Messina's Federal Budget, Chapter 18 Health & Human Services - why we need to abolish it

A selection and reading from my recently published book

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A reading from my recently published work on fixing the Federal Budget - and thereby Washington, DC - so that it serves the American people instead of the unaccountable blob of unionized public employees.

Eventually, all these readings will be packaged into an audiobook version of Messina's Federal Budget.  You get to hear it first!

Buy the printed book and Kindle here: https://a.co/d/d6GtsFY

Enjoy!

The Centralizing Politician Power Grab Myths About “Health Care” Costs

There are a few people who benefit from the insane rats’ nest of stupid rules and regulations standing between you, the American citizen and a person, say, a doctor, from whom you would like to receive, I dunno, let’s call it health care. You and your doctor are not among them.

The toady apologists for the centralizing totalitarian Statists like Paul Krugman tell us that emergent properties of our terrible system are not things that can be fixed, but are somehow fixed in place by the Hand of God Almighty. Things like insurance companies standing between patients and doctors. Things like “pharmaceutical formularies” which are massive bureaucracies adding a layer of costs between drug manufacturers and insurance companies.

Krugman will tell you that we “need” insurance companies because medical costs rise over time.

Did you catch the core error? He posits as a given that costs will rise. But he does not say why or how that price inflation occurs.

His very description of “why” health insurance is “necessary” to pay for medical costs is wrong. He posits that “because” costs are so high, the only way to pay for them is via complicated insurance run by the government either in whole or in part via regulation. But to take a similar example, it’s like saying “because” someone might get into a catastrophic car crash, the “only way” to pay for maintaining and running a car is via “insurance.” Can you imagine how much more cumbersome and expensive it would be to fill up your gas tank or get your oil changed if you had to present a “car insurance” card to the gas station before services?

Automobile insurance exists to protect against extreme events, not to pay for your weekly gas or oil filter change. There are numerous competitive options if you want to shop around for the best price/quality combination for brake realignment or minor repairs.

Similarly, there is no “need” for insurance for maintaining one’s car day to day. That is true for everything else in a free market economy. Yet Krugman and his pals – “health economists” – insist that somehow healthcare is sui generis a wholly different thing, immune to the salutary effects of price transparency and competitive markets. 

He’s wrong. It’s better to pay for things out of pocket, with complete price transparency before a doctor pokes you in the ribs and suggests an MRI, CAT scan and a full blood panel. As part of being an operating business in America, every doctor, hospital and everyone else in health care must post the price for their services or products so a customer can make an informed choice before committing to a legally binding commercial relationship.

Crazy, huh?  They should do what everyone else is required to do.  

Trump Demanded Price Transparency – The Swamp Waited Him Out

I make a lot of noise, so it’s quite possible President Trump heard this brilliant idea and decided to do something about it. I mean, this wacky idea of presenting prices to patients before they commit to services certainly would not have come up within the confines of Washington, DC. He may have heard it from someone else who had the equally brilliant insight.

No matter the cause, 24 June 2019, he signed Executive Order 13877, with the heady title Improving Price and Quality Transparency in American Healthcare To Put Patients First, demanding just that.[1]  The hospitals and insurers bitched and moaned and cried about how “impossible” it would be to come up with such price lists, which is odd because they are certainly able to charge people $90 for a Tylenol tablet after the pill has been swallowed. Given their ability to slap me with wildly exorbitant bills after discharge, I had assumed they could just, y’know, grab the prices from somewhere and print them up before I entered the operating theatre.

Maybe I am being unfair. Perhaps hospital bills are a quantum phenomenon.  They exist in a perpetual state of indeterminacy along a probability distribution which gets perturbed the more one tries to fix it in time and space, but the moment a sucker, er, patient is legally committed to pay the fee, the bill’s infinite potentiality field collapses into a single reified state which then causes the patient to faint in shock.

That sounds about right.

Fast forward to January 2024. Just think about all the times you have encountered a pre-service price list from The Health Care Industry since President Trump signed that Order into effect. Oh, right, you haven’t because they continue to flout the law.

Once again, if you work in an industry favored by a powerful political constituency, then feel free to ignore pesky things like laws and legal executive orders. But if you, insane prepper conspiracy theorist, don’t trust banks and prefer to keep $10,001 in legal tender in your home, the police and FBI can come seize it under “civil forfeiture” laws created under the Biden-sponsored Comprehensive Forfeiture Act of 1984, even if you are never even charged with a crime.

