Red Alert:

Big Brother Barack Is Coming and Health Freedom Is Hanging By a Thread

© By Peter Chowka

(February 28, 2009) I’ve been sounding the alarm for a long time, for at least fifteen years, to be exact, since Bill and Hillary Clinton proposed a mandatory socialist universal health care scheme in 1993.

The warnings were based on the actions of a growing number of prominent politicians like the Clintons to expand their political power by greatly enlarging the role of government in the $2.2 trillion a year field of American health care and, in so doing, to tie the hands of all doctors and patients in terms of medical freedom and autonomy.

Alternative medicine, and even its watered down hybrid orphan “CAM” (complementary alternative medicine), depended on medical freedom and autonomy.

It should have been obvious, then – but clearly, it wasn’t to most of the interested parties – that what remains of alternative medicine at the present time is particularly vulnerable to the collectivist trends sweeping across the American political landscape under the guise of universal health care.

Obama ascendant

Throughout his two year-long campaign for the nation’s top political job, Barack H. Obama promised to enact government guaranteed universal health care. He denied supporting single payer, the most extreme form, but in a speech in June 2003 he said “I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program.” In August 2008 Obama confirmed his support of single payer.

As I wrote on November 1, 2008, three days before the election, “It will be interesting to see what happens on November 4. . . If Obama comes out on top, it is likely that we will have seen the last of the once strong and autonomous alternative medicine field as it is subsumed under statist government-run universal health care.”

Now that he has the power of the presidency, Obama is moving forward with his plans to nationalize American health care, via the recently passed so-called stimulus bill – and, count on it, alternative medicine will soon be an endangered species.

Since he first appeared on the national stage in 2004, Obama has had most of the people in the CAM universe fooled – or maybe not. It’s possible that many CAM proponents were not in fact classic “useful idiots,” rather their inherent and ingrained leftist ideology has trumped common sense and what should have been the weight of their practical experience on the essential question of the primacy of freedom and autonomy in the successful clinical practice of natural medicine.

Now, one month into his presidency, Obama’s, and the Democrats’, so-called stimulus (really a spending) plan that passed the U.S. Senate on February 10, and the House of Representatives on January 28, has been revealed to contain stealth provisions that will completely transform for the worse the practice of medicine in the United States – with a direct hit, it should be obvious, on alternative medicine and medical freedom of all kinds.

Under Obama, health care freedom that has been in effect since the founding of the country will be replaced by a centralized government system that will usher in the process of limiting medical options, ending clinicians’ autonomy, and seizing control of the practice of medicine and patient care right down to the doctor’s office. All of these things will soon become the new norm because health care resources will be rationed – for the people, not for the elites, needless to say.

The vehicles for these changes are privacy busting government electronic medical records, which will be required of “every individual in the United States,” shadowing everyone from cradle to grave, and new bureaucracies, including the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, which, as Elizabeth McCaughey wrote in a highly recommended article published February 9 by Bloomberg, “will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective.”

McCaughey has been criticized for her analysis but it should be clear that the quote from her above (essentially a definition of rationing) will come to pass, sooner or later.

In an Op Ed published in the San Diego Union Tribune on February 27, 2009, Grace-Marie Turner, the president and founder of the Galen Institute, wrote “President Obama has signed legislation that creates a new federal health board in which 15 government officials will decide what medical treatments are good or bad. It's only a matter of time before payment policies follow their dictates. . . We need fewer bureaucratic programs that are slow, rigid, unresponsive and rule-driven. But if Congress and the Obama administration have their way and continue down the path toward greater centralized control over our health sector, we will lose the dynamic creativity of the marketplace that can respond to the needs and demands of consumers and get us to faster-better-cheaper medical care and coverage.”

Although former Sen. Tom Daschle, Obama’s choice for Health and Human Service Secretary who was supposed to shepherd health care reform through Congress, had to drop out because of tax problems, many of his statist proposals for remaking American health care have already made it into public policy via the stimulus bill. Of particular relevance is the new federal agency, referenced by McCaughey and Turner above, that will monitor treatments and outcomes and make and enforce clinical recommendations. It is modeled, as Daschle proposed, on NICE – the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence – the bureaucratic nightmare agency that controls and rations health care in the UK’s socialized medical system with deadly results that have been widely reported on the other side of the Atlantic.

