someguy
02-12-2010, 02:08 PM
The substance of this post is only an excerpt from a much longer, more fascinating article that dives into the the history of universal health care systems and liberal policy in general. The article as a whole is an amazingly thoughtful, researched and thorough analysis of the dangers posed by current legislation that is in the senate. While I personally do not agree totally with the authors solutions, I did however gain a much better understanding of liberalism, conservatism, and the constant balance that must be maintained. But unfortunately, we have neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism which both serve the same interests but pretend to be against each other. Truly both our neo-parties are very liberal with their massive expansion of government here and abroad, as well as government control of more and more industries. But as we find out in the article, government control, no matter how many good intentions are fueling it, inevitably leads to suppression of creativity and innovation, as well as human sovereignty.
Keep in mind this guy is not some right-wing wacko, but rather he's an 'alternative' doctor who has a really awesome medical practice being threatened by this health care reform legislation.
Full article by Nicholas J. Gonzalez, M.D.
A Physician’s Perspective on the Dangers Of Government Health Care Reform (https://www.dr-gonzalez.com/healthcareJan2010.htm)
Why US Health Care Reform Will Fail
It is tragic, at least to me, to witness our President and the Democratic leadership in Congress foist a government controlled health care program on us without nary a second thought, as if history didn’t exist, as if the failed government-run health care programs around the world never happened. These failures did happen, they did and still do exist, and we need to learn from them. Government run health care in the US, however restricted at the onset, will grow as malignant bureaucracies always relentlessly grow, as Medicare and Medicaid grew (into bankruptcy of course), as Bush’s prescription drug benefit plan has already grown far beyond its original intended limited scope. Bureaucracies can do no less, they must grow, it is in their biology and genetic make up. And so the proposed government run health care will grow, it will fester, and it will fail, for the same reasons all socialist statist enterprises ultimately fail.
I thought it would be useful to summarize, simply, my predictions as to why government run health care will falter:
1. The various health care bills I have reviewed all make provision for that inevitable draconian centralized group of Washington medical experts who will decide, for each and every condition – in fact, if I read the bill correctly, for each and every patient – what diagnostic tests and what therapy the doctor can prescribe. In a sense, the various drafts of Democratic inspired health care in one way or another seek to put the state between the doctor and the patient. Tom Daschle, the unseated former Senator from South Dakota claims such a system is best for the “collective,” whatever the downside to individual patients and their doctors. As with most centralist experts, despite the lack of any scientific or medical training, Mr. Daschle sees nothing wrong with telling physicians actually in the health care trenches they must stop performing as individuals, stop making individual decisions, stop relying on their own experience, education, intelligence, instincts, but instead blindly the follow the dictates of centralized experts. Once again, such a proposed system, to its final detriment, would prohibit and penalize independent thinking and independent action, the hallmarks of good medicine in general and the hallmarks of American medicine to date.
2. Doctors would not only take their marching orders from the state, but would also work for the state, charged as it would be with doling out payments according to its own system of acceptable medical practice and price controls. This set-up, as it did in the Soviet Union, would further discourage creative thinking, initiative and good old fashioned hard work, since doctors would no longer work for themselves. And those doctors who work harder would not be paid more than those who work less.
3. Historically, whenever government intrudes into science or medicine, science and medicine become twisted into the tools of political agendas, only peripherally devoted to their more honorable responsibilities, i.e., the search for the truth and the service of the sick. We have seen that with Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, eugenics in Nazi Germany, physicians use as evangelical missionaries for Castro’s Cuba. We see that currently in the United States with the global warming initiative and the various legislative proposals that seek to drastically curb mankind’s allegedly pernicious activity at enormous cost financially, and at enormous cost to our liberty. Global warming appears to suit a particular political agenda, which suits the environmental ends of non-scientists but increasingly – as we freeze through a particularly brutal winter – seems based not in scientific fact. With “health care reform”, inevitably politicians and the scientists they chose to consult will determine what doctors, and their patients can do, based on their ideas of what should be right regardless of the scientific fact or the consequences.