“Medicare for All” is Social Control, not Medicine

At its heart, ObamaCare was never about medicine, healthcare or insurance at all. It is about completing totalitarian state control over every aspect of your life, dear reader. 

In the United Kingdom, the stories of tragic wait times and poor hospital conditions are legion. But the main fundamental flaw in the UK system – which the ObamaCare trainwreck is designed to bring us in the form of single payer, one government health care system – is that it literally strips away an individual’s right over her body.

Given how much noise the chattering classes and the pro-choice Left make about “a woman’s right to choose,” you’d think those same people would be natural enemies of a system which strips in toto the right of an individual to make his or her own healthcare choices. But in the bizarre, dropped backwards through the Looking Glass world of Democrat Party politics, the only “freedom to choose” any citizen should have is discriminatory – only half the population is allowed to choose to have an abortion. All other medical procedures are not to enjoy the same privilege of freedom of choice and control over one’s body. 

The very logic of a single-payer, collectivist healthcare system means that your healthcare, fitness, choice to exercise or smoke are not yours at all – they’re ours in a very real, economically-binding way. Once “healthcare” is fully socialized, the real result is that “you” no longer exist. You are simply a number merged into a group, with no rights at all.

In fact, under single-payer systems, you don’t even have the right to try an experimental drug or treatment. In the US currently, if you have a horrible, terminal illness which is a near-term death sentence, you can sign a liability waiver to get into an early-stage drug trial, which you are willing to do on the chance that it may be the cure you’re praying for. In the United Kingdom, you are not allowed to sign up for an experimental drug. The reason why is bone-chilling: because if you, say, have three months to live and you take this experimental drug, that drug may extend your life 20 years, but may have severe side effects that render you, say, paraplegic and therefore make you a burden on the socialized medicine system, a burden which you would not have been had you just died quietly, politely and in a collectively-minded way in three months.

This kind of medical care rationing is not – and cannot be, under a centralized system – limited to only experimental procedures or medicines. As of 6 April 2019, the Times of London reported that a full two years after being told to stop withholding cataract surgery, the National Health Service was still doing so. In a headline startling in its clarity, the paper reports that “Elderly go blind as NHS ignores eye surgery rationing advice.”[2]  The Royal College of Ophthalmologists is appalled that because of cost cutting, the NHS wants to wait until elderly patients die before they become eligible for surgery to prevent or alleviate blindness.

Canada under the Trudeau government is busy encouraging citizens to commit suicide if they’re feeling a little down and cannot pay their rent. The supposedly humane law was started to allow serious 7^th standard deviation edge cases – two months to live, excruciating pain from late-stage liver cancer kind of situations – but in a terrifyingly short period of time has expanded to allow teenagers whose brains are not fully formed to call this life quits with government help if, you know, they’re not feeling so positive about thing just now. It saves the taxpayer money rather than treating the patient.

This is the sort of cold, brutal, centralized bureaucratic decision which Americans can come to expect if ObamaCare grinds to its logical conclusion of destroying the private market for medical care and insurance. The Democrats have spent and continue to spend along with their dimwitted media allies huge amounts of money and time pooh-poohing the “fake” bogeyman of “death panels.” They rightly understand that death panels issuing the very kinds of rulings which currently prevail in the UK for experimental medicines are precisely what central, single payer, socialized medicine demands.  Paul Krugman – rabid ObamaCare fan along with any other Socialist program proposed by anyone ever and my favorite, self-cleaning Socratic foil – in a rare moment of candor stated:

Eventually we do have a problem. That the population is getting older, health care costs are rising… there is this question of how we’re going to pay for the programs. The year 2025, the year 2030, something is going to have to give… we’re going to need more revenue…. Surely it will require some sort of middle class taxes as well. We won’t be able to pay for the kind of government the society will want without some increase in taxes… on the middle class, maybe a value-added tax. And we’re also going to have to make decisions about health care that has no demonstrated medical benefits. So the snarky version, which I shouldn’t even say because it will get me in trouble, is death panels and sales taxes is how we do this.[3]

There are so many things wrong with this brief statement, to unpack its every assumption and implication is like appreciating the infinite depth and layers of nuance to the most perfectly inspired haiku. Just how much significant meaning can one consistently wrong wingnut “economist” pack into 134 words? Let’s have a stab at it, shall we?