The new future for American medicine is really quite simple. With the government in charge, national spending for health care, currently around $2.2 trillion annually, will be viewed in global or collective terms, with everyone supposed to get an equal share of the pie under the new reigning philosophy of “health care as a right.” Under Obama, the government is moving into a position of regulating, controlling, and doling out health care; from now on, the national health care budget will essentially be divided by the number of Americans to arrive at a figure – approximately $8,000 a year per capita – which will start to serve as a maximum or cutoff point, as it does in other countries with universal health care like England. Annual spending on an individual patient above that level will not be allowed.

CAM embraces universal health care

For years, if not for decades, there has been ample reporting and analysis on the deleterious role that government has played in medicine, including in terms of individual health care. Much of this reporting and analysis has come from socialist countries like the UK, which have long had universal health care and which are cited by Obama and other proponents of universal health care, erroneously, as somehow superior to the United States in terms of equitable coverage and outcomes.

In addition, one would think that personal experiences would confirm that statist health care is a fatally flawed option – a Faustian bargain.

Yet, in the world of CAM, there appears to be almost universal support for government-provided universal health care. I recall being surprised in the early 1990s when many CAM proponents expressed support for Hillarycare. Around 1996, for example, the director of a national association of naturopathic physicians told me that she supported government-run universal health care. Some more recent examples:

CAM czar James Gordon, M.D., the single most influential CAM proponent in government during the past two decades, recently went on the record as supporting single payer universal health care – the most socialist, draconian option.

Closer to the grassroots level, self-styled CAM leaders like Rima Laibow, M.D., John Weeks, and Mike Adams have all written praising Obama and his plans for reforming health care. On December 28, 2008, Weeks wrote approvingly of “Obama, Daschle, Harkin, Kennedy and the Emerging Society of Wellness.” For his part, Adams wrote on November 7, 2008 that we need a “national health insurance program that covers all citizens.” One year ago, on February 7, 2008, Adams wrote of Obama, “I'll take Obama over Clinton any day.” And so on, and so on.

At a recent high level academic CAM conference in California, attendees rose to their feet and cheered their approval when a photo of Obama was slipped into a PowerPoint presentation.

Electronic Medical Records and Evidence Based Medicine

The imminent policy changes in health care at the federal level in the U.S. signal the triumph of the unholy alliance of electronic medical records (EMR) and evidence based medicine (EBM – as reflected by the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology). EMR and EBM are in effect the sacraments of the secular religion of scientism that has now triumphed over reason, individual clinical experience, ages old traditions, and personal freedom. It is EMRs and EBM that will provide the objective- and scientific-sounding methods of controlling all Americans’ health care.

The field of CAM aside, the claim that electronic medical records will save money is unproven if not disproven. Even Newsweek.com, a left of center pro-Obama publication, published a piece by Factcheck.org on February 13 “Stimulus Swagger vs. Reality” which reported “The president also says electronic health records will save billions of dollars. But the Congressional Budget Office says that even a decade of expected savings are unlikely to pay back the government what the government will spend on health IT.”

Beyond the budgetary considerations, the concept of electronic medical records and its companion, evidence based medicine, come with serious and probably irreversible costs to privacy, autonomy, and freedom.

If EMRs are adopted, everyone in the country will, by law, be given a unique number, or “identifier,” which will follow the individual from cradle to grave much like the Social Security number. The identifier, a de facto national ID, will be the key to unlock a treasure trove – a life's worth of the most private and intimate data having to do with the complete history of a person's health status and his medical care. Every American's doctor visits, every medical test and diagnosis. . . every single drug and treatment prescribed, surgery performed, sexual problem reported, incident of depression or mental illness or illegal drug use suspected or confirmed-everything! – would by law have to be recorded digitally and warehoused in government data banks forever, for the purpose of unknown numbers and kinds of current and future uses, many of the latter not even foreseen yet.

The American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) explains “To be distinguished from a customized digital personal health record (PHR) that a patient controls, the EMR is standardized, interoperable, and controlled by the System.” Privacy will clearly be a thing of the past if EMRs become standard, especially under a government-run system.

Technology is advancing at a quickening pace in this area, and is helping to drive a plethora of questionable privacy-busting implementations. On June 25, 2007, for example, according to news accounts, the American Medical Association, which has supported universal health care since 2001, “adopted a policy [link is to a Word doc file]. . stating that [implantable human RFID tags or biochips, a.k.a. “spychips”] can improve the ‘safety and efficiency of patient care’ by helping to identify patients and enabling secure access to clinical information.”

