Forced by the government to go to the conventional doctor...

It can't happen here... Or can it?

© By Peter Barry Chowka
September 15, 2007

(September 15, 2007) On September 2, in a speech in Iowa as he campaigned for President, former Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) gave a startling and chilling indication of what's ahead if his plan for government-controlled socialized medicine is enacted in the United States. Similar to all of the other Democrats running for their party's nomination for President in 2008, Edwards has made providing universal health care for everyone in America – which is socialized medicine under a more palatable, benign-sounding name – a central part of his platform.

According to the Associated Press account of his speech:

Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards said on Sunday that his universal health care proposal would require that Americans go to the doctor for preventive care.

“It requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care,” he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. “If you are going to be in the system, you can't choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK.”

He noted, for example, that women would be required to have regular mammograms in an effort to find and treat “the first trace of problem.”...

“The whole idea is a continuum of care, basically from birth to death,” he said. [emphases added]

Thanks to Edwards, anyone who might still be wondering exactly who is in charge of his or her health care under socialized medicine no longer needs to wonder: It's the government, stupid.

Edwards' draconian plans for controlling all health care treatment and delivery options for the entire population do not exist in isolation, either. In recent years there have been numerous proposals and mounting precedents for expanding the nanny state into the most intimate and sensitive aspects of Americans' lives, areas that involve people's personal health care and medical decisions.

While many Americans in recent years have been all riled up about issues like the Patriot Act and the surveillance of potential terrorists' phone conversations, the government has been steadily moving ahead with plans (with little objection, especially from the Left) to effectively end privacy and choice where they count the most: the control of your own body. In New York City, for example, there has been, for over a year, mandatory reporting to the government by law of diabetics' blood sugar test results. The results are collected in government databases and evaluated by government health authorities. The increasing utilization of electronic medical records and the cookbook of approved treatments ("evidence based medicine") have given government bureaucrats the tools to go into action. If it is determined that a diabetic's blood sugar levels are too high above what is deemed “normal,” that individual can be contacted or visited by government health police in his home and strong-armed to do this or that in terms of complying with conventional therapies or interventions (as determined and sanctioned by the government, following the dictates of fashionable buzzword mantras like “evidence based medicine”). Linda Kohl, in Medical Laboratory Observer (February 2006), commented on the unprecedented nature of this scheme: “The data compiled based on those medical laboratory reports will then be used to directly intervene in individual patient's care. Not only will city officials alert patients whose blood-sugar levels are not being well controlled, but they will also contact doctors about those patients and will offer advice.” In an article in the Institute for Heath Freedom's Health Freedom Watch (January 2006), Sue Blevins noted that some critics of this kind of policy are describing it as here come “the sugar police.”

A trial balloon for one of the more extreme examples of the kind of manipulation, control, and loss of freedom that John Edwards and his ilk are advocating was floated in the pages of the “newspaper of record,” the New York Times, in 2006. As I wrote in an article last year, “On June 27, 2006 the New York Times published a prominent op-ed essay by an influential professor at Columbia University, Barron H. Lerner, M.D., who suggests that people who test positive for HIV and who decline or refuse to take their prescribed antiretroviral drugs might be locked up in 'detention wards' at places like Bellevue Hospital and, similar to people with tuberculosis, forcibly medicated with HIV-AIDS drugs for up to two years.”

And these reports are part of a still larger and emerging context. In the UK, for example, where socialized medicine has been in effect since 1948, and where the situation, as a result, is more desperate, the opposition political party (the Tories) has proposed, according to the Evening Standard (September 4, 2007), that “the NHS [National Health Service] should not treat those with unhealthy lifestyles.” Rationing and denial of services is clearly one way that socialist medical schemes operate, and the increasing demand for “free” medical care here will inevitably result in more proposals of this kind.

A September 3, 2007 article at the World Health Care Blog, “How to Make Prevention Popular,” reflects some increasingly popular thinking on the subject:

Most of the well-thought-out “solutions” to our health care crisis include the recognition that to the extent possible, we should be dramatically increasing our investments in prevention... The prevention effect may arise from immunization and other medical means, or via preventing or reforming risky behaviors that tend to cause sickness... The two most popular approaches to altering behaviors seem to be either to make it economically more advantageous for all such stakeholders to adopt and persist in healthier behaviors, or to require them to do so by law (which can be economically more advantageous as well, since it can enable people to avoid paying fines or serving unpaid time in jail by behaving better). Both have been suggested by many health care reform gurus and political aspirants.

Making healthy behavior mandatory, or at least unhealthy behavior more difficult, expensive, and potentially a reason for jailing people, has been used frequently, though for a limited number of such behaviors. Recent jailing of people with tuberculosis, either because it is untreatable, or because the patient refuses to comply with treatment, and historical cases of forced quarantine of individuals and populations are examples of this form of “punishing the sick”. One presidential aspirant [John Edwards] recently called for making it mandatory that individuals both have insurance coverage, and get preventive care, including all forms of prevention...