Table 6: Exegetical Interpretation of the Draft Dodger Generation’s Bad Ideas Summed Up In 134 Words

Paul’s Fun Statement accompanied by Messina’s Translation and Commentary

Eventually we do have a problem.

We sure, do, Paul, in the main because folks like you can’t leave well enough alone. I am betting very heavily that Paul’s intention with this very clumsy, almost grammatical sentence fragment is to make some Solomonic observation about an objective state of affairs which he believes cannot be altered, but merely addressed through the very expensive advice of a pack of folks who studied the same outdated equilibrium models of economics promulgated from Samuelson onwards. We do have a problem, but not in the way Paul thinks. The problem is the way Paul thinks because far too many horrible policies and decisions are forced on Americans because – thus far – we’ve permitted clowns like this to be in positions of authority. For those Americans who have been too busy to care, it’s worth recalling that the only private company that ever hired Paul Krugman for his advice was Enron.

the population is getting older

Well, for now, that appears to be the trajectory, but changes in migration patterns, birth rates or repeated influxes of, say, innovative coronaviruses from Chinese biohazard labs, could alter the demographic trends. On the positive side, once Americans wake up, shake their heads free of the bad ideas forced on us by FDR onwards, adopt the rational path forward described helpfully in this book, then young Americans who can once more pay for a year of college with the cash earned during the previous summer’s job, might start feeling optimistic about the future and start acting like busy little bunnies again, in the way the Greatest Generation did when war-weary men came home after being feted by Gigi in Paris and Beth in London for a few sweet weeks in 1945. But if the current population distribution trajectory continues, then, yes, the population in the US will skew older until the Boomers leave us all in peace. But leaving all of those complexities aside, the age distribution of the population is not an ironclad condition which predetermines whether the cost of anything – mobile phone service, sustainable bamboo flooring, frozen pizzas or “healthcare” – will rise, fall or stay constant over time. It is important to keep that firmly in mind, because this whole “folks are getting older” mantra is one of the linguistic tools our political and chattering classes use to form the subconscious impression that there is some solid, irrefutable relationship between ageing people and rising medical costs.

health care costs are rising

That most assuredly need not be true, which is what Paul wants you to believe. It is true now, given decades of stupid government policy and Americans’ delight in parasitic lawyers and the voters’ tolerance to date of completely value-destructive and cost-additive “insurance” and “benefits” bureaucracies.

there is this question of how we’re going to pay for the programs.

Fascinating. Nothing in here about quality of life, the dedication and self-sacrifice of years of study it takes to become a doctor, or the dedication to purpose of the nurses that care for patients. No mention of the fact that for millions of years, human beings were born, lived and died without ever seeing a doctor. No mention of the myriad personal choices – to smoke or not, to drink heavily or not, to exercise or not, to have unprotected sex or not – that go into every individual’s state of health. No mention of any of the things that normal people consider when thinking of healthcare. No mention of the fact that for every single elective, out-of-pocket medical procedure not covered by insurance, prices come down while quality rises in sharp contrast to all “covered” procedures whose prices do nothing but rise, rise, rise.

No mention of fixing the tax code and solving the nation’s addiction to unlimited credit, to leave more hard dollars in people’s pockets with which they can make their own medical decisions.

Nope! None of that, because all of those ideas diminish the authority of tinpot authoritarian nanny state brats. All that exists in the minds of centralizing control freaks is how “we” are going to pay for the collective “programs” which replace all individual choice with bureaucratic dictates. You’ve had about a decade of ObamaCare thus far – how are you enjoying your “health care” delivered by the same pack of fools who mismanage the DMV?  Costs have been skyrocketing every year since Obama jammed through his awful, lie-based takeover of 1/6^th of the economy. To which his apologists and the liars who are on record declaring their whole argument for ObamaCare was based on fraud and lying to the American people say, “Wow – but costs would have been higher without our passing this important legislation, that was so important that Nancy Pelosi wanted to “deem” it passed without making her Democrat Congressclowns go on record as voting for it, and further was so excited to force it into law because everyone would get to find out what was in it.”[4]

The year 2025, the year 2030, something is going to have to give

Notice that none of these meddling clowns ever addresses current problems, which might actually have a solution. (See, for example, this entire book.) No – that’s tough, you see, because you’ll get judged in real time as to how well your prescribed solutions work! When you say in 2013 that things will be tough 12 years from now, well, that’s just dandy.  