4. I have personally witnessed medical bureaucracy first hand, and trust me, it isn’t pretty. As many of you know, I have spent the past 12 years battling with the various medical bureaucracies at Columbia University, The National Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of health, and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, as we tried to force them to run our government funded clinical study properly – to no avail. Although I explain the details more thoroughly on my website and in my upcoming book about this expensive and time consuming fiasco, simply put, we uncovered dishonesty, incompetence, indifference, and good old-fashioned laziness right up into the offices of at least one Director. Our clinical trial, as supervised by entire cadres of bureaucrats from these various institutions, deteriorated into the chaos of careless management and mismanagement, corruption, even fraud, with the lives of patients put at risk with total indifference as far as we can tell. These people shouldn’t be running anything, least of all health care. Bureaucratic scientific institutions seem to select too frequently for the incompetent and the lazy, those happy to do very little of anything for as long as possible and always at taxpayer expense. In our office we call this syndrome “welfare science” and the bureaucratic practitioners “welfare scientists.”
5. The proposed government controlled health care system will prove financially untenable, for the same reasons bureaucratically run, centralistic enterprises of whatever ilk are always financially untenable. The bureaucracy will itself, cancer that it is, consume enormous amounts of resources that go not to medical facilities such as hospitals, or to patient care, or to medical research. I have read that the Senate bill if passed would establish 17 new major government programs, each requiring large staffs, facilities, and expenditures that take money away from the actual purpose of health care reform, that is, health care.
6. Health care reform as currently proposed, will as most government programs punish good behavior, and reward bad – and ironically, will make us sicker. Those of us careful and intelligent about what we eat, those of us who exercise, who avoid noxious habits such as smoking, drug use, and excessive drinking and have little need for medical care will be taxed to pay for the very expensive medical treatments prescribed to those who could care less, who eat recklessly and behave recklessly, who smoke, drink, etc. I read recently that a full course of treatment for lung cancer – a mostly preventable disease - with surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy can cost upwards of a million dollars, though most standard treatments for the problem work poorly. I have read predictions that the cost of treating Americans with Type II diabetes, largely the result of poor dietary and lifestyle choices, will run in the tens of billions annually as its incidence continues to increase yearly. But as long as someone like the government pays the bill, little incentive exists to change habits or take personal responsibility for one’s health. The fallacy persists in the liberal-socialist-Marxist mind that sick people are helpless “victims,” in need of the all powerful State, which parent-like, will be there to take care of you, whatever the problem and regardless of previous self-destructive behavior. No one need change habits, or take responsibility, quite the opposite. Ironically, such an attitude shared by the bureaucrats and populace in the Soviet Union helped speed along the downward spiral of the nation’s health care system, as purely preventable diseases achieved epidemic proportions, straining medical resources to the breaking point.
7. If we all had to pay for our own health care directly, and not indirectly through third parties of whatever ilk, government or private, we would inevitably think twice about our life decisions, and we would be the healthier for it. After witnessing a few families going bankrupt paying for pretty much useless lung cancer treatment, many of us might think twice about lighting up. For most humans, there’s nothing like repercussions for bad decisions, particularly financial repercussions, to make our decision-making process better. I remember during the welfare reform of the mid-1990’s, opponents of the plan paid for television ads warning that if the legislation passed tightening requirements, grandma would end up on the street, or little Timmy would starve to death. Of course, after the reform initiative became law, smartly placing severe entry criteria and time limits on welfare, our grandmothers did not die on the street nor did Timmy or Tommy end up starving to death, as far as I know. Instead, with payments now limited and no longer indefinite, millions of healthy Americans, many of them young, got off their duff, went to work, and experienced the rewards, self-respect, and possibilities for their future only work can bring. The nation, and the former welfare recipients now in the work force, were and are the better for it.
8. If we had to pay for our own health care, we would become intelligent consumers, as intelligent as we are when we purchase a house, or a car, or a lawnmower. First of all, most sane citizens, if they had to pay themselves, would restrict unnecessary visits to the doctor that don’t require any major intervention. In England and in Canada, with their universal “free” health care programs, repeated unnecessary doctor consultations for minor complaints are helping to undermine the entire system. Then, most of us, again if we paid for health care ourselves directly at the point of service, would investigate the options, find out what treatment works best for whatever condition we might experience, which doctor has the best results, which tests give the most valuable information. We would stop being so passive as we are today when someone else foots the bill directly, invariably turning over all the decision-making to the doctor. Intelligent choices and intelligent consumption by the consumer in the marketplace would not only lead to better, not worse care, but as an added benefit, would inevitably bring prices down. For example, PET scans can cost, in New York where I practice, up to $5,000, all directly underwritten of course by the insurance companies, though we all inevitably bear the price. However, if patients themselves had to foot the bill at the point of service, they would balk at such an expense, forcing the radiologists to bring their fees for the test more in line with the actual value – less than $1,000, in fact, less than $500. If a patient with metastatic pancreatic cancer had to pay the $30,000 or more for surgery, the $30,000 or more for chemotherapy, the $20,000 or more for radiation – it certainly adds up – they might question whether the expense was worth it for treatments that in general do little of anything for the disease. Doctors, and drug companies, would have to compete for patients, and bring the costs to a more reasonable level that patients could immediately afford. But as long as it’s “free,” that is, paid for directly by insurance companies and only eventually paid for by all of us in indirect costs, patients don’t think twice about proceeding with an aggressive and outrageously expensive therapeutic plan that might give them a few extra months of life and much discomfort along the way.