[Such] methods would cost money, for “behavior police” and systems for enforcing mandatory behaviors and punishing providers or patients for unhealthy behaviors. Of course, these costs could be covered by taxing, fining, or increasing premiums and out-of-pocket payments for those guilty of uncooperative behavior. Such taxes, fines and other penalties could increase the proportions of the provider and patient populations that adopt and persist in desired behaviors...

The statist schemes noted above, taking place in the U.S. and abroad, and the proposals to expand them are disturbing. But as I have gone about reporting in detail on these kinds of developments in recent years, what is even more disturbing to me is the conspicuous silence on the part of people, particularly leaders, who are prominent in the world of CAM (complementary alternative medicine). *see endnote

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), the 2004 Democrat candidate for President, and his running mate, Sen. John Edwards

To be sure, the incrementalism, and the political correctness, that enable the march to socialized medicine have lulled many people into a sense of complacency or into accepting and even welcoming its inevitability. “Health care as a right,” a concept first proposed by one worlders at the United Nations in 1978, has recently taken hold of a majority of the American population as an ultimate feel-good, do-good belief system. Canny commandantes of socialism have used Americans' guilt and compassion for others in this area to take things to the next level – to mobilize support for what is said to be the only option for a “failed” American health care system: universal health care provided to everyone by the federal government.

But finally, it is all based pretty much on feelings, and not intellect. If the latest opinion polls are to be believed, nanny state socialized medicine is widely felt by a majority of Americans to be the right thing to do – for the children, for the poor, for the uninsured, and so on. On the other side, standing in the way of progress (and even killing people, in the view of dissembling but influential ideologues like Michael Moore), are the big, bad, for-profit health care players including “Big Pharma,” the insurance industry, overpaid medical doctors, and so on.

Meanwhile, a serious inquiry into and an evaluation of what government controlled medicine would really mean, and what it has wrought in countries where it has been in effect, are way too complicated for most people to consider. At most, Americans may be willing to spend $10 and put aside two hours to watch a pro-socialized medicine propaganda film like Sicko, but that's about it.

There is simply no excuse for the myopic, head in the sand attitude of most CAM leaders regarding government-run universal health care. Alternative, innovative, natural medicine in the U.S. has flourished and grown in recent decades because of medical freedom and the modified free market of competition, such as it exists here (imperfect as it may be, but better than the restrictive government controlled systems of other countries). If CAM proponents don't know or fail to acknowledge this fact, then they are the victims, or the perpetrators, of the collective ignorance and historical amnesia that typify the times that we live in.

The fact is that whenever the U.S. government has gotten involved in health care, real alternative medicine, as opposed to the watered down complementary variety, has almost always taken a hit. And the government bureaucracies established in the 1990s to supposedly advance alternative medicine have had a stultifying and narcotizing effect on the field. Ultimately, the millions of dollars – hundreds of millions, actually – that have been made available to CAM leaders and their institutions since the start up of the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine in 1992 have bought complacency and silence on this, the most important freedom-related issue of our time – the push for government-controlled, mandated conventional medical care for all Americans. And now, John Edwards has made it succinctly and abundantly clear what's in store for all of us – not only people interested in alternative medicine, medical autonomy, and freedom but everyone in the general population, too – once we are forced into a government controlled health care monopoly.

 

Note: There are many instances of CAM's reluctance to criticize proposals for universal health care/socialized medicine. For example, over the summer John Weeks' Integrator Blog, which, as the name suggests, charts the integration of CAM into mainstream medicine, has published three “rounds” of discussion by CAM experts on the subject of universal health care inspired by Michael Moore's film Sicko. The third round can be accessed here, and the previous two discussions here and here. Most of the people commenting appear to support some degree of government-run universal health care. Meanwhile, at the three day long, fifth annual Health Freedom Conference (October 12-14, 2007 at the William Mitchell College of Law, St Paul, MN), there doesn't appear to be a single presentation on the subject of universal health care or the government's rapidly expanding role in the health care field. Instead, there are presentations on topics like Codex and “Work Being Done by FDA on Draft CAM Guidance Document and on AER Compliance.” Finally, at the 22nd annual convention of the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians in Palm Springs, CA (August 22-25, 2007), one of the keynote speakers, “urban cultural anthropologist” Jennifer James, PhD, who was particularly well received according to several attendees, vigorously promoted government-run health care to her rapt audience of naturopaths.

 

Peter Barry Chowka is a widely published writer and investigative journalist who writes about politics, health care, and the media. Between 1992 and 1994, he was an advisor to the National Institutes of Health. His Web site is: http://chowka.com.