The
Hindenburg catastrophe last week of Paul Ryan’s effort to replace Obamacare is
a marvelous opportunity for the
House Freedom Caucus – the
folks who submarined RINOcare – to offer actual Health Freedom as replacement
for the Democrats’ Health Fascism.
Recall
the House Pubs voted to repeal Obamacare 61 times – all without a bill of their
own to radically improve healthcare for all Americans. Then Ryan comes up
with a mess that makes things worse.
Thus
the Freedom Caucus can now offer real free market medicine – offer the freedom
to be healthy instead of being enslaved to the government for your health.
It
is critical to start by understanding that Obamacare is fascist.
First,
the “health care crisis” in America that Obamacare claims it is solving
hasn’t got anything to do with health care. There is a big difference
between an excuse and a purpose.
The
issue of health care is the excuse for the crisis. The purpose,
like that of its predecessors – the Poverty Crisis, the Drug Crisis, the Energy
Crisis, the Environmental Crisis (which morphed into the Global Warming-Climate
Change Crisis) – is to be a rationale for the expansion of governmental
power.
For
all of these alleged crises, their promoters offered one and only one
type of solution: vast government programs at taxpayers’ expense. None
ever offered free market solutions, or were used to increase individual
freedom, rather than diminish it.
Second,
Obamacare is a program of health fascism. It is not
socialist. It is fascist.
Socialism
is government seizure of ownership of private businesses, i.e.,
nationalization. Fascism is government seizure of control of
private businesses, i.e., thoroughgoing bureaucratic regulation of business
which retains only a Potemkin-like façade of private ownership. Fascism is the
authoritarian imposition of raw, naked government power – guns and prisons – to
control people’s economic lives.
Obamacare
does not nationalize the U.S. health care system, and make all doctors, nurses,
and medical technicians government employees. It simply puts a gun in
their faces and orders them to do as they are told or they face fines and/or
imprisonment. This is fascism.
Third,
the true alternative to health fascism is free market health care. Real
free market medicine – not phony-crony corporatist medicine where Big
Government colludes with Big Medicine, Big Insurance, and Big Pharma to
restrict competition. Such anti-capitalist corporatism is a fundamental
component of a fascist system.
Fourth,
there are three basic propositions of Health Freedom legislation:
1.
Health Care is so incredibly expensive in America because of government
intervention into the medical marketplace.
2.
Health care costs can only be radically reduced by an equally radical reduction
of government regulations and subsidies.
3.
Just as health care costs will be radically reduced, both the availability and
the quality of health care will be radically increased by such a reduction of
government intervention.
Given
this, here are:
Ten Specific Legislative Means By Which Health
Freedom Can Be Achieved
One: Open Enrollments in Medical Schools.
How
many times have you sought medical care and your doctor turned out to be from
Bangladesh? He or she may be quite competent, but nonetheless, there is a
critical shortage of American medical practitioners, which Obamacare is grossly
exacerbating.
The
American Medical Association (AMA) colludes with State Medical Boards
throughout the 50 states to severely limit the number of medical and nursing
schools, class size, number of teachers, and number of admitted students.
Each
year, tens of thousands of qualified students are unable to get into medical or
nursing school because of these artificial restrictions. There are an
estimated 10 to 20 qualified applicants for every vacancy available in U.S.
medical schools. Despite a chronic shortage of nurses, most nursing schools
have a two to three year waiting period for admittance.
An
instructive question to ask in this regard is: Why is there no shortage
of chiropractors?
The
answer is that chiropractors do not have a medieval guild which has the
political power to restrict entry into their profession. Chiropractor
colleges accept virtually all qualified applicants. Those who can’t complete
the curriculum or pass the licensing exams are weeded out. The number of
chiropractors is controlled by the market — not by a medieval guild like the
AMA.
Health
freedom legislation would terminate the AMA’s monopoly over the medical
profession, allow open enrollment at current medical schools, and the
construction of as many new medical schools as the market will bear.
Licensing
and testing must, of course, remain strict and reliable. But as the
number of physicians and nurses rises, competition between them for patients
will concomitantly increase, and thus their fees and salaries will go down with
the law of supply and demand.
This
also applies to the cost of a medical education in the first place: it
will decrease as the number of students and new schools increases.
Further,
health freedom legislation would end the AMA’s guildification of medical
practices.
Most
things done by doctors can be done by physicians’ assistants, most things done
by them can in turn be done by registered nurses, and them in turn by nurse
practitioners. You don’t need a Ferrari racing mechanic to fix a
Toyota. You need free market medicine with several layers of medical
practitioners.
