25 December 2009By Ellen Hodgson Brown
Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of
Independence, is quoted as warning two centuries ago:
“Unless
we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time
will come when medicine will organize into an
underground dictatorship. . . . The Constitution of
this republic should make special privilege for
medical freedom as well as religious freedom."
That time seems to have come, but
the dictatorship we are facing is not the sort that
Dr. Rush was apparently envisioning. It is not a
dictatorship by medical doctors, who are as distressed
by the proposed legislation as the squeezed middle
class is. (For a withering analysis by an outraged
M.D. of the nearly 2000 - page House bill, see here.
[http://yes-23.com/rep/house-healthcare-bill-breakdown-letter-from-dr-stephen-e-fraser-md/])
The new dictatorship is not by doctors but by Wall
Street -- the FIRE (finance, insurance, and real
estate) sector that now claims 40% of corporate
profits.
Economist L. Randall Wray
(http://neweconomicperspectives.blogspot.com/2009/10/healthcare-diversions-part-3.html)
observes that ever since Congress threw out the Glass-Steagall
Act separating commercial banking from investment
banking, insurance and Wall Street finance have been
“two peas in a pod.” He writes:
“[T] here is a huge untapped
market of some 50 million people who are not paying
insurance premiums—and the number grows every year
because employers drop coverage and people can’t
afford premiums. Solution? Health insurance ‘reform’
that requires everyone to turn over their pay to Wall
Street. . . . This is just another bailout of the
financial system, because the tens of trillions of
dollars already committed are not nearly enough.”
The health reform bills now
coming through Congress are not focused on how to make
health care cheaper or more effective, how to
eliminate waste and fraud, or how to cut out expensive
middlemen. As originally envisioned, the public option
would have pursued those goals. But the public option
has been dropped from the Senate bill and radically
watered down in the House bill.
Rather than focusing on making
health care affordable, the bills focus on how to
force people either to buy health insurance if they
don’t have it, or to pay more for it if they do. If
you don’t have insurance and don’t purchase it, you
will be subject to a hefty fine. And if you do
purchase it, premiums, co-pays, co-insurance payments
and deductibles are liable to keep health care
cripplingly expensive. Most
of the people who don't have health care can't afford
to pay the deductibles, so they will never use the
plans they are forced to buy.
To subsidize those who can’t pay,
the Senate bill would make families earning two to
four times the poverty level who don’t have
employer-sponsored insurance surrender 8% to 12% of
their income to insurance payments, or pay a fine. In
another effort to make the insurance payments
“affordable,” the Senate bill calls for the lowest
cost plan to cover only sixty percent of health care
costs.
“In other words,” writes Dr.
Andrew Coates (http://blog.timesunion.com/coates/wheres-the-reform-part-2-compulsory-private-insurance/102/)
in a November 23 article, “a guarantee of insurance
industry dominance and the continued privatization of
health care in every arena.”
Compulsory health insurance is
like compulsory selective military service (the
draft), except that all of our numbers have come up.
The argument has been made that auto insurance is
compulsory, so why not health insurance? But the
obvious response is that you can choose to drive a
car. The only way to escape the vehicle we call a body
is to give up the ghost.
The Right to Sovereignty Over Our Own Bodies
And that brings up another issue
alluded to by Dr. Rush: the matter of freedom of
choice in health care. Some people would equate it
with freedom of religion. Not everyone believes in
Modern Medicine. If we the people have a right to
choose what we believe about life after death, we
should have the right to choose what we believe about
life before death, by choosing how to maintain our own
bodies.
The conventional treatment
promoted by the medical/pharmaceutical complex is an
aggressive approach that can wind up killing the
patient as collateral damage in its war on the
disease. Among other researchers questioning the
wisdom of this approach is Gary Null, who reported the
results of an exhaustive independent review (http://www.garynull.com/pix/DeathbyMedicine_march09bf2Faloon.pdf)
by the Nutrition Institute of America in 2004. The
reviewers concluded that the number one killer is not
heart disease or cancer but conventional medicine
itself. Conventional medicine was found to be
responsible for an estimated 783,936 deaths annually,
including 106,000 deaths from adverse drug reactions,
98,000 from medical errors, and 88,000 from infection;
and those figures were conservative, since no more
than 20 percent of iatrogenic (doctor- or drug-caused)
mishaps are ever reported.
There are more natural, less
invasive alternatives, but most are not covered by
insurance; and even such simple remedies as healthy
organic food may be too expensive for people forced to
use a major portion of their incomes for medical
insurance. A true public option of the
Medicare-for-all variety could have solved the problem
by keeping health care affordable. If other
industrialized countries can find the money for a
national health service, we could too. For a model, we
could follow the lead of Canada, which originally
obtained the funds for its national health service
from its own publicly-owned central bank. But that
will be the subject of another article. Stay tuned.
Ellen Brown is an attorney and
the author of 11 books, including Forbidden
Medicine, The Key to Ultimate Health
(co-authored with Dr. Richard Hansen), Nature’s
Pharmacy (co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker), and
her latest book Web of Debt. Her websites are
www.webofdebt.com and
www.ellenbrown.com.
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