.S. health
care system.
Only by offering a genuine alternative to the Clinton plan
can the threat it poses to America's
health care system be removed.
Only be offering genuine free market solutions can America's
health care system be improved and be made affordable.
Only by offering the American people a clear choice between
Health Freedom and Health Fascism can the Clinton [Obama] Health Care Plan be
defeated.
America's
health - and freedom - hangs in the balance.
[It still does, even more now than in 1994.]
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