Two: Reduce Hospital Administrative Costs
For
an average stay in a hospital, fifty to seventy-five percent of the charges are
due to administrative costs.
The
primary cause of exorbitant administrative hospital costs is the requirements
of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations
(“Joint Commission” or JCHAO), a
collusion of bureaucratic health care organizations and government
regulators. JCAHO imposes such a morass of regulations that hospital
administrators must focus their efforts on “compliance” with JCAHO
requirements, rather than on the welfare of their patients.
Further,
not every patient needs to stay in a tertiary-care hi-tech hospital, replete
with MRI and CT scanners, with a capability for coronary by-pass and heart
transplant surgery. Some patients merely need a few days of IV
antibiotics and rehydration, along with TLC observation. This could be
provided by a small low-tech hospital or overnight clinic.
But
the JCAHO requirements, which set the standards of hospital compliance, do not
differentiate between large and small hospitals. All must meet the same
excessive criteria necessitating huge administrative costs, making low-tech
hospitals economically impossible.
For
example, computer system/recording needs are not the same for small vs. large
hospitals, yet ObamaCare forces all, big or small, to buy big expensive
systems.
Health
Freedom legislation would eliminate “one-size-fits-all” JCAHO hospital
compliance standards, allowing the operation of “low-tech” small hospitals with
minimal administrative overhead.
Three:
Eliminate State Mandates and Regulatory Barriers on Health Insurance
One
primary reason for the high cost of health insurance today is the monumental
number of required benefits health insurance policies must provide imposed by
state regulators. Today there are over one thousand mandates on
everything from hairpieces to marriage counseling. As a result, insurers
are legally prohibited from supplying low-cost basic health insurance.
Health
Freedom Legislation would allow insurers to offer low-cost, basic health
insurance policies with no state mandated benefits whatever.
Such
legislation, according to a number of studies, would reduce health insurance
policy cost by twenty percent or more. Needless to say, Obamacare
nationalizes the problem and makes it far worse – requiring, e.g., that all
policies must include abortion coverage.
Another
major cause of high health insurance costs is the regulatory barriers
inhibiting small businesses from forming risk pools. Two-thirds of all
employed but uninsured workers are either self-employed or work for firms with
fewer than 100 employees, and cannot afford individual or small group policies.
Health
Freedom Legislation would eliminate all regulatory barriers such as business
commonality and geographic proximity requirements to small businesses from
freely combining into common insurance risk pools. It would further allow
non-business organizations – churches, unions, or any group of people formed
for whatever reason – to form similar pools for their members.
Such
“small market” reform would make health insurance dramatically more affordable
to millions of Americans. Such reform will be bitterly opposed by the
large major insurance companies, because it would result in competition from
deregulated small insurance companies. This opposition must be
disregarded.
Four: Give Health Care Providers A Tax Credit For Charity Work
One
of the major sources of the “health care crisis” necessitating Obamacare, its
advocates say, is the tens of millions of uninsured Americans who cannot afford
medical care. They are regarded by the medical industry as “non-payers”
to be “turfed” to the county hospital and receive minimal treatment.
The
quality of their medical care would be very different if they were looked upon
not as a liability, but as a tax credit.
Health
Freedom legislation would allow health care providers — physicians, nurses,
medical technicians, pharmacies, and hospitals — to deduct from their personal
or corporate income taxes an appreciable amount of the income they would have
derived if their charity patients paid the normal fees.
Such
legislation would result in physicians, hospitals, and other health care
providers fighting among themselves to provide free (to charity patients), tax
deductible (to them) health care.
Such
an incentive to provide free care would dramatically reduce Medicaid and
Medicare costs — more than compensating for loss of income tax
revenues. The ultimate savings to the taxpayers would be astronomical.
Five:
Restore the 100% Deductibility of Health Care Expenses
Throughout
most of this century, individuals were not taxed on the money they spent on
health care. When Congress eliminated the tax deductibility of most
medical expenses, it made medical care and health insurance prohibitively
expensive for individuals to pay for on their own.
As
a result, employer-provided health care and insurance – the costs of which
corporations can deduct and does not count as income to the employee – is the
only option for workers. For them, their choice is restricted to whatever
plan(s) the employer offers, and they lose their coverage once they quit or are
fired. For those millions of workers who can’t get employer-provided
insurance, they simply must do without.
The
solution is 100% deducibility for medical expenses. One Congressman
consulted for this report estimates that “this one simple reform will enable
as many as 15 million Americans who cannot now afford it to gain access to
healthcare and health insurance.”
This
measure would greatly expand the health insurance risk pool, enabling insurers
to offer more options and coverages while reducing premiums. Further, the
Congressman observes, it would “dramatically increase marketplace competition
for healthcare and health insurance, as perhaps 100 million more people enter
the market to shop for the best among all available services and insurance
plans.”
