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Old August 16th, 2012 #121
Alex Linder
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The Inevitable Future of Electronic Medical Records

by Cynthia J. Koelker, MD

For the past year now I’ve been using an Electronic Health Record (EHR) and believe the writing is on the wall. These computerized medical records are not about improving health care; they are about control of both the physician and patient.

Beginning in 2013, doctors who don’t prescribe electronically will be penalized financially. Although this mandate is Medicare-driven, Medicare collects statistics for patients of all ages and insurance groups, not just those receiving Medicare benefits. What Medicare requires eventually effects us all.

So what do I foresee? A primary goal of the EHR is the universal availability of your medical records. If you’re in Florida and visit an Urgent Care center while on vacation, "ideally" your records from your Ohio family physician will be readily accessible. With your health records on computer, theoretically the information can be transferred nearly instantaneously. The problem is, there are hundreds of different EHR systems, and they do not communicate with each other, and your doctor may not be able or willing to provide this information in the middle of the night. The easiest solution to this problem is the adoption of a single system used nationwide by all providers.

If only one system is to be used, it will likely be government-controlled. For timely exchange of information, your records will need to be hosted on the Internet (which many already are). This makes it simple for governing agencies to collect data on both patients and physicians. If America ever goes to a single-payer system, you can guarantee data collection will skyrocket.

You will also need a number, a card perhaps, similar to an insurance or Medicare card. But my patients commonly forget to bring these along. What if you show up in the ER without identification? Why, the simplest answer is to have your EHR-access information available in or on your body. Pets are commonly "chipped" with tiny RFID implants, in case they are lost. What about your Granny with Alzheimer’s, or young children, or mental patients prone to wander? They too can be chipped – and so can we all.

If you think this is crazy, consider that Medicare is already collecting data on your body mass index, your tobacco use, your vital signs, diagnoses, and medications. Insurance companies and pharmacies track which drugs I prescribe and whether my patients are compliant with refills. In Ohio, every controlled drug that is prescribed is reported to a database. Last year it was voluntary for me to check my patients. This year I am mandated to check this database on all patients using any controlled drug or tramadol in an on-going basis. Whereas this mandate is to find the few who are abusing medication, it subjects all of us to governmental monitoring. Additionally, this mandate will require dozens, perhaps hundreds, of hours of my time to detect a problem, wasting both time and money. The benefit to society is unproven, but it’s the law. Your name, too, may be in a government database. A few Vicodin after a dental extraction may land you there.

My only patient to refuse the EHR to date is a former citizen of the USSR. What does that say? Does she know something we don’t?

At least for now, you can refuse an EHR record – at least at my office. Other doctors may not be so accommodating. If they have transferred all their records to computer, they may have no means of maintaining a paper record. And if your doctor is an employee, he or she has little if any say-so in the matter.

The EHR amounts to a little-recognized infringement of your personal freedom. Perhaps this article will engender a rebellion against computerized medical records. I’m actually hoping so. My paper records were better organized, easier to access, and definitely more secure.

August 16, 2012

http://lewrockwell.com/koelker/koelker8.1.1.html
 
Old August 23rd, 2012 #122
Alex Linder
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Friedman noted that 56 percent of all hospitals in America were privately owned as for-profit enterprises in 1910.... It took decades, but by the early 1990s government had taken over nearly the entire hospital industry.... Friedman's key contention was that, as with all bureaucratic systems, government-owned or government-controlled healthcare created a situation whereby increased "inputs" such as expenditures on equipment, infrastructure, and the salaries of medical professionals, actually led to decreased "output" in terms of the quantity and quality of medical care.... This kind of result is present in all government-run bureaucracies because of the absence there of any kind of market feedback mechanism. Since there are no profits in an accounting sense in government, there is no reliable mechanism for rewarding good performance and penalizing poor performance. (pp. 26–7, emphasis in original)
 
Old August 23rd, 2012 #123
Alex Linder
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The Medical-Pharmaceutical Killing Fields
Posted by Karen De Coster on August 22, 2012 09:04 PM

A must-see documentary this year will be premiered one month from now: Medical, Inc, a movie about "exposing the modern medical monopoly." I hope this film lives up to its potential in exposing the incompetencies, myths, and fraud of the government-medical-pharmaceutical oligarchy.

And no, the gentleman speaking in the opening scene of the trailer (and in other snippets) is not a regime figure in the Third Reich - he is a former spokesperson for the AMA. As one chiropractor in the film notes, "Medicine is not health care; it is sick care. And when you take sick care and provide it through a culture like health care, then you end up with a sick culture."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=-C42_gnJ3a8
 
Old August 23rd, 2012 #124
Hunter Morrow
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Did you see that from fees, taxes, penalties and fines that the health care bill, the so-called Affordable Health Care Act, will cost nearly 900 billion dollars over the next 10 years, apart from its 900 billion price tag?

Amazingly, the Supreme Court allowed this bill to stand in its entirety and considered all of these onerous and Unconstitutional coercions on people to buy and provide certain varieties of health care as "taxes." This system is garbage.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/read-m...bamacare-taxes

 
Old September 3rd, 2012 #125
Alex Linder
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new drug development - costs, time and more
http://www.america.gov/st/econ-engli...0.5233981.html
 
Old September 13th, 2012 #126
Alex Linder
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[no idea if this is true]

Golden Dawn Beat Up Doctor Who Demanded Bribe to Treat Sick Patient

Posted by Cheradenine Zakalwe

Scanning the Internet for an interesting offbeat story we stumbled on this one. It is actually a little horrific, but at the same time we actually said "yioupiiii" and sighed with relief. (Sorry... but its true)

According to an article in the Patras daily "Allagi" members of the GD party attacked a doctor at the Hospital of Rio who had the audacity to ask a very sick patient for a "fakelaki" so that he would perform his duties! The incident, according to the article, occurred three days ago and a vocal complaint was made immediately to both the management of the Hospital and the 6th Health District.

According to the publication, the relatives of the patient were annoyed and insulted by the coercive behavior of the doctor. They wanted help and skipped turning to the hospital management or the police in fear that their case would be placed on the back burner and they instead called on the "Golden Dawn" party for help. Almost immediately members of Golden Dawn flooded the Doctor's office and he was attacked. They left undisturbed after the incident. (Reference in Greek - Taxalia)

Editor's Note - No we do not agree with violence... but we cannot hide our satisfaction knowing that the little guy struck a blow to the corrupt State system. The focus should not be on whether the Golden Dawn party has bullies amongst its ranks, which it might, but rather that our brothel of a public sector continues to thrive even in a cash-strapped Greece! Especially State doctors. They continue to ask -or rather demand- for an envelope -or fakelaki- every time we need their services without one ounce of remorse. To them this is a given. Without it... expect to be treated months later, not to be treated at all and if you are treated and do not also give a second "fakelaki" to the nurses then expect to sleep on soiled sheets and smell like a soiled toilet until you leave the hospital. Unfortunately this is the pitiful truth. Obviously this activity thrives because Greek society supports it of course and State healthcare workers take good advantage of it. In some sadistic way the public sector has forced citizens to believe that they will not be serviced if they do not sweeten their pockets first. We actually smiled when we read this story... and no... we did not pity the doctor at all. In fact we bet our bottom dollar that this particular doctor will never ask for a fakelaki again! LOL...

http://islamversuseurope.blogspot.co...-demanded.html
 
Old October 2nd, 2012 #127
Alex Linder
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The Obamacare Lobster Trap

by Bill Butler

According the Affordable Care Act’s ("ACA") website, ACA is:

Quote:
…a health care law that aims to improve our current health care system by increasing access to health coverage for Americans and introducing new protections for people who have health insurance
ACA in fact is a lobster trap. It is also crony socialism’s latest and most dangerous assault on what remains of the free market for health care.