Beyond the long-dated, reputation-protecting mechanism, you’ll note that should some “crisis” occur between 2025-2030, in the minds of Fellow Travelers, the “something” that has “to give” can only mean higher taxes and lower quality of care. Implicit in Paul’s very being is that government control and heavy taxation are the only solution to everything, which would be an odd trait to observe in an “economist” if one didn’t understand that one of the three core defining characteristics of centralizing statists is a lack of irony. The other legs to their ideological stool consist of appallingly unjustified arrogance and a breathtaking amount of hypocrisy.

Logically, even if one supposes some “giving point” in 2025, what could “give” could turn out to be the entire, insane, bureaucratic micromanaging morass that does not deliver any actual medical care and just lines the pockets of societal parasites. We could actually have the system I propose here – which is great for us dumb working stiff Americans because it’s easy to understand and based on free choice, without the controlling oversight of our elite superiors.

we’re going to need more revenue

Ah ha! There it is! The poisoned, decaying heart of the Progressive’s terrible belief system. With all these complex moving parts – age-related infirmities, innovations in medicine, innovations perhaps in philosophical approaches to ageing, bad policy causing costs to rise – the default answer to every “problem” a Good Progressive perceives is to tax the living bejesus out of everyone they can focus the IRS on.

But there is nothing in the Constitution or anywhere else that says “We the People” must pay collectively for individual health care. That has been the operating assumption and therefore the ongoing destruction of quality healthcare in America since the late 1960s, a dumb reality we can put the brakes on whenever we want to. So while the Krugmans of the world see aggregate statistics about the “healthcare costs” of 350+ million people, comprising each $42 per pill aspirin administered in the hospital, or each ridiculous $275 “therapeutic massage” scammed out of the taxpayer by stupid laws in the People’s Republic of NewYorkistan, or crystal chakra realignment in the Bay Area at $385 a pop, or the hundreds of billions of dollars stolen by Medicare and Medicaid fraud because the government cannot be bothered to check that an invoice is genuine before paying it, rational people see a bloated, waste-filled, fraud-riddled system – and that’s before the parasitic trial bar ambulance chasers who form a core Democratic Party donor class levy an annual tax on every single doctor in the form of malpractice insurance premiums which costs then trickle down to each one of us who reluctantly goes for a doctor visit – which we don’t need to pay for at all.

We can tear down the entire stupid bloated edifice, so that the proven magic of free choice in a free-market economy can do what it has done in every single other area of human endeavor­ – raise quality while reducing costs. So even if from a policy perspective one wants to keep track of aggregate expenditures on health care, under a truly free system permitting Americans true choice – and not just in abortions, the only area of medical treatment the American Left sees as holy – in medical services, those healthcare costs will decline, not rise. But all of that is irrelevant – because no matter what happens to the statistics of healthcare costs, those costs – with a very few exceptions – will be paid for the way people pay for everything else, at the individual level.

Also, pay close attention to the political class’s constant insistence on mislabeling “government tax receipts” as “revenue.” Words matter, as we all discovered in 1Q20 when the Chinese Communist Government strong-armed the misnamed World Health Organization (WHO) into taking massive time and effort to insist that the whole world stop calling the Wuhan Virus which appeared in Wuhan, Hubei Province, Communist People’s Republic of China by its proper name – the Wuhan Virus which causes the Wuhan Flu – and start calling it some nonsensical thing like “COVID-19” instead. The American Left (and therefore the Media, which is mostly the same thing) in true Leninist Useful Idiot[5] mode, immediately – during what they thought was a scary pandemic, with real people dying, mind you – started scolding everyone that to call something by its proper name was somehow – wait for it…. wait for it… you guessed it! – “racist.” The Useful Idiots even got a Legislative Champion in the form of the junior Senator from California – of course – Kamala Harris, who introduced a resolution on the Senate floor condemning the use of “Wuhan Virus” as “racist,” this bit of theatre pandering to the already-convinced dingbat base happening while across the way, her Fellow Traveler Insider Trader and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was forcing the House of Representatives to repudiate 230 years of requiring in-person voting on national legislation.[6]

I digress. I told you Krugman’s utterances are like a multi-layered onion of rotten ideas. Anyway, calling the productivity-draining cash stolen by the government “revenue” makes it sound like something productive. It’s not. It’s a tax and a cost of keeping the country running. Certain well-defined and constrained areas of communal concern are worth paying taxes for – healthcare ain’t one of them – but make no mistake. There is nothing productive about government expenditures.  

