|
America’s Socialized Health Care’
[27/1/2005]
“Communism is dead” is the modern
belief of the minds fed by Fabian/Socialist controlled media. For the
non-initiated, Communism and Socialism [Fabianism] are twin-sisters of
the same mother, the French Revolution.
The
difference between the two is that the former endorses bloodshed through
perpetual revolution [Trotskyism], whereas the latter adopted
“gradualism”
as means of slow ‘adjustment’ in order for society to change from a
Christian to a totally secular one, under the One World Government.
Naturally, this type of ‘adjustment’ to be successful within the society
requires that “gradualism” be implemented in all sectors and at all
levels of people’s lives - such as in education, social, economical and
political.
However, the focus of the following writing is given in particular on
the ‘America’s Socialized Health Care’,
which could well be applied to Australia, or to any other country in our
western world.
###########
America’s Socialized Health Care
by Lawrence Wilson, M.D.
January 25, 2005
[The
URL of this article is: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/wilson-l1.html]
Health-care systems in most developed nations are in financial trouble.
Health benefits are being cut back because of exploding costs.
Degenerative illnesses such as diabetes and cancer are at epidemic
levels in spite of new drugs and treatments. While doctors, politicians,
and insurers blame each other, they rarely mention the real problem.
Skyrocketing costs are due to the structure of health care in
all these nations. All are mainly socialized, including America’s. This
means they operate as top-down bureaucracies, out of touch with people’s
real needs. Almost no market forces are allowed to operate for rational
decision-making and cost control.
The results are predictable. In 2002, America spent $1.6
trillion on health care, up 9.3 percent from 2001. Drug costs increased
15.3 percent while hospital costs increased 9.5 percent. Out-of-pocket
costs, the most market-related, declined.
A graph plotting the percentage of government payment for
health care with the total cost of health care would turn almost
vertical after the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1967.
America really has three health-care sectors. The socialized
part or government sector comprises about 65–70 percent and includes
Medicare, Medicaid, and the Indian Health Service. It also includes the
Department of Veteran Affairs, the Public Health Service, programs such
as KidCare, and the bulk of medical research. The latter includes the
National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute, National Heart
Institute, and about 30 other government institutes. The “donors” for
research in these institutes have little say over what or how wisely
their health-research dollars are spent.
All the above are funded from taxes confiscated from
the people at the point of a gun, making this a less-than-compassionate
system. All are insulated from the health-care marketplace and thus from
rational decision-making. All are run as huge bureaucracies, with their
inherent problems of fraud and high administrative overhead. Medicare
rules alone are 133,000 pages in length. This makes the 10,000-page
income-tax code look like a model of simplicity.
The war on cancer
An example of the dismal failure of the government sector in
America is the “war on cancer,” which is administered by the National
Cancer Institute. It has cost taxpayers some $30 billion over a 35-year
period. After adjusting for a longer life span, between 1950 and 1989
the incidence of cancer rose by about 44 percent. Breast cancer and
colon cancer in men have risen about 50 percent, while some others have
risen 100 percent. A recent article in the Journal of the AMA was
entitled “Are Increasing Five-Year Survival Rates Evidence of Success
against Cancer?” The answer was “No.”
The news mostly announces new cures and new drugs, but
nothing about the waste of money in federal cancer research. A recent
news broadcast said some cancer had declined “due to lifestyle changes.”
For this the taxpayers paid $30 billion. However, this waste is
predictable because national research laboratories are not primarily
interested in a cancer cure, no matter what they claim. They are
interested foremost in keeping their jobs and second in getting more
money next year from Congress. This is the nature of all bureaucracies.
The regulated sector
The so-called private sector of American health care is better termed
the regulated sector. It includes insurance companies, HMOs, and
licensed pharmacists and physicians. To receive any government
reimbursement they must “play by the rules” imposed by the socialized
sector. As a result, this sector is mainly an extension of the
socialized sector.
Insurance companies are burdened with a thousand state and
federal mandates regarding what services they must supply. HMOs are also
heavily regulated and are in fact creations of the U.S. Congress by
virtue of the HMO Act of 1973.
Medical schools also receive government subsidies and grants.
This means that what is taught is influenced if not dictated by these
funding sources. Physicians are regulated by state licensing boards and,
of course, must abide by Medicare and HMO regulations if they choose to
work in those settings. To call any of these aspects of the health-care
system “private” is a joke.
The free-market sector
Perhaps 2 percent of the health-care system is private or free-market.
It is composed of the unregulated, non-mainstream holistic and
alternative healing schools and practitioners. People pay cash for their
services and products. Practitioners and suppliers must respond to
people’s needs to stay in business.