THE ACA LOBSTER TRAP: THE "EXCHANGE"

As a condition to implementing ACA, ACA requires that every State (and, interestingly, the federal territories) establish a health care "Exchange." The Exchange is a computer database of programs and designed to implement ACA within the States. Through the Exchange, authorized health care providers, participating employers and individuals and payers (insurers and the federal and state governments) will input information designed to create a "market" for health care services.

In order to create a market, however, ACA needs "information." Specifically, it needs information on the people who will be demanding services from this market – the lobsters. What if the lobsters are too smart to enter the trap themselves? ACA demands that the States to throw the lobsters into the trap by populating State Exchanges with their personal, private financial and health data without any lobster first giving their consent. ACA can never go anywhere without complicit State actors.

An example of the information that will become part of each state’s Exchange is found in Exhibit D of the State of Minnesota’s $41-million Exchange Contract with Virginia-based "Maximus" corporation. Governor Mark Dayton entered into the Exchange Contract through the executive fiat of an Executive Order without legislative action. In Exhibit D, Governor Dayton authorized the State of Minnesota to provide Maximus with the following information on its citizens: private data, health records, chemical health records, HIPPA-protected health information, Electronic Health Information and federal tax information.

Not only has no Minnesota lobster consented to allowing the State of Minnesota sharing his personal, private health and financial data with the ominous-sounding Maximus, no Minnesota legislator has passed a law permitting Governor to establish the Exchange. Yet over $41 million in funds will flow through the Minnesota State treasury to Maximus.

THE REALITY OF THE ACA "MARKET"

ACA will in fact create a "market." But the market will be a federally controlled and federally regulated oligopoly and will therefore resemble the Soviet Union bread market. Government will determine who is an authorized provider and will therefore determine (and therefore limit) supply. Government will also determine who is an authorized payer (only authorized insurers and the government itself through Medicare and Medicaid) and therefore limit "demand."

Although the hapless lobsters who enter the trap based on the promise of "improved health care" will think that it will serve their "demand" for health care, it will not. ACA is to stop the gushing of red ink from federal Medicare and Medicaid. The only way to do this is to for the federal government to get control of costs. The only way to do this is for the federal government to complete control of the market and deny payment, deny services or exclude providers who, according to the federal government, "overcharge." This is already happening and ACA is not even off the ground. Just look at the recent actions of Massachusetts Governor and Obama acolyte Deval Patrick. He has signed a "cost containment" law that will limit state ACA expenditures. Moody’s reports that the law is "credit negative" for hospitals as will "limit revenue growth" and "reduce their operating flexibility."

The reality of ACA is that the very wealthy and the independent thinkers will avoid the lobster trap and will seek free-market health care outside of ACA and will obtain real, discerning, market-based holistic health care. The poor lobsters who enter the allopathic ACA trap will soon realize that it will not and cannot provide the services they need. They will wake up to the fact that the ACA system resembles the Bataan Death March more than the health care they once enjoyed. That is when the hapless lobsters will discover what the federal government really means by "universal" health care – there is no way out.

CRONY SOCIALISM

The great Murray Rothbard commented that the "State is a gang of thieves writ large." Nowhere is this more evident than in ACA and government involvement in health care generally.

For example, Minnesota has its own diluted version of ACA called "MinnesotaCare." In order to get the dollars that flow from the federal and state Medicare and Medicaid troughs, a group of politically connected University of Minnesota physicians established a company called "UCare." The idea behind UCare was to make UCare one of the preferred providers for MinnesotaCare: to get first in line at the trough. In 2011, UCare quietly "gifted" $30 million to the State of Minnesota. This gift in fact represented sums that UCare had overcharged the State for Medicaid services. State Health and Human Services Commissioner Lucinda Jesson suggested to the UCare cronies that they characterize the payment as a "gift" so that the State of Minnesota (Crime Family No. 2) would not have to share the overcharges with its partners in crime, the federal government (Crime Family No. 1). Leader of Crime Family No. 1 Senator Chuck Grassley, however, discovered the lack of honor among thieves, demanded payment and got it.

And so will be the fate of ACA. The free market price mechanism has a way of keeping people honest. Free market prices did not exist in the Soviet bread market and do not exist in ACA Exchanges. The winners in the ACA system will the UCare’s of the world: socialist cronies who can steal $30 million in full public view and then avoid prosecution by calling return of the ill-gotten loot a "gift."

A TAX? REALLY? IS IT REALLY CONSTITUTIONAL?

In the United State Supreme Court’s decision regarding Obamacare, turncoat Justice John Roberts avoided a "commerce clause" challenge by calling the ACA’s penalty for non-compliance a "tax."

Exposing the lobster trap nature of ACA, its opponents properly pointed out to Justice Roberts that the ACA cannot be a tax, because the penalty will apply to everyone who refuses to purchase health care insurance through the Exchange. Taxes that apply to everyone are "direct" taxes and the United States Constitution does not allow "direct" taxation without apportionment (division in accordance with state population). Unapportioned federal taxes can only be lawful if they are indirect, excise taxes. Indirect, excise taxes are constitutional because they can be avoided. The federal 19 cents per gallon gas tax is an example. Don’t want to pay the tax? Ride a bike.

Peter Schiff explains the difference between a constitutional indirect tax and an unconstitutional indirect tax here.

Justice Roberts response? Here it is:

Quote:
A tax on going without health insurance does not fall within any recognized category of direct tax. It is not a capitation. Capitations are taxes paid by every person, "without regard to property, profession, or any other circumstance." Hylton, supra, at 175 (opinion of Chase, J.) (emphasis altered). The whole point of the shared responsibility payment is that it is triggered by specific circumstances – earning a certain amount of income but not obtaining health insurance. The payment is also plainly not a tax on the ownership of land or personal property. The shared responsibility payment is thus not a direct tax that must be apportioned among the several States.
Justice Roberts says: the health care penalty tax is not a direct tax because no one in the past has every tried to tax everyone directly for health care. If no one in the past has ever tried it, then it cannot be a direct tax now. This is a perfect example of circular reasoning fallacy.

Then he no-so-deftly admits that the penalty applies to everyone (that is, it is an unconstitutional direct tax), but it is only "triggered by specific circumstances." That circumstance is being lobster who may have unwittingly entered an ACA Exchange by accessing its medical care and then later earning "a certain amount of income."

That is when the lobster discovers the trap.

CONCLUSION

Murray was right.

October 1, 2012

Bill Butler [send him mail] is a Minneapolis attorney and the owner of Butler Liberty Law.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/butler-b/butler-b15.1.html
 
Old November 1st, 2013 #128
Alex Linder
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For the “Healthcare is Special” Crowd
John Keller

I keep seeing posts on social media to the effect that healthcare is somehow “special” because it deals with people’s lives and well-being, so it is not or should not be subject to the laws of economics, such as supply and demand, in the same way as gasoline, pet food, or apples. This is like saying that people are special and therefore are not or should not be subject to the laws of physics, such as gravity. Healthcare, drugs, medical equipment, and so on are scare goods, and therefore subject to the laws of economics whether people like it or not. If demand for a given drug goes up with the supply remaining fixed, ceteris paribus, the price will rise.