Health
Freedom legislation would broaden the category of deductible medical expenses
to include alternative and preventive health care. Traditional
establishment medicine is limited primarily to medication, surgery, and medical
devices. It should more properly be called “disease care.” Genuine health
care would have its primary focus on prevention of illness and health
maintenance, and subsequent focus upon intervention to restore health.
Alternative
therapies as acupuncture, nutritional and herbal supplementation, EDTA
chelation, and applied kinesiology have this primary focus. Surely, the
absolute best way to reduce health care costs is for people not to get sick in
the first place.
Health
Freedom legislation would grant 100% tax deductibility to individual tax payers
for all healthcare expenses, including health insurance, and medical,
pharmaceutical, and alternative/preventative expenses. It would further
encourage insurers to include alternative/preventative therapies in their
coverage.
Health
Freedom Legislation would also create tax-exempt Medical Savings Accounts
(MSAs, or Medical IRAs), allowing individuals to set aside tax-free up to
$3,000 per year for medical expenses.
In
addition, Health Freedom Legislation would make health insurance portable,
through minor changes in existing COBRA legislation, by allowing workers
between jobs to pay (tax-deductible) premiums directly to the insurer.
Many
employees feel trapped in their jobs today because they cannot afford to lose
their employer-provided medical coverage. These proposals would liberate
them to seek their own coverage, give them the option of taking their coverage
with them after they leave their job, and provide them with tax incentives for
life-long savings for their health care needs.
Six:
Reduce Malpractice Insurance Costs
Malpractice
insurance costs are a major source of higher health care expenses. The
insurance premiums have skyrocketed due to multi-million dollar awards made for
“pain and suffering,” which are orders of magnitude beyond the plaintiff’s
medical expenses.
Health
Freedom legislation would eliminate “pain and suffering” malpractice settlements;
limit malpractice settlements to all costs of the patient’s malpractice-related
medical bills; and limit payment to patient attorneys to normal fees,
prohibiting attorney commissions of a substantial percentage of the total
settlement.
This
legislation would cause a drastic reduction of malpractice premiums, enabling
doctors and other health care providers to lower fees. (Remember that the
increase in competition via proposal #1 above gives the incentive to do so.)
In
addition, physicians should be legally enabled to forego buying malpractice
insurance at all, supplanting it with: legally-binding liability
waivers and agreements with their patients to purchase their own malpractice
insurance. If the physician performed malpractice, the patient’s own
insurance company would pay him.
Seven:
Repeal the Kefauver Amendment
Prior
to 1962, for a pharmaceutical company to gain FDA approval for a new drug, it
had to prove that the drug was safe. But in the wake of the Thalidomide
scare, the Kefauver Amendment was passed, requiring that a new drug, to gain
FDA approval, must be proven not only safe but effective in curing or
ameliorating a specific disease.
Proving
a drug’s safety is not that difficult or costly. It is proving its
effectivity that is primarily responsible for the current situation: it
now costs an average of over $800 million, takes up to twelve years and
requires an average of 40,000 pages of documentation to get one new drug
approved by the FDA.
The
primarily public concern should, appropriately, be with the safety of given
medication. But the individual patient, in consultation with his doctor
or health professional, should be the judge of whether the medication is
working out or not.
Health
Freedom legislation would repeal the Kefauver Amendment, making proof of a
drug’s safety only requirement for FDA approval.
No
legislative act could more contribute to reducing pharmaceutical costs than
this.
Further,
the Kefauver Amendment is the primary bottleneck in the flow of medicinal progress.
It creates an enormous logjam delaying for years getting new drugs on the
market which could have been saying countless lives during those years.
It creates such impossible expenses and regulatory disincentives that many
promising drugs are never developed at all.
Thus,
no single legislative act could save more lives and contribute more to the
health of Americans that the repeal of the Kefauver Amendment.
Realize, though, that the phony-crony corporatists of Big Pharma will
fanatically oppose this. Reduced costs of drug approval opens the door to
competition.
Eight:
Allow Truthful Health Claims for Nutritional Supplements
If
there is one legislative act that could compete with the repeal of the Kefauver
Amendment in saving lives and reducing health care costs, it is this.
The
evidence that such nutrients as Vitamin C, Vitamin E, and selenium can
radically reduce the incidence of heart disease and cancer – the two diseases
which cause more deaths and are responsible for more health care spending than
anything else – is simply overwhelming.