9. Perhaps those in Washington believe that this time around “we’ll do it better.” But this argument is nonsensical, since government programs are never “done better,” they always turn out worse. Again, it’s in the inevitable nature of beast.
Health Care Reform and Alternative Medicine
Since the world categorizes what I do as a physician as “alternative” in nature, I thought it might be a productive exercise to discuss the various bills before Congress in terms of the specific dangers they might represent to health care practitioners whose paths diverge from the current standard of care. Since bigger government always means, except for the cherished elite, less freedom and less liberty, including for us doctors, all the bills as they exist represent a potential hazard to alternative medicine. In an earlier brief essay that currently circulates on the Internet, I wrote that I have been in touch with those who have studied the various bills, such as the Liberty Counsel in Washington DC. All the bills, whatever its proponents state about “competition” and “freedom to choose a doctor” have as an ultimate goal single payer, universal government mandated government controlled health care with an end to competition, and government regulation of all medicine and medical science.
All doctors who participate in the government program would be closely monitored by the centralized bureaucracy and its dictates about acceptable care. Possibly – and I say only possibly - physicians such as myself might be able to opt out of the centralized collectivist plan, but no one at present seems sure if this will actually, in practice, be allowed. If doctors can opt out, we would then operate on a cash only basis, with patients aware no insurance would cover the cost of the alternative nutritional therapy. That would be ok, since we would still have the freedom to practice medicine and think as we saw fit. But if the government plan requires all physicians to join the centralized health system, as the Senate version requires all Americans, under threat of jail time, buy insurance, then serious alternative medicine practitioners will need find another America, and another Plymouth rock. Hopefully, the situation won’t reach such a draconian turn, since the lives of so many hundreds of my patients depend on the availability of this therapy.
Keep in mind this guy is not some right-wing wacko, but rather he's an 'alternative' doctor who has a really awesome medical practice being threatened by this health care reform legislation.
Full article by Nicholas J. Gonzalez, M.D.
A Physician’s Perspective on the Dangers Of Government Health Care Reform (https://www.dr-gonzalez.com/healthcareJan2010.htm)
Why US Health Care Reform Will Fail
It is tragic, at least to me, to witness our President and the Democratic leadership in Congress foist a government controlled health care program on us without nary a second thought, as if history didn’t exist, as if the failed government-run health care programs around the world never happened. These failures did happen, they did and still do exist, and we need to learn from them. Government run health care in the US, however restricted at the onset, will grow as malignant bureaucracies always relentlessly grow, as Medicare and Medicaid grew (into bankruptcy of course), as Bush’s prescription drug benefit plan has already grown far beyond its original intended limited scope. Bureaucracies can do no less, they must grow, it is in their biology and genetic make up. And so the proposed government run health care will grow, it will fester, and it will fail, for the same reasons all socialist statist enterprises ultimately fail.
I thought it would be useful to summarize, simply, my predictions as to why government run health care will falter:
1. The various health care bills I have reviewed all make provision for that inevitable draconian centralized group of Washington medical experts who will decide, for each and every condition – in fact, if I read the bill correctly, for each and every patient – what diagnostic tests and what therapy the doctor can prescribe. In a sense, the various drafts of Democratic inspired health care in one way or another seek to put the state between the doctor and the patient. Tom Daschle, the unseated former Senator from South Dakota claims such a system is best for the “collective,” whatever the downside to individual patients and their doctors. As with most centralist experts, despite the lack of any scientific or medical training, Mr. Daschle sees nothing wrong with telling physicians actually in the health care trenches they must stop performing as individuals, stop making individual decisions, stop relying on their own experience, education, intelligence, instincts, but instead blindly the follow the dictates of centralized experts. Once again, such a proposed system, to its final detriment, would prohibit and penalize independent thinking and independent action, the hallmarks of good medicine in general and the hallmarks of American medicine to date.