I have a medical degree but have worked as an unlicensed
nutrition consultant (not a dietitian) for 23 years. My attention is
focused 100 percent on what clients need, not on getting grants or
subsidies, receiving insurance reimbursement, or paying lobbyists to
plead my case in Washington. In the free-market sector, costs for
vitamins, for example, have decreased.
Sad to say, many alternative practitioners who are
shut out of mainstream medicine have lobbied for licenses. There is no
real need except they can charge more, keep out the competition, and
perhaps force insurers or the government to reimburse their services.
These include chiropractors, some naturopaths, acupuncturists, and
physical therapists.
The medical cartel
Another factor driving up costs and contributing to poor quality care is
the medical cartel. A cartel exists when one group works together to set
prices and control all steps in the production and distribution of a
commodity or service. Through licensing and other laws enacted in the
early part of the 20th century, one group, the American Medical
Association, controls how many medical schools exist, how many students
enroll, what is taught in the schools, the availability of hospital
residencies, and, indirectly through licensing laws, who will get jobs
in medicine. It would be difficult to find an industry in America that
is more tightly controlled by one group or union.
Alternative therapies and practitioners have been ruthlessly
suppressed, their proponents often being run out of the country.
Thousands of Americans flee each year to Mexico and Europe to obtain
products and therapies banned in the United States but in use for as
many as 50 years elsewhere.
The kingpin of the cartel is the restrictive state-medical
licensing laws, passed in the early part of the 20th century.
Previously, there were no licenses and the health-care system worked
well. However, one group of physicians, the allopaths or drug doctors,
felt they were not making enough money. The AMA, formed in 1847, was
quite candid about its intentions. It sought vigorously to reduce the
supply of doctors by eliminating the competition and controlling the
number of medical graduates. With backing from the Carnegie Foundation
and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the AMA was quite
successful. Because of its efforts, the number of healing schools fell
from 140 in 1900 to 77 in 1940.
The purpose of a cartel is to improve the income of its
members. From this perspective, American health care is a resounding
success. John C. Goodman and Gerald L. Musgrave, in their excellent book
Patient Power, explain that “the AMA endorsed the idea of a medical
cartel and made participation in it ethically mandatory.”
In his book Price Discrimination in Medicine, Reuben Kessel
states,
The
delegation by the state legislatures to the AMA of the power to regulate
the medical industry in the public interest is on a par with giving the
American Iron and Steel Institute the power to determine the output of
steel.
The FDA
The large drug companies became part of the medical cartel through their
agent, the federal Food and Drug Administration. Anyone who believes the
FDA is an impartial or even helpful agency needs to read The History of
a Crime; How Could It Happen, by Harvey Wiley, M.D., the first director
of the FDA. In the book, he meticulously details how the FDA became
infiltrated by food and drug companies and how its mission became
completely subverted. As a physician, I believe no other domestic agency
has caused more deaths than the FDA.
Physicians are the legal drug pushers in our society. Those
who step out of line and prefer to prescribe vitamins, herbs, or
non-patentable drugs often lose their licenses, though they do no harm.
Only one state, Arizona, has a second medical homeopathic board that
allows medical doctors to escape from under the thumb of the state board
of medical examiners and practice as they see fit. In the past two
years, a few states enacted laws to protect physicians from losing their
licenses just because they use methods unapproved by their medical
board.
Through physician licensing and hundreds of other rules, only
those who practice drug medicine hold licenses, work in hospitals and
HMOs, and direct government research institutes. This effectively blocks
change. Most alternative-health practitioners who practice a far less
expensive type of healing are shut out of the mainstream.
Special-interest laboratory laws also abound. In
America one cannot walk into a laboratory and request a cholesterol
test. One must first go to a doctor to obtain permission. Results may
not be sent to the patient, only back to the doctor. This means another
doctor visit. Thanks to these rules, a $10 test may cost $100 or more.
The extra cost discourages people from caring for their health. Instead,
they wait until a crisis occurs, which further raises the cost of health
care. In Mexico, by contrast, one just walks into a laboratory, orders
the test, and receives the results.
Deregulating health care
Whenever an industry becomes mired in special-interest rules,
deregulation is the answer. It is a healing process that many industries
periodically need. America “deregulated” trucking, airlines, the phone
system, and power generation. In every case, dire predictions of chaos
did not come true and the public benefited greatly. Power deregulation
has also been very successful. What failed in California was not
deregulation but simply another form of regulation.
Private regulation of health care is not new. For her first
120 years, America had a true free-market health-care system free of
government interference. Herbalists, hydrotherapists, nature-cure
practitioners, allopaths or drug doctors, homeopaths, Native American
healers, religious healers, osteopaths, and others offered services and
competed with one another. Each had its own schools, clinics, and
hospitals. I was born in a formerly homeopathic hospital in New York
City. There were few licensing laws, so no group had a legal advantage.