The second fallacy is that healthcare is not a regular market good, because people’s lives are at stake, so the government must step in to make sure the awful free market doesn’t keep it away from the poor, etc.. Setting aside for a moment the fact that the average American visits the doctor just over 3 times a year, mostly for a cough, and the fact that mortality rates drop when hospitals close, and the fact that iatrogenic errors are usually cited as the fourth leading cause of death, there is another good that is far more important and far less regulated, and that is food.

We eat several times a day, and without food we would die in less than a month. Yet, every attempt to centrally plan the cultivation, harvest, and distribution of this vitally important good has resulted in starvation, shortages, and food riots that are astonishing in their scale. The Five Year Plans had the central planners making errors at every step in the production chain, from what crops to sow, to how many tractors and plows to make, to what fertilizer to mix, to how to get rice to market before it rotted, to what price to sell it. All along the value chain, prices signal the farmers, tractor makers, fertilizer peddlers, and grocers what to charge and what to produce in a feedback loop of supply and demand that puts asparagus to zucchini on the table millions of times a day, and automatically signals consumers that lobster is rare and delicious, while few people like beets.

This is the miracle of the market at work, feeding millions. To the extent that we trust the government it has given us the deeply flawed food pyramid, and a food system based largely on soy, corn, and wheat in the hands of a few favored mega-corps. Happily, the relatively free entry into the market means that alternatives can thrive as smaller farms with better quality food enter the market. If we trusted government to manage and regulate the food supply as completely as some would have with healthcare, we would end up with meals of the same general quality as “government cheese” at best, and the food riots, breadlines, and starvation of past central planning attempts at worst. Pass the broccoli, please – not today, your plan only covers broccoli 3 times a month.
 
Old November 1st, 2013 #129
Alex Linder
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National Health Care Must Become More and More Totalitarian
Michael S. Rozeff

Where is American health care now and where is it headed? Toward less choice by you and more control by bureaucrats. Toward more control by others over your body and life. Toward totalitarianism. This occurred in Germany. National health care in Germany, 1918-1945, is reviewed in this article.

The logic of national health care has to lead to more control by bureaucrats because its goals and poor incentives cause such high costs that the government seeks ways to control costs and decides how to ration medical services. Its control invariably will grow. In the name of health care, the government will decide who lives and dies, who gets an operation and who doesn’t, and who must wait. It may get into or deepen its control of diet, exercise, eugenics, sterilization, euthanasia, vaccinations, abortions, organs, and disease prevention. The government will want to control what you eat and drink, your sanitation, and any activity that has a risk that you may be injured or even exposed to something that might require medical attention. Activities such as pregnancy, sports activities or driving a car will all be fair game. Required procedures will be on the agenda of control. Since life is filled with risks, government activists use health and program costs as a wedge to gain control of personal lives and choices.
 
Old November 1st, 2013 #130
Alex Linder
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National Health Care: Medicine in Germany, 1918-1945

Does the modern bureaucratization of medicine risk a return to the horrors of national socialist medicine?

NOVEMBER 01, 1993 by MARC S. MICOZZI M.D.

Marc S. Micozzi, M.D., Ph.D., a physician and anthropologist, directs the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., which recently brought from Berlin the exhibition, “The Value of the Human Being: Medicine in Germany 1918-1945,” curated by Christian Pross and Götz Aly.

Today we are concerned about issues such as doctor-assisted suicide, abortion, the use of fetal tissue, genetic screening, birth control and sterilization, health-care rationing and the ethics of medical research on animals and humans. These subjects are major challenges in both ethics and economics at the end of the twentieth century. But at the beginning of the twentieth century the desire to create a more scientific medical practice and research had already raised the issues of euthanasia, eugenics, and medical experimentation on human subjects. In addition, the increasing involvement of the German government in medical care and funding medical research established the government-medical complex that the National Socialists later used to execute their extermination policies.

The German social insurance and health care system began in the 1880s under Bismarck. Ironically, it was part of Bismarck’s “anti-socialist” legislation, adopted under the theory that a little socialism would prevent the rise of a more virulent socialism.

By the time of Weimar, German doctors had become accustomed to cooperating with the government in the provision of medical care. The reforms of the Weimar Republic following the medical crises of World War I included government policies to provide health care services to all citizens. Socially minded physicians placed great hope in a new health care system, calling for a single state agency to overcome fragmentation and the lack of influence of individual practitioners and local services. The focus of medicine shifted from private practice to public health and from treating disease to preventable health care. During the German “economic consolidation” of 1924-1928, public health improved under new laws against tuberculosis, venereal disease, and alcoholism, with new advisory centers for chemical dependency and counseling bureaus for marriage and sexual problems.

Medical concerns which had largely been in the private domain in the nineteenth century increasingly became a concern of the state. The physician began to be transformed into a functionary of state-initiated laws and policies. Doctors slowly began to see themselves as more responsible for the public health of the nation than for the individual health of the patient. It is one thing to see oneself as responsible for the “nation’s health” and quite another to be responsible for an individual patient’s health. It is one thing to be employed by an individual, another to be employed by the government.

Under the Weimar Republic these reforms resulted in clearly improved public health. However, the creativity, energy, and fundamental reforms found in social medicine during the Weimar Republic seem in retrospect a short and deceptive illusion. Medical reformers had wanted to counter the misery inherited from the first World War and the Second Empire on the basis of comprehensive disease prevention programs. In the few years available to the social reformers, they had remarkable success. But in connection with these reforms the doctor’s role changed from that of advocate, adviser, and partner of the patient to a partner of the state.

Where traditional individual ethics and Christian charity had once stood, the reformers posited a collective ethic for the benefit of the general population. Private charity and welfare were nationalized. The mentally ill, for example, having been literally released from their chains in the nineteenth century and placed in local communities and boarding houses in regular contact with others (the so-called “moral therapy”), were returned to state institutions to become the ultimate victims of state “solutions.”

With the world economic crisis of 1929, welfare state expenditures had to be reduced for housing, nutrition, support payments, recreation and rehabilitation, and maternal and child health. What remained of the humanistic goals of reform were state mechanisms for inspection and regulation of public health and medical practice. Economic efficiency became the major concern, and health care became primarily a question of cost-benefit analysis. Under the socialist policies of the period, this analysis was necessarily applied to the selection of strong persons, deemed worthy of support, and the elimination of weak and “unproductive” people. The scientific underpinning of cost-benefit analyses to political medical care was provided by the new fields of genetics and eugenics.

Genetics and Eugenics

At the same time as these economic and political developments, the application of nineteenth- century scientific discoveries began to make their way into twentieth-century public health and medical practice. Charles Darwin’s studies on natural selection were of course based upon animal populations living in nature and not human populations living in complex societies. But the biological basis of natural selection gave rise to a concept of “survival of the fittest” in human civilizations. This term was coined by the British social anthropologist Herbert Spencer, and the concept led to “Social Darwinism.”

Darwin’s theories (developed in parallel with Alfred Russel Wallace—another British natural scientist) had been published prior to full elucidation of the principles of genetics. With subsequent understanding and acceptance of the science of genetics, the underlying basis of natural selection could more completely be described. While scientists still did not understand what made up the gene (awaiting Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA in the 1950s) they began to search for outward expression of inner genetic tendencies. In the absence of being able to pinpoint individual genes, they sought outward expression of genetic “types.” These “typologies” were largely based upon external measurements of the body.