Since it will be impossible to opt out of universal health care once it’s passed into law, an important corollary to the improved identification of citizens via their EMRs is the enhanced ability, and the necessity, of tracking everyone to make sure that they are in full compliance with the new mandates.

A major stated purpose of Electronic Medical Records and one of its strongest selling points in this age of scientism is to amass enough data to enable bureaucrat “experts” chosen by the government to measure “evidence” of medical “outcomes,” and to determine which therapies, drugs, tests, and other procedures are supposedly the most effective, both clinically and in terms of cost, according to the current scientific fashions. The final step is to publish standards of practice that every doctor and health care professional in the country will have to follow. These clinical directives from on high constitute the EBM or Evidence Based Medicine part of the “E”-quation. Also part of the plan is to monitor much more closely – and to attempt to modify and control – an individual’s behavior (eating, drinking, exercising, smoking, and other “lifestyle factors,” and even whether or not a person takes his medication including recommended or required immunizations exactly as prescribed) with improved health status as the promised outcome.

Like much about the complex field of modern medicine, the data pointing to EBM’s lack of efficacy is buried in the pages of difficult to decipher professional scientific journals, mind numbing think tank policy papers, obscure government reports, and the experiences of other countries that have experimented with EMRs and EBM. An excellent, easy to understand overview is provided by Bernadine Healy, M.D., former director of the National Institutes of Health and currently the Health Editor for U.S.News & World Report (USNWR). On September 11, 2006, in her USNWR column, Healy wrote

“Evidence-based medicine has the ring of scientific authority. But it’s not as self-evident as it sounds. . . Touted as a way to improve patient care and restrain unnecessary treatment, EBM sees itself as a major shift away from traditional medicine that emphasizes the expertise of the medical profession. That includes knowledge of the underlying nature of disease, mechanisms of therapy, basic and clinical research, and physician experience. The autonomy and authority of the doctor, and the subsequent variability in care, are the problems that EBM wants to cure.” And most important, “EBM carries its own ideological and political agenda separate from its clinical purpose.”

Newsweek cover February 16, 2009

Enter Mike Adams

On May 27, 2007, self-styled “health ranger” and omnipresent Internet natural healing and CAM pied piper Mike Adams wrote a story “Sen. Clinton announces national health insurance plan with prevention focus” at his site newstarget.com that linked to a fawning New York Times article; Adams wrote approvingly of Clinton’s proposal “It's Big Pharma's worst nightmare: A health care plan that would end the disease treatment monopoly in the U.S. . .”

Notwithstanding his consistent support of Clinton, Obama, and other statist politicians who have advocated universal health care, Adams, no doubt with his finger to the wind, more recently has emerged as somewhat critical of the direction health care is taking under Obama and the Democrats. To that end, Adams has launched a “grassroots healthcare revolution petition.”

In the petition, Adams advocates the “complete replacement for all existing health care payer systems” [emphasis original] with “a ‘socialized-free-market’ system of health care coverage, combining the universal coverage of socialized medicine with the personal economic decisions of free market behavior.”

The total incongruity of combining “socialism” and “free market” seems to have escaped Adams. Or perhaps his use of cognitive dissonance in this instance is another prong in the stealth campaign to remake America along collectivist lines. Indeed, Adams’ “petition” is making the Internet rounds, and several people have e-mailed me to say that it’s time to “get on board” with the petition.

Adams outlines his proposal for a “’Citizens in Charge’ health care system” that can most charitably be described as complete pie in the sky. He imagines a world of medical socialism funded by the government in which (I guess this is where the free market comes in, since the freedom inherent in the market-based approach gave birth to alternative medicine in the first place) CAM therapies, including anything the patient or clinician believes will help, without restriction, offered by licensed and unlicensed practitioners alike, would be made available and paid for by the government. Dream on.

For more information,

Economic Stimulus Bill Mandates Electronic Health Records for Every Citizen without Opt-out or Patient Consent Provisions

Institute for Health Freedom February 9, 2009

Stimulus for Socialized Medicine by David Catron

Health Care BS February 9, 2009

“Evidence-Based Medicine”: Ration Health Care, Hurting Patients by Twila Brase, R.N., P.H.N. Citizens’ Council on Health Care December 2008

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