Yet
the FDA has — let it be stated candidly — a perverse bias against nutritional
supplements. The “knife-and-fork” mythology prevails: that “you can
get all the nutrients you need from a well-balanced diet.” Getting three
grams of Vitamin C daily (the optimal amount for reducing risk of heart disease
and cancer) from oranges would require eating sixty oranges a day – and be far
more expensive than taking one or two capsules. (Not to mention the diabetes
risk from so much sugar in the oranges.)
The
FDA enforces this bias by threatening a nutrient manufacturer who supplies
information about the health value of his products with prosecution if he does
so without FDA’s express approval. No matter how truthful and supported
by scientific evidence are the health claims, the FDA will attempt to fine or
imprison the manufacturer for making an “unapproved health claim.”
This
policy is such an egregiously clear violation of the First Amendment protection
of free speech that in January 1999, the Ninth Circuit Federal Court in
Pearson v. Shalala
determined that FDA regulations regarding unapproved health claims for certain
nutrients was a violation of the First Amendment.
The
FDA’s implementation of the ruling has been slow and obstructive ever
since. Thus to this day it has managed to prevent widespread dissemination
through nutritional advertising of how 400 i.u. of E and 2,000 mgs. of C per
day via supplements can reduce one’s chances of heart disease or cancer by over
40% — which would save hundreds of thousands of lives and save billions of dollars
in health care costs each year.
This
is just one example with two nutrients. The savings in lives and money
applied to all nutrients is far greater.
Health
Freedom legislation would, therefore, force the FDA to abide by Pearson v.
Shalala, and prohibit the FDA from threatening any nutritional
or medicinal manufacturer or supplier for making an “unapproved health claim”
if that claim is truthful and non-misleading.
The
FDA’s latest attack on the nutrition industry is to require the same “good
manufacturing practices” (GMP) requirements as for pharmaceutical
companies. The purpose is to make it too expensive to produce
supplements. The solution is to replace GMPs entirely with purity
standards. All that should matter is the purity of the supplement or
pharmaceutical, however that purity is achieved.
Nine:
Remove Government Restrictions Regarding the Importation of Foreign Drugs.
While
not widely known, it is currently legal for an individual to import a
“reasonable” amount (e.g., a three-month supply) of a medication for personal
use. Yet it remains illegal to promote or profit from such importation.
Most
Americans are consequently unaware of their drug importation rights and do not
know how to obtain medication overseas. Further, those who do are
frequently harassed by the Postal service, DEA, FDA, and Customs.
Health
Freedom legislation would allow the promotion of and profit from importation of
foreign pharmaceuticals. It is important to note that most medications
sold in the U.S. are sold overseas for pennies on the dollar over the U.S.
price. These medications are manufactured by foreign divisions of the
same companies that make them here in the U.S.
Quite
often, in fact, many medications sold in the U.S. are actually re-labeled
foreign-manufactured drugs.
Ten:
Allow the Purchase of Non-Controlled Medications Without Prescriptions
An
American visiting a pharmacy overseas, say in Europe, for the first time, is
astounded to discover that the medications he needs cost a fraction of their
U.S. cost – and that he can purchase them over the counter without a
prescription. Medications requiring a doctor’s prescription is the
exception, not the rule, in most countries in the world.
The
incidence of adverse drug reactions is no higher in these countries than in the
U.S. Nor is medication abuse. What is different is that in America,
you must schedule an appointment with a doctor, take the time to see him, pay
him $40 to $75 for an office visit, so that you can get a prescription.
And
because you can only get the medication needed by prescription, the
pharmaceutical company may charge much more money for it.
Over-the-counter medications usually cost much less than prescription
medications.
Health
Freedom legislation would allow all non-controlled, non-addictive medications
to be purchased over the counter without a prescription.
Dramatically
reducing unnecessary doctor visits, and reducing prescriptions prices to
over-the-counter price, would greatly contribute to lowering health care costs.
***
Conclusion:
*Government
programs and regulations are not the solution to health care problems.
They are the cause of the problems in the first place.
*Only
by offering a genuine alternative to Obamacare can the threat it poses to
America’s health care system be removed.
*Only
by offering genuine free market solutions can America’s health care system be
improved and be made affordable.
It
is carpe diem time for President Trump, the Freedom Caucus, and
Republicans. The Ryancare Debacle is giving them a priceless opportunity
to live up to their professed free market principles and provide an alternative
that really will work as opposed to the Democrat Disaster.
The
choice must be made clear: Health Freedom that can succeed as advocated
by Republicans, or Phony-Crony Corporatist Health Fascism that is now a proven
pathetic failure advocated by Democrats.
The
choice and the issue really is and must be between freedom and fascism.
HEALTH
FREEDOM AND HEALTH FASCISM – To The Point News