Much of this work was carried out by German anthropologists and physicians (often one and the same at that time) in newly acquired colonies in German East and Southwest Africa, prior to the loss of these colonies to Allied protectorates in World War I. Such work resumed following the war, however, and by 1927 the opening of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics was celebrated in Berlin as the advent of the “German Oxford.” The annual report of the Institute in 1932 stated: “The term eugenics means to establish a connection between the results of the studies in human genetics and practical measures in population policy.”

Under the new “scientific understanding” of human biology provided by genetics and its implementation under eugenics, poverty, for example, would become merely an expression of degeneracy (Entartung) and genetic inferiority. “Inferior” and “superior” became natural terms used by persons of nearly all political persuasions, as readily as the terms “handicapped,” “impaired,” “socially dependent,” or “disadvantaged” are used today.

Life Unworthy of Living

Following World War I there had been concern among some in Germany that the war had decimated the ranks of the qualified and strong while weak, unqualified, and inferior people had been spared. Many felt that scant resources should not be wasted on the sick and suffering. The philosophy of the unimportance of the individual in favor of the people (das Volk) led to the belief that individuals who had become “worthless, defective parts” had to be “sacrificed or discarded.”

Alfred Hoche, a neuropathologist (as Freud had been) and Karl Binding, a lawyer, published a pamphlet in 1922, The Sanctioning of the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living. Binding relativized the legal and moral prohibition, “Thou shalt not kill,” and Hoche alternated between economic and medical arguments. Neurologists in Saxony formally discussed the topic, “Are Doctors Allowed to Kill?” A physician in Dresden pointed out “the contradiction that many persons (reformers) demand an end to the death penalty for crimes, but the same people are for putting imbeciles [sic] to death.” By the time the National Socialist Party came to power in Germany, the mentally ill and the mentally retarded had begun to be sterilized and to be subjected to euthanasia in large numbers in German government institutions.

National Socialism and the Nation’s Health

No profession in Germany became so numerically attached to National Socialism in both its leadership and membership as was the medical profession. Because of their philosophical orientation toward finding a more scientific basis for medical research and practice, government funding for research, and the practical benefits of acquiring university positions and medical practices from the many banned and exiled German Jewish doctors, many physicians supported Nazi policies. One of the first Nazi laws, passed July 14, 1933, was the “Law for the Prevention of Progeny of Hereditary Disease,” intended to “consolidate” social and health policies in the German population and prohibit the right of reproduction for persons defined as “genetically inferior.” After 1933, the connection between the theory and practice of politicized medicine advocated by many in Weimar Germany became actual in Nazi Germany.

A “Genetic Health Court” consisting of judges and doctors made decisions about forcible sterilization. As “advocates of the state,” doctors prosecuted those persons charged with being “genetically ill” in sessions lasting generally no more than ten minutes and from which the public was barred. In 1935, an adjunct law allowed forcible abortion in such cases up to the sixth month of pregnancy. A total of 300,000 to 400,000 were sterilized and approximately 5,000 (nearly all women) died as a result of these operations. After 1945, it was argued to the Restitution Claims Commission of the German Bundestag that the “Law for the Prevention of Progeny of Hereditary Disease” not be considered in the same category as subsequent National Socialist race laws and other Nazi abuses. The sterilization law had been drafted earlier under the Weimar Republic as part of progressive health reform, and as late as 1961 was defended by an expert at the Max Planck Institute on the basis that “every cultured nation needs eugenics, and in the atomic age, more so than ever before.”

German Youth and Euthanasia

Following the sterilization laws, the National Socialists next implemented a strategy of euthanasia to solve the remaining problem of those whose conception and birth had preceded these laws. The pediatrician Ernst Wentzler, while developing plans to improve care in the German Children’s Hospitals in Berlin, personally decided (as consultant to Hitler’s Chancellery) on the deaths of thousands of handicapped children. Hans Nachtsheim placed delivery orders for handicapped children for his pressure chamber experiments on epilepsy. Joseph Mengele delivered genetic and anthropological “material” from Auschwitz to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and conducted his infamous twin experiments on the child victims of the Holocaust.

Julius Hallervorden at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research at Berlin-Buch carried out several research projects based on euthanasia programs. Hallervorden and others systematically collected the brains of their patients who had been killed, taught the murdering doctors how to dissect, and cooperated closely with institutions where murdered children had previously been given thorough examinations and tests. During interrogation by an American officer in 1945, he stated, “I heard that they were going to do that . . . and told them . . . if you are going to kill all these people, at least take the brains . . . . There was wonderful material among these brains beautiful mental defectives, malformations and early infantile disease. I accepted these brains, of course. Where they came from and how they came to me, was really none of my business.” The collection was until recently kept by the Max Planck Institute (formerly the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute) in Frankfurt and used for brain research.

In a system in which so many were routinely condemned to die, the temptation proved strong to use human subjects in medical experimentation prior to their tragic and terrible deaths.

The Luftwaffe had developed aircraft which could climb to altitudes of nearly 60,000 feet, altitudes unattainable by Allied fighter aircraft. However, tolerance of these altitudes on the part of pilots had not yet been tested. Trials on volunteers at altitudes above 36,000 feet had to be discontinued due to severe pain. For this reason, lethal altitude experiments in pressure chambers were conducted on 200 victims held prisoner in Dachau concentration camp in a program called: “Trials for Saving Persons at High Altitude.”

Many German ships were also being sunk in the North Atlantic and North Sea, and the same group of medical investigators conducted painful ice bath experiments on 300 Dachau prisoners in a research program entitled “Avoidance and Treatment of Hypothermia in Water.” Other medical experiments were carried out with chemical and biological warfare agents and infectious diseases.

Following World War II much of this data was kept classified by Allied military authorities on the basis of national security. Debate continues to this day on the validity of these experiments and the ethical implications of any use of such data.

The Banality of Evil

We now know the end of this historical horror story of massive crimes against humanity and the leader of the thousand-year Reich burning in a bunker in Berlin. But it is not so easy to recognize the steps on the path down the slippery slope when we don’t yet know the end of the story—as today we do not know which social health reforms in combination with which new medical technologies have the potential to plunge modern society over a brink in which disaster might result. Is legalized abortion a new form of medicide? Is doctor-assisted suicide a step toward positive euthanasia? Is modern genetic testing and the Human Genome Project the first step to a new eugenics? Is health care rationing, which is always a result of government involvement in medical care, a step toward the new definition of”life unworthy of living” ? Is our present “quality of life index” a new way of saying it?

Nazi medicine was implemented by a political-medical complex—on the basis of political health care—a scientific and social philosophy imposed by a totalitarian regime. It should never happen again, but could it ever happen again?

In the United States the medical profession operates in a mixed (not a national socialist) economy which does not yet have the institutionalized mechanisms of control and regulation of Weimar Germany and in a democratic political system which thankfully does not have the political ideology of the Third Reich. But the “banality of evil” described by Hannah Arendt in the Third Reich may stem largely from a government bureaucracy in which 90 percent of the people think 90 percent of the time about process—not purpose. Does the modern bureaucratization of medicine hold any real risk for a possible return with new health reforms and new medical technologies—to some of the horrors of National Socialist medicine? Removal of personal responsibility (“I was only following orders”), personal authority, and personal choice in a bureaucratized system may leave less and less room for individual ethics in the conduct of medical science and practice.

Politicized medicine is not a sufficient cause of the mass extermination of human beings, but it seems to be a necessary cause. The Nazi Holocaust did not happen for some inexplicable German reason; it is not an event that we can afford to ignore because we are not Germans or not Nazis. The history of Germany from 1914 to 1945 is a telescoping of modernity from monarchy, war, and collapse to democracy and the welfare state, and finally to dictatorship, war, and death.