Whoever helped people the most prospered. Competition between many kinds
of practitioners kept prices low – people paid for exactly what they
wanted. Our health statistics ranked first in the world. Today America’s
worldwide rank in many health-care areas ranges from 19 to 22.
Deregulation in health care would have to be a
two-part affair of (1) eliminating government regulation and government
involvement; and (2) eliminating the control of the medical cartel.
Obviously, this would not be easy to accomplish because (1) the
welfare-state concept, which Americans embraced in the 20th century,
entails a government “safety net”; and (2) the medical cartel has been
in charge for more than 100 years and most people are unaware of the way
it controls the system.
Personal responsibility
The biggest problem with the drug-medicine cartel is that drugs and
surgery do not prevent disease, do not address deep causes of disease,
and do not make people healthy. They mainly suppress symptoms. According
to the American Public Health Association, 48 percent of the
determinants of disease are now due to “behavioral lifestyle,” 25
percent are due to genetic constitution, 16 percent to the environment,
and only 11 percent are due to lack of access to medical care. Often
drugs make people sicker, which only adds to the cost. Malpractice
lawsuits due to harm from the system add even more cost.
According to a recent article in the Journal of the AMA,
modern medicine is the fourth leading cause of death in America, just
behind cancer, heart disease, and strokes. This study only included
deaths that occurred in hospitals. The Nutrition Institute of America
just completed the first broad survey of the side effects of drug
medicine.
It found that adverse drug effects and medical errors account
for some 669,000 deaths, making drug medicine the leading cause of death
in America. (See www.nutritioninstituteofamerica.org.) Instead of giving
poisons, other healing systems balance body chemistry, correct spinal
abnormalities, detoxify the body, or alter subtle electrical or
vibrational imbalances in the body.
A new paradigm
An entirely different model of health care is possible. Instead of
focusing on diagnosis and treatment of disease entities, it focuses on
supplying missing factors of health. The new model is a true science of
preventive medicine. There is no reason to wait to supply the factors of
health. Prevention is hundreds of times less expensive than treating a
condition when it has fully developed.
The new model uses more-sensitive assessment methods that
detect imbalances long before a disease occurs. Whether by checking
one’s spine, hair tissue mineral analysis, or acupuncture pulses, small
problems can be detected and corrected before they become serious ones.
It is the only way to control health-care costs and really improve
people’s health.
The new model stresses participation and presumes the patient
is responsible for his health. Changes in diet and lifestyle can only be
recommended. Self-discipline and a desire to be well are required. An
adult-adult or client-consultant relationship with the doctor replaces
the parent-child relationship that currently exists between doctors and
adults. Patients need to ask a lot of questions. Taking responsibility
is healing in itself. It is empowering, replacing the futile and
energy-wasting attitudes of fear, denial, and self-pity. Natural
products can help restore balance and remove toxins from the body. Drugs
and surgery would still be used but only as a last resort, as they are
far more costly and dangerous.
The new model redefines health. It is not just an
absence of cancer or heart disease. It is the state of relating
harmoniously with one’s physical, emotional, intellectual, and social
environment. Health is never a commodity that can be bought and sold,
doled out to the poor or guaranteed by a government agency. All such
thinking is incorrect. Health is an outcome of understanding one’s self
and perfecting one’s relationship with one’s surroundings.
Adopting the new model
The health-care cost crisis offers an opportunity to view health care
like any other industry. There is no market failure. How can there be
market failure when there is almost no health-care market in the sense
of free agents who willingly buy and sell on the basis of free access to
information?
Deregulating health care would have to be part of dismantling
the welfare state, as the two are closely related. Medical licenses are
not only the basis for the cartel’s control. They are meal tickets for
any doctor who wants to participate in the welfare state.
Replacing licensing with private certification would break
the power of the cartel and help restore a free market. No physician
would be prosecuted and jailed for doing his best. Many people,
brainwashed by 100 years of life under the cartel, would object, as they
have objected to all the other deregulation efforts. But the American
people would be much better off.
Instead of the FDA, several competing consumer rating groups
would do far more to protect the American people than the current
system. Lest this seem impossible, it was the system used successfully
in America for more than 120 years. Several organizations tested new
medicines and medical devices and decided which merited their seal of
approval.
Though we may not wish to admit it, American health care is
only slightly less socialized than the single-payer systems of Europe
and Canada. No wonder costs are out of control. Deregulating health care
would benefit all Americans and restore a crippled system to sanity.
Health care does not have to be costly or dangerous.
January 25, 2005
Lawrence Wilson is a physician in Arizona. This article was
originally published in the September 2004 edition of Freedom Daily.
Copyright 2005 The Future of Freedom Foundation
Back to LewRockwell.com Home Page
[URL: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/wilson-l1.html]
|