2. Doctors would not only take their marching orders from the state, but would also work for the state, charged as it would be with doling out payments according to its own system of acceptable medical practice and price controls. This set-up, as it did in the Soviet Union, would further discourage creative thinking, initiative and good old fashioned hard work, since doctors would no longer work for themselves. And those doctors who work harder would not be paid more than those who work less.
3. Historically, whenever government intrudes into science or medicine, science and medicine become twisted into the tools of political agendas, only peripherally devoted to their more honorable responsibilities, i.e., the search for the truth and the service of the sick. We have seen that with Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, eugenics in Nazi Germany, physicians use as evangelical missionaries for Castro’s Cuba. We see that currently in the United States with the global warming initiative and the various legislative proposals that seek to drastically curb mankind’s allegedly pernicious activity at enormous cost financially, and at enormous cost to our liberty. Global warming appears to suit a particular political agenda, which suits the environmental ends of non-scientists but increasingly – as we freeze through a particularly brutal winter – seems based not in scientific fact. With “health care reform”, inevitably politicians and the scientists they chose to consult will determine what doctors, and their patients can do, based on their ideas of what should be right regardless of the scientific fact or the consequences.
4. I have personally witnessed medical bureaucracy first hand, and trust me, it isn’t pretty. As many of you know, I have spent the past 12 years battling with the various medical bureaucracies at Columbia University, The National Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of health, and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, as we tried to force them to run our government funded clinical study properly – to no avail. Although I explain the details more thoroughly on my website and in my upcoming book about this expensive and time consuming fiasco, simply put, we uncovered dishonesty, incompetence, indifference, and good old-fashioned laziness right up into the offices of at least one Director. Our clinical trial, as supervised by entire cadres of bureaucrats from these various institutions, deteriorated into the chaos of careless management and mismanagement, corruption, even fraud, with the lives of patients put at risk with total indifference as far as we can tell. These people shouldn’t be running anything, least of all health care. Bureaucratic scientific institutions seem to select too frequently for the incompetent and the lazy, those happy to do very little of anything for as long as possible and always at taxpayer expense. In our office we call this syndrome “welfare science” and the bureaucratic practitioners “welfare scientists.”
5. The proposed government controlled health care system will prove financially untenable, for the same reasons bureaucratically run, centralistic enterprises of whatever ilk are always financially untenable. The bureaucracy will itself, cancer that it is, consume enormous amounts of resources that go not to medical facilities such as hospitals, or to patient care, or to medical research. I have read that the Senate bill if passed would establish 17 new major government programs, each requiring large staffs, facilities, and expenditures that take money away from the actual purpose of health care reform, that is, health care.
6. Health care reform as currently proposed, will as most government programs punish good behavior, and reward bad – and ironically, will make us sicker. Those of us careful and intelligent about what we eat, those of us who exercise, who avoid noxious habits such as smoking, drug use, and excessive drinking and have little need for medical care will be taxed to pay for the very expensive medical treatments prescribed to those who could care less, who eat recklessly and behave recklessly, who smoke, drink, etc. I read recently that a full course of treatment for lung cancer – a mostly preventable disease - with surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy can cost upwards of a million dollars, though most standard treatments for the problem work poorly. I have read predictions that the cost of treating Americans with Type II diabetes, largely the result of poor dietary and lifestyle choices, will run in the tens of billions annually as its incidence continues to increase yearly. But as long as someone like the government pays the bill, little incentive exists to change habits or take personal responsibility for one’s health. The fallacy persists in the liberal-socialist-Marxist mind that sick people are helpless “victims,” in need of the all powerful State, which parent-like, will be there to take care of you, whatever the problem and regardless of previous self-destructive behavior. No one need change habits, or take responsibility, quite the opposite. Ironically, such an attitude shared by the bureaucrats and populace in the Soviet Union helped speed along the downward spiral of the nation’s health care system, as purely preventable diseases achieved epidemic proportions, straining medical resources to the breaking point.