Medical ethics is the responsibility of all members of a society, not just doctors and scientists. Medicine and science alone do not have the answers to such questions as: When does life begin? When should it end? Are humans just the sum of their genetic parts or genetic programs? While bioethicists debate, individual medical choices are made a million times a day among doctors, patients, their families, and increasingly the government. The product of all these choices ultimately constitutes the ethical, legal, and social framework in which the practice of medicine and of medical research are conducted. In the end it is the preservation of freedom that will guide us to the best application of new health reforms and technologies in the future.

Dr. Robert Ritter of the German National Department of Health (right) and his associates carried out anthropological measurements and genealogical research. They prepared fingerprints and photographs in order to ascertain the “proportion of gypsy blood” in all of the Sinti and Roma of “Greater Germany.”

Nazi medicine was implemented by a political-medical complex, a scientific and social philosophy imposed by a totalitarian regime.

From The Exhibition, “The Value of the Human Being.”

Read more: http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detai...#ixzz2jR8JTYIo
 
Old January 8th, 2014 #131
Alex Linder
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The Magnificent Failure of ObamaCare
Gary North - January 06, 2014

From the point of view of a defender of liberty, ObamaCare is the most magnificent welfare state program of our generation.

Premium expenses are going up for most people. Deductibles are going up for most people. Cancellation letters are going out to millions of people. The number of people signing up is less than the number of people who have received policy-cancellation letters. In short, the costs are being front-loaded, and the benefits are being back-loaded.

Always before, welfare state politics has been based on a specific strategy: "Benefits first. Costs later." This is called front-loading and back-loading. The best examples of this process are Social Security and Medicare. The costs are now coming due for these two programs. According to Prof. Lawrence Kotlikoff, the back-loaded cost of the two programs is now in the range of $200 trillion, present value. But no one really cares. Those costs will be imposed in the future. Politicians care only about the immediate future, namely, the next election.

The politicians come to the general public, and they promise that the state will intervene on the side of the middle class. The state will do so also to help the poor. The costs will be borne exclusively by the rich. Politicians are careful never to define how much money is going to be paid by the middle class, especially the upper-middle-class. This is always kept secret. The assumption is that only the wealthy will pay for the benefits that will be given to the middle class and the poor.

Then, step-by-step, the costs are imposed over years. There is a kind of definition creep involved. More and more of the middle class is defined as being rich. This is never made public. But it does become operational when the tax bills come due.

The way around this has been to increase the amount of borrowing by the federal government, and by other agencies of state and local governments. But, primarily, it has been done through the federal government.

In order to keep interest rates low, the Federal Reserve System intervenes in order to create money out of nothing, in order to purchase the IOUs of the United States Treasury Department. This conceals the extent of the cost of the welfare state programs that have been passed into law by an enthusiastic Congress, and supported by an enthusiastic electorate.

By front-loading the benefits, and by back-loading the costs, the politicians have extended the welfare state to encompass virtually every area of life.

ObamaCare is the exception. ObamaCare is front-loading the costs, and it is back-loading the benefits.

That is the nature of all insurance. Insurance programs force you to pay for the coverage now. You will receive the benefits later, if in fact you become eligible by means of some disaster in your life. Whatever you have insured against takes place, and you receive payment from the insurance company.

In this case, however, the costs of insuring the poor must be borne by people who buy the policies now. The poor cannot be excluded because of prior conditions. So, this is not insurance; this is a welfare state program, pure and simple. But it is being covered by the illusion that it is, in fact, an insurance program.

People who have pre-existing conditions that exclude them from getting insurance in the free market are rushing to sign up for the welfare program. People who are generally healthy, meaning younger people, are not rushing to sign up. They don't want the program. They have been outvoted. They had not understood that they are the targets of the program. They do not understand the economics of health insurance, when coupled with the economics of ObamaCare, have made them the big losers. They are not rich. They are barely middle class. But they are the ones who are going to pay the freight for the poor people and the old people who are sick and cannot get insurance.

The front-loading is taking place today, in a congressional election year. The pain will be imposed on middle-class voters and younger voters prior to the election. It will build all year long.

The subsidies come in the form of tax credits, but half the voters do not pay income taxes. So, they will get no relief. Supposedly, the government will pay for any increased costs of their insurance policies. This will prove to be an illusion. It is a poorly timed illusion from the point of view of the Democrats, and a magnificent illusion from the point of view of the Republican Party. The Republican Party voted across the board against the program. So, it took a position in 2010 that it would front-load the cost and back-load the benefits.

In 2010, the liberal media piled on the Republicans, calling them heartless opponents of the poor and the weak. In 2012, this proved to be an ineffective attack on the Republican Party. In 2014, the costs are being imposed directly, and the Republicans have escaped the political liability. We now see Democrats running for cover. All of a sudden, ObamaCare needs delays. All of a sudden, ObamaCare does not look like such a good idea.

Because of the timing of the increased premium costs, which are coming this year, the traditional back loading strategy has hit the Democrats right between the eyes. It took too long to get from the promise, which was made in 2010, and the benefits, which are only appearing this year. But the benefits are being extended only to people at the margin. They are people who almost certainly would have voted for the Democrats anyway. Meanwhile, the costs are being imposed on voting groups, especially young adults, who tend to vote for the Democrats, and who are now caught by the details of the law that Nancy Pelosi said Congress would not be allowed to read until Congress voted for the bill. Congress voted for the bill, and now the targeted losers are finding out just how large the bill really is. They're finding this out in an election year.

Because of the unique situation in which all Republicans voted against the bill, it is now possible to gain political acceptance by Republicans for the principle of the repeal of ObamaCare. That will have to require the election of a Republican president and Republican majorities in both houses of Congress in 2016. If, as expected, Democrats lose ground in the Senate in 2014, the scene will be set for a complete repeal in 2017.

The ability of Republican moderates to get a replacement program is minimal. There will be domestic opposition from the Tea Party movement. But there will not be opposition by the Tea Party movement to repeal. So, it will be much easier to repeal ObamaCare than it will be to get a Republican substitute. This has not happened before. Always before, some Republicans voted with the Democrats on particular welfare state programs. Unified opposition across the board has not happened before. But it happened this time. This makes ObamaCare unique.

Democrats insist that once the program gets rolling, a majority of voters will support it, and Democrats will be re-elected. This is Harry Reid's position. He has stated clearly. This is the position of the mainstream media. They are hoping, though of course not praying, that there will be enough beneficiaries on the rolls to offset the losers who had their policies canceled, their premiums increased, and their liabilities increased. So far, this hope is an illusion.

The horror stories are going to begin very soon. These horror stories will be people who have had their deductibles increased, and who are hit by a medical bill. They will find out that the deductible must be paid every year. If they get hit by a multi-year disease, they will pay these high deductibles every year from now on. The political pain will be intense. While the mainstream media may not feature these stories, there will be lots of them on the alternative media. Horror stories gain readership. These are human interest stories. There are going to be thousands of them every year.

Again, the Democrats have made a mistake. They have voted as a party in favor of a program that has front-loaded the costs and back-loaded the benefits.

http://www.garynorth.com/public/11966print.cfm
 
Old March 20th, 2014 #132
Alex Linder
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Free Kevin Trudeau!
By John Seiler
March 20, 2014

I might get thrown in the Gulag Americana for writing this, but Kevin Trudeau helped me in at least two medical areas. I’m going to describe how.

But first, although I’ll discuss some minor problems I had with Kevin below, there’s no reason for a vicious judge to throw him in prison – just for publishing a book!

AP reported from Chicago: Federal Judge Ronald Guzman “on Monday sentenced TV pitchman Kevin Trudeau to 10 years in prison for bilking consumers via infomercials for his best-selling weight loss book.”

Doesn’t the First Amendment protect the right to publish books? No more than the Fourth Amendment any more protects the right “against unreasonable searches and seizures” by the NSA, FBI, CIA, etc.

Here’s how Kevin helped me. About a decade ago, I came down with severe pain in my knees. My GP sent me to an orthopedic specialist, who took X-rays, diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis on my knees, and prescribed Celebrex.

I took the Celebrex, and it sure made things better. But I was skeptical because my father had been taking Vioxx, a similar drug, just before a heart attack in 1999 that required a quadruple bypass. Did the Vioxx cause the heart attack? We’ll never know. But according to Dr. Joseph Mercola, Vioxx killed at least 60,000 people and, when recalled, cost Merck a $321 million fine.

Celebrex supposedly is safer. But how much safer? Here’s what Pfizer’s own Celebrex site warns (emphasis in original):

IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION

All prescription NSAIDs, like CELEBREX, ibuprofen, naproxen, and meloxicam have the same cardiovascular warning. They may all increase the chance of heart attack or stroke that can lead to death. This chance increases if you have heart disease or risk factors for it, such as high blood pressure or when NSAIDs are taken for long periods.

CELEBREX should not be used right before or after certain heart surgeries.

Serious skin reactions, or stomach and intestine problems such as bleeding and ulcers, can occur without warning and may cause death. Patients taking aspirin and the elderly are at increased risk for stomach bleeding and ulcers.

Tell your doctor if you have:

A history of ulcers or bleeding in the stomach or intestines
High blood pressure or heart failure
Kidney or liver problems
CELEBREX should not be taken in late pregnancy.

Do not take CELEBREX if you have bleeding in the stomach or intestine, or you’ve had an asthma attack, hives, or other allergic reactions to aspirin, any other NSAID medicine or certain drugs called sulfonamides.

Life threatening allergic reactions can occur with CELEBREX. Get help right away if you’ve had swelling of the face or throat or trouble breathing.

Prescription CELEBREX should be used exactly as prescribed at the lowest dose possible and for the shortest time needed.
“Natural Cures”

So I was open to natural alternatives. I bought Trudeau’s “More Natural Cures Revealed: Previously Censored Brand Name Products That Cure Disease” when it came out in 2006; it’s still available – for now – for as little as 50 cents, plus postage, on Amazon.com.

It recommended a natural oil called Cetyl Myristoleate. I tried the brand from Natrol, which you also can get from Amazon.com for $15.83 for 120 capsules. I dumped the Celebrex and took four capsules of the Cetyl a day. The arthritis came back. Six capsules. No good. Eight capsules – bingo! Arthritis gone.

I am eager to say that I am not a medical doctor and you should not do anything without consulting your own physician. I’m just an old journalist who has written too much, most of it broadsides against the government, and whose carpal-tunnel syndrome also was relieved by the Cetyl Myristoleate.

I consulted other sources. The consensus was that for some people, taking the Cetyl for a month or two would provide a lasting cure; but other folks would have to take it continuously. The latter turned out to be the case for me. But a buck a day certainly is worth it to be relieved of joint pain while not taking a possibly dangerous drug from Big Pharma.

This is from Wikipedia:

Cetyl myristoleate is a chemical compound which is a type of fatty acid ester or, more specifically, a cetylated fatty acid (CFA). It is the cetyl ester of myristoleic acid. Although it is used as a dietary supplement, there is little clinical evidence to support a benefit for any medical condition.[1]…

In animal studies, cetyl myristoleate was first reported to block inflammation and prevent adjuvant-induced arthritis at very high doses in rats.[2][3] Other studies using identical and similar methods have failed to replicate this effect.[4] In follow-up studies in mice, a modest anti-inflammatory effect was observed.[2]

Studies, schmudies. It worked on this mouse. As to any danger for the Cetyl, it’s essentially about as “dangerous” as a couple drops of olive oil.

When it worked for me, I recommended it to my father for his arthritis. It definitely helped him until his death in 2008 at age 90.

And over the years, I’ve recommended it to other friends. Results vary, just as people do. But one friend, age 40 and an active runner, complained to me of an old football knee injury. He took the Cetyl for a month, and his pain was gone without continuing the treatment.

Again, I’m not a doctor. I’m just a journalist reporting my experiences under the apparently expired protection of the former First Amendment.

Acid Reflux

Another ailment I suffered from a decade ago was acid reflux. My GP in the late 1990s prescribed Prilosec, which didn’t work. (It’s now over-the-counter.) He then prescribed Prevacid, which did work. But I looked up the Warnings and Precautions, which are on the drug’s Web site:

Symptomatic response with PREVACID does not preclude the presence of gastric malignancy.
PPI therapy may be associated with increased risk of Clostridium difficile associated diarrhea.
Bone Fracture: Long-term and multiple daily dose PPI therapy may be associated with an increased risk for osteoporosis-related fractures of the hip, wrist or spine.
Hypomagnesemia has been reported rarely with prolonged treatment with PPIs.
So when Kevin’s book came out, I looked up a natural alternative. He recommended “digestive enzymes.” I drove over to our local Mother’s Market health food store and bought a bottle of Dr. Michael Murray’s Multi Enzyme High Potency Vegetarian Formula, about $25 at the time for 120 capsules. I took four capsules a day for a month, and the acid reflux was gone.
A couple of years ago, the acid reflux returned. I repeated the treatment. Gone again.

I have recommended this to several friends, and it has worked for them as well. Dr. Murray’s Formula is not available on Amazon.com. But it is available at other online stores, and likely at your local health-food store. Other brands of digestive enzymes also might be worth trying.

Weight loss

To quote the late Chris Farley, I have “what doctors call a little bit of a weight problem.” So I bought the book for which Kevin was lynched, when it first came out in 2007. It cost about $30. You still can get it – for now – on Amazon.com for as little as 65 cents plus postage.

The main recommendation from Kevin was to go on a 500-calorie-a-day diet with HCG injections, which are legal. I didn’t take up that therapy. But that’s what got him in trouble with the U.S. government. AP reported: “He sold more than 850,000 copies of the weight book, generating $39 million in revenue, prosecutors say. But his lawyers have argued it can only be said 67 buyers were defrauded because that’s how many complained to consumer protection agencies.”

Will Judge Guzman also throw in prison a Chicago citizen named Barack Obama, who famously lied when he promised, “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan”?

How is lying political speech about health care, which is protected by the First Amendment, any different from an alleged lie in a health-care book?

And who are these whiny Americans who claimed to be “defrauded” of a mere $30 for a book? I bought Obama’s last book, “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream,” for about $20 in a local bookstore when it came out in 2007, the same year as Trudeau’s diet book. Should I ask the government to put him on trial because I was “defrauded”? Well, I won’t. (Although the president should be impeached and removed from office for, say, murdering wedding parties.)

Trudeau’s diet book also makes alternative recommendations for those who can’t follow his more rigorous program. Basically, he says to switch to a diet based only on organic food. I did that for a couple of months and I did lose weight. It worked! And I felt great.