7. If we all had to pay for our own health care directly, and not indirectly through third parties of whatever ilk, government or private, we would inevitably think twice about our life decisions, and we would be the healthier for it. After witnessing a few families going bankrupt paying for pretty much useless lung cancer treatment, many of us might think twice about lighting up. For most humans, there’s nothing like repercussions for bad decisions, particularly financial repercussions, to make our decision-making process better. I remember during the welfare reform of the mid-1990’s, opponents of the plan paid for television ads warning that if the legislation passed tightening requirements, grandma would end up on the street, or little Timmy would starve to death. Of course, after the reform initiative became law, smartly placing severe entry criteria and time limits on welfare, our grandmothers did not die on the street nor did Timmy or Tommy end up starving to death, as far as I know. Instead, with payments now limited and no longer indefinite, millions of healthy Americans, many of them young, got off their duff, went to work, and experienced the rewards, self-respect, and possibilities for their future only work can bring. The nation, and the former welfare recipients now in the work force, were and are the better for it.
8. If we had to pay for our own health care, we would become intelligent consumers, as intelligent as we are when we purchase a house, or a car, or a lawnmower. First of all, most sane citizens, if they had to pay themselves, would restrict unnecessary visits to the doctor that don’t require any major intervention. In England and in Canada, with their universal “free” health care programs, repeated unnecessary doctor consultations for minor complaints are helping to undermine the entire system. Then, most of us, again if we paid for health care ourselves directly at the point of service, would investigate the options, find out what treatment works best for whatever condition we might experience, which doctor has the best results, which tests give the most valuable information. We would stop being so passive as we are today when someone else foots the bill directly, invariably turning over all the decision-making to the doctor. Intelligent choices and intelligent consumption by the consumer in the marketplace would not only lead to better, not worse care, but as an added benefit, would inevitably bring prices down. For example, PET scans can cost, in New York where I practice, up to $5,000, all directly underwritten of course by the insurance companies, though we all inevitably bear the price. However, if patients themselves had to foot the bill at the point of service, they would balk at such an expense, forcing the radiologists to bring their fees for the test more in line with the actual value – less than $1,000, in fact, less than $500. If a patient with metastatic pancreatic cancer had to pay the $30,000 or more for surgery, the $30,000 or more for chemotherapy, the $20,000 or more for radiation – it certainly adds up – they might question whether the expense was worth it for treatments that in general do little of anything for the disease. Doctors, and drug companies, would have to compete for patients, and bring the costs to a more reasonable level that patients could immediately afford. But as long as it’s “free,” that is, paid for directly by insurance companies and only eventually paid for by all of us in indirect costs, patients don’t think twice about proceeding with an aggressive and outrageously expensive therapeutic plan that might give them a few extra months of life and much discomfort along the way.
9. Perhaps those in Washington believe that this time around “we’ll do it better.” But this argument is nonsensical, since government programs are never “done better,” they always turn out worse. Again, it’s in the inevitable nature of beast.
Health Care Reform and Alternative Medicine
Since the world categorizes what I do as a physician as “alternative” in nature, I thought it might be a productive exercise to discuss the various bills before Congress in terms of the specific dangers they might represent to health care practitioners whose paths diverge from the current standard of care. Since bigger government always means, except for the cherished elite, less freedom and less liberty, including for us doctors, all the bills as they exist represent a potential hazard to alternative medicine. In an earlier brief essay that currently circulates on the Internet, I wrote that I have been in touch with those who have studied the various bills, such as the Liberty Counsel in Washington DC. All the bills, whatever its proponents state about “competition” and “freedom to choose a doctor” have as an ultimate goal single payer, universal government mandated government controlled health care with an end to competition, and government regulation of all medicine and medical science.
All doctors who participate in the government program would be closely monitored by the centralized bureaucracy and its dictates about acceptable care. Possibly – and I say only possibly - physicians such as myself might be able to opt out of the centralized collectivist plan, but no one at present seems sure if this will actually, in practice, be allowed. If doctors can opt out, we would then operate on a cash only basis, with patients aware no insurance would cover the cost of the alternative nutritional therapy. That would be ok, since we would still have the freedom to practice medicine and think as we saw fit. But if the government plan requires all physicians to join the centralized health system, as the Senate version requires all Americans, under threat of jail time, buy insurance, then serious alternative medicine practitioners will need find another America, and another Plymouth rock. Hopefully, the situation won’t reach such a draconian turn, since the lives of so many hundreds of my patients depend on the availability of this therapy.