Then I went off it and regained the weight. Old story. Trudeau and other health-care gurus blame agribusiness and fast-food companies, both of which are hooked into the government, for getting us addicted to artificial substances. They probably have a point. But it’s also the old problem of trying to get rid of bad habits described by Aristotle; or by St. Paul, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

Part of the problem for me also was that organic meat costs about three times that of non-organic. And other organic food costs about twice as much. Maybe if I weren’t taxed so much to fund Kevin’s persecutors, I could afford what I need.

Based on this, I’ve devised my own diet (with apologies to Steve Martin), in two parts: First, get a million dollars. Second, move to a tropical island and eat only organic food prepared by an expert chef.

Kevin’s problems

I didn’t like everything about Kevin’s books. He pushed Scientology and new-age therapies. But hey, I’m a big boy. I can decide these things for myself.

As to his past criminal activity, according to Wikipedia:

After being incarcerated for fraud in the early 1990s,[11] Trudeau joined a multi-level marketing firm, Nutrition for Life. The firm was successful until the Attorney General of Illinois charged that it was running a pyramid scheme. Trudeau and Nutrition for Life settled cases brought by the state of Illinois, and seven other U.S. states, for US$185,000.[11][12][13][14][clarification needed]

But there’s a big difference between actually ripping people off with a Bernie Madoff-style pyramid scheme, and selling a book.

AP reported: “U.S. District Judge Ronald Guzman blasted the 50-year-old Trudeau before the sentencing, saying that for decades he ‘steadfastly attempted to cheat others for his own personal gain.’ Guzman called Trudeau ‘deceitful to the core.’”

Again, the judge didn’t distinguish between the pyramid scheme early in Trudeau’s career, and selling a book. And again, why don’t federal prosecutors arrest President Obama and almost all members of Congress for promoting the ultimate pyramid scheme, Socialist Security?

Big Pharma

What’s really behind this, of course, is Big Pharma’s symbiotic relationship with Big Government. Because I paid $30 for Kevin’s “More Natural Cures Revealed,” I cost Big Pharma already thousands of dollars.

And Big Government doesn’t like independent medical advice, either, because then we don’t need Obamacare or whatever new scheme Republicans will devise to “repeal and replace” it.

Free Kevin Trudeau!

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/03/j...kevin-trudeau/
 
Old August 29th, 2014 #133
Alex Linder
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This Doctor Posts All His Prices. And His Business Is Booming.
Shalva Ginsparg / August 27, 2014 / 0 comments 257 9.8k

About a year before the birth of Obamacare, Dr. Keith Smith, director of the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, posted all the prices for his center’s surgeries online.

Today he’s expanding, looking to build two more operating rooms. His fastest-growing group of patients? Obamacare enrollees.

Though they have Obamacare health insurance plans, many patients are saddled with high deductibles. Looking for alternatives, some travel across the country to the Surgery Center, where the cost of airfare care and travel together is less than the deductibles on their Affordable Care Act plans.

The Surgery Center of Oklahoma is physician-owned. It doesn’t take Medicare or Medicaid and only selectively works with private insurance plans. Patients pay in cash or with cashier’s checks.

Smith says that “coverage doesn’t mean care.” He points out that many of the earliest patients were Canadians, who are covered under their country’s socialized health care system but had been put on waiting lists. ALL SOCIALIZED MEDICAL SYSTEMS RESULT IN WAITING LISTS. You can't avoid the market. There are limited goods/services and unlimited demands always and everywhere.

Tasha Bradley, a spokesperson at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, points out that enrolling in Obamacare provides financial benefits for some patients.

“Before the Affordable Care Act, consumers could face unlimited out-of-pocket expenses for plans with limited benefits and high deductibles, if they could even get coverage without being denied for a pre-existing condition,” she said. “In the Marketplace, out-of-pocket expenses are capped for the first time, prescription drugs are now covered, and many consumers may qualify for cost-sharing reductions that reduce their out-of-pocket costs.”

One reason it goes faster at the center is because Smith does not accept government funding and is not bound by administrative “red tape” that bog down most hospitals. For example, the center doesn’t have to comply with hospital standards for electronic documentation, an innovation Dr. James Totoro, general surgeon at the Surgery Center for more than 12 years, said is more of a hindrance than a help. Not only is the center’s paper documentation system more efficient, Totoro said, it also allows him to spend more time with his patients and less at a computer.

http://dailysignal.com/2014/08/27/do..._medium=social
 
Old August 30th, 2014 #134
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One isolated incident reported by a repulsive lying Jewess (Shalva Ginsparg) whose probably got relatives making lots of money off goyim misery in America's corrupt capitalist health care system (including the Obannanacare racket which is the polar OPPOSITE of socialized medicine) doesn't disprove the merits of universal health care. Canadians aren't flooding America for hospital treatment, and it doesn't even compare to the number of Americans flooding other countries, often third world ones, with public healthcare to be able to actually afford it.

Nearly one million Americans go abroad to countries with subsidized/public health care every year for medical procedures. It's called "medical tourism" and there's even an organization dedicated to it. Tens of thousands of Americans go to places like Costa Rica, which is the whitest country in Central America (not saying much), to enjoy the benefits and affordability of the subsidized health care of a comparatively small and poor nation. That's just pathetic.

In Canada, comparing the prices of drugs and medicine is another major thing you're missing. 10 million Americans smuggle their medicine from Canada because its so much cheaper (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...062801634.html) .

An OECD study found that out of 11 countries surveyed, wait times in the United States (second to last place) were shorter than Canada (last place). But Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, all who have a socialist/universal health system, had shorter wait times than the USA.
http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/canada-...imes-1.1647061
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Old August 30th, 2014 #135
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Private health care:

Patient: I need this tumor out of me or I will die!

Doctor: Ok, well , when we factor in all the useless treatments I can pretend are useful now that no government is around to regulate me, the price will be 1 million dollars.

Patient: But I can only scrape together 10,000!

Doctor: Oh well. The good news is the free market means there's something for everyone now, courtesy of the invisible hand. My cousin has organic cancer treatments he's offering, for a thousand bucks a pop he will give you magical raw apricot seeds. Here, watch this poorly acted video testimony attesting to their cancer curing abilities!
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Old August 30th, 2014 #136
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe_Smith View Post
Private health care:

Patient: I need this tumor out of me or I will die!

Doctor: Ok, well , when we factor in all the useless treatments I can pretend are useful now that no government is around to regulate me, the price will be 1 million dollars.
I don't think I've seen more economic ignorance packed into a sentence in my life. The leftist press, which is dominated by jews, has pushed single-payer since I was writing about this stuff professionally back in the early nineties. More money taken by force from white paychecks, more white power turned over to unelected bureaucrats and unreachable politicians. They'll set budget caps on treatment. They'll decide which diseases are real, and which imaginary. And which drugs are valid, and which aren't. We can trust this unelected genius elite, certainly not our own brains and research.

Why not just have these geniuses run everything? Wait, they already do. They're the reason we're in this mess. That last thing we need is more of them.

Quote:
Patient: But I can only scrape together 10,000!

Doctor: Oh well. The good news is the free market means there's something for everyone now, courtesy of the invisible hand. My cousin has organic cancer treatments he's offering, for a thousand bucks a pop he will give you magical raw apricot seeds. Here, watch this poorly acted video testimony attesting to their cancer curing abilities!
False premise: there is safety, and regulation guarantees it.

You're also bringing the worst from leftism: ideological thinking. A jew that says 2+2 is 4 is wrong because jew. It doesn't work like that. We don't need white communism. It won't work any better than jew-communism.

Have the courage of your position - prove the guy is not actually opening new station, and prove people aren't actually coming down from Canada to take advantage of them. The whole history of socialized medicine is waiting lists, black markets.

What we have now is more socialized than not, and that is why prices are through the roof.
 
Old August 30th, 2014 #137
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What my article shows is that the market for medicine and treatment is the same as any other. Decide what you want, and pay for it. If you can't, then figure out another arrangement. It's not someone else's responsibility to pay for your treatment. Of course, plenty of doctors work on people for free, and they could do a lot more of that if they didn't have to deal with government-mandated insurance paperwork.
 
Old August 30th, 2014 #138
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Alex Linder View Post
I don't think I've seen more economic ignorance packed into a sentence in my life. The leftist press, which is dominated by jews, has pushed single-payer since I was writing about this stuff professionally back in the early nineties More money taken by force from white paychecks, more white power turned over to unelected bureaucrats and unreachable politicians.

The "Obamacare" Jews lobbied for is not public health insurance. Calling the affordable care act socialized medicine would be like saying laws mandating you have auto insurance are socialized auto insurance. The purpose of Obamacare, in theory, is to actually reduce government spending on real health care programs like Medicare, as well as making private capitalist Jews rich.

The government forces you to buy private health insurance, with no public option. That isn't socialism, that is plutocracy, that is big capitalist Jew capturing your government and lining his private pocket book with your money. This has been the inevitable outcome of every capitalist system that has ever existed. Either the government controls the businessman , or the businessman controls the government, there is no middle point except in the science fiction novels that are the laughable ideological basis of libertarianism.

Left-wing press? The liberal capitalist's notion that their perspectives are censored in the media is based, again, on nothing. Libertarianism is accepted as thoroughly kosher, which is precisely why its intertwined with the Republican party. Ron Paul got lots of shit from Jews because he didn't want to give money to Israel, but his Jew ass-licking son Rand whose got pretty much the same economic philosophy is perfectly acceptable in GOP and Jewish media circles. I can name quite a few maintream newspapers and talk shows that are dedicated to giving the libertarian perspective, often by kikes themselves.

Single-payer insurance, in essence, is just medicare available to everyone. How many Americans are complaining about Medicare? Even Tea Party retards hold up signs in support of Medicare.

You're showing off that regrettable tattoo you got when you were wasted on your 21st birthday, as if left and right actually mean anything in the media. That tattoo is conservativism.


Quote:
They'll set budget caps on treatment. They'll decide which diseases are real, and which imaginary. And which drugs are valid, and which aren't. We can trust this unelected genius elite, certainly not our own brains and research.
Health care in most of the civilized world is socialized and universal, and people are living longer than ever in Japan, Germany, and New Zealand, while spending less (both publicly and privately) on health care than in the privatized American system. Your doomsday scenario is typical neo-con mularkey that depends on people being too stupid to look up the facts themselves.


Quote:
You're also bringing the worst from leftism: ideological thinking. A jew that says 2+2 is 4 is wrong because jew. It doesn't work like that. We don't need white communism. It won't work any better than jew-communism.
So I cite you statistics of millions of Americans going to countries with socialized medicine (including small and poor ones like Costa Rica) to get their drugs and surgeries, and you just omit it. I show you statistics where the French, British, and Germans with actual universal healthcare have shorter wait times to see a doctor in contrast to Americans in the comparatively private health system- you pretend you don't see it. And somehow, without a shred of irony, you accuse me of being the ideological one .

That jew is saying 2+2=5, that is why its Jewishness is relevant. The Jew is lying, but thanks to your residual conservativism, you fall for its lies. When it comes to this question, you seem to make the same excuse that all the Jews that formulated and promote your views on economic liberalism-for the first time in history...they're doing it for completely selfless reasons because they love "freedom" .

If it's one Jew, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. When all of them are Jews except Gary North, it's not a coincidence and they're not "good jews".


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Have the courage of your position - prove the guy is not actually opening new station, and prove people aren't actually coming down from Canada to take advantage of them. The whole history of socialized medicine is waiting lists, black markets.
That Jewess lies because she implies-in the subtle weaselly way Jewry and its capitalist and Leftist wings do- that Canadians are flooding the United States in search of private health care. In reality, the actual figures of Canadians who opt for treatment in the United States is insignificant, even if the wait time in some Canadian provinces is slightly longer: http://content.healthaffairs.org/con...3/19.full.html


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What we have now is more socialized than not, and that is why prices are through the roof.
So then why do countless countries with completely socialized systems spend less tax dollars and less private dollars on health care than America? Wouldn't prices be to scale and hence superior America's mostly private health care system? 40 dollar Ace bandages at the hospital are not big government's fault, except insofar as big government allows it. Health care and drugs were a ripoff in America before Obamacare, and still are afterwards.

A handful of Canadians are seeing the doctor in America, but 1 million Americans are buying their drugs from the Canadian system that regulates prices. http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/...pharmacy-drugs
__________________
"The favorite slogan of the reds is: 'No Pasarán!: Yes we have passed! And we tell them...and we tell them, we will pass again!'"
― Benito Mussolini after the Communist capitulation in Barcelona

Last edited by Joe_Smith; August 30th, 2014 at 10:45 PM.
 
Old August 31st, 2014 #139
Crowe
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I agree with Joe Smith here. Obamacare isn't a real Socialist solution to health insurance. The government is simply using regulation to make everybody buy insurance from the private sector. Prices go up because the law says you must have it - or pay a fine. And the jew ran insurance companies get to charge more for less. Plutocratic regimes are Capitalist when it suits them, and they'll also use regulations to line their own pockets. And this is what we got going on here. The government foots up some or all of the bill for the insurance if you're under a certain income level. Meaning the government pays private insurance to insure all the niggers and spics and their other multicult minions. So put into contrast, even though its a Nation destroying policy that is only serving to line the pockets of jews, any White person who can get free insurance should take advantage of it.

Last edited by Crowe; August 31st, 2014 at 04:30 AM.
 
Old September 1st, 2014 #140
Englisc
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Here's what an actual socialist said about Obamacare:

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Greg Pason, the national secretary of the Socialist Party USA said in a recent interview: “The ACA program relies on private health insurance companies to manage health services,” Pason said. “A socialized system would not include ‘health insurance,’ but would be an actual national health-care system which would be publicly funded through progressive taxation and controlled by democratically elected assemblies of health-care workers and patients.”
As this article further points out:

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How did it happen that we are allowing the conservatives to label The Affordable Care Act (ACA) socialized medicine and/ or socialism? Are they trying to hide just how capitalistic the ACA really is?

The ACA is a gift to capitalists. It develops competition in each state between private insurance companies, a sort of textbook definition of capitalism. Granted, this isn’t free market capitalism based on the regulations, but any American knows the US is not run on free market capitalism, as it would never work in the real world.

The ACA is not socialized medicine since the customer is still buying insurance. Socialized medicine is not an insurance plan; it is a health plan. Under socialized medicine, you do not worry about bills and deductibles, you go to the doctors or hospital and get your care and walk away. Socialized medicine is also single payer; you simply have health coverage by virtue of being a citizen, and taxpayer money is used to cover everyone. The ACA, however,does not cover those who opt-out, or who do not qualify for coverage.
http://www.truth-out.org/speakout/it...-not-socialism

I remind you that the idea behind Obamacare was originally a GOP one (so-called Romneycare). Republicans saw it as a way of covering almost all Americans for health insurance, without a single payer system.
 
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