Surely it will require some sort of middle-class taxes as well.

To be fair, this phrase could be shoved into anything Paul and his ilk write. There is nothing – Climate! Water! Poverty! Propaganda, er, “Education,” Shoelaces! – that falls within the purview of the average American liberal for which the answer is not a slew of new taxes on the middle class. To be fair, they always lie and say all the new taxes will fall on “THE RICH!” who already pay 60% of the nation’s taxes, are adept at skirting new ones and therefore every new tax aimed at THE RICH always ends up soaking the middle class because in the words of Willie Horton, that’s where the money is.

We won’t be able to pay for the kind of government the society will want

Oh, my! Is it just the Boomer in him that makes him say things like this on a continuous basis? Wow, the hubris! Have you, dear reader, yet noticed the so very subtle linguistic legerdemain all these freedom thieves deploy daily from the opinion pages of New York Pravda (where Krugman spews nonsense week in, week out) to the billions of hours of constant howling on cable “newsfotainment” propaganda factories to the legions of armchair social justice warriors whining behind their keyboards or dumbphone screens?

“The society” does not have the agency capability for active, transitive verbs. “The society” cannot “want” anything. “The society” as an emergent property of actual individual actors may be composed of mindless sheep or it may prove to be composed of active, freedom-loving individual citizens who prize the words of the Declaration of Independence over the current whiny plank of some pandering politician’s Gimme Everything For Free While I Suck My Thumb Helplessly platform.

Because if active citizens vote for and demand the “kind of government” that I lay out in these pages, then not only can We The People pay for that kind of government, but we’ll have  a rising cash balance in the Treasury for years to come – a true rainy day fund to deal with those consistently-appearing “rare events,” be they hurricanes, viruses or the emergency cash required to sharpen the citizenry’s sticks against the next Socialist huckster that shows up.

In this particular instance, Paul is waffling on about the healthcare market as distinct from the practice of medicine, though he stupidly conflates the two concepts. Paul posits that the individuals who constitute our society – I know, he hates individuality, but I’m trying hard to translate his totalitarian nonsense into real world terms my rational readers can apprehend – want a comprehensive Nanny State who slaps their bottoms when they’re born, coddles them literally throughout life and then decides via death panel when to quit giving them healthcare lacking in demonstrated medical benefits. That slew of constant hands-on interference would indeed cost a vast amount of cash, so if the “society” wants such insane restriction of personal freedom and collective existence, there’s not enough money in the world to “pay” for that insanity. Why he believes that the little people – not him, you can bet your ass – would want to be taxed at 95% and dictated to is kind of baffling, but then again, this kind of muddy thinking is par the Krugmanian course.

I leave it to you, dear reader, to ponder the myriad philosophical difficulties presented by the idea that some faceless bureaucracy will make all these decisions for you, because you are clearly not qualified to make important medical decisions. Who, then, is this magically qualified class of special Americans who are capable of making medical decisions for you? Do you get to turn around and make their medical decisions for them? I think you know the answer to that rhetorical question.

And we’re also going to have to make decisions about health care that has no demonstrated medical benefits.

Typical. Just typical. Krugman and his ilk get all hot and bothered about “healthcare” because it’s one of the areas that politicians have stupidly allowed useless parasites like him to meddle in. Rest assured, he’d love to make across the board decisions about everything in your life – from which type of light bulb you’re allowed to buy, how much fuel your car must consume, to which fabrics are permitted – all based on whether said product or service has “demonstrated benefits” to you, the poor sap who thought you lived in a free country.

“No demonstrated medical benefits.” That’s a fairly bland way of saying, “Oh, so you’ve got a horrible wasting disease and there’s a treatment which will extend your life another six months so you can spend more time with your family, but it’s really expensive and ‘we’ don’t want to pay for it, and if you think about it, is another 180 days really a demonstrable medical benefit? ‘We’ don’t think so; so no, you can die on time, please.”

In a free country the individual – GASP! Can you hear the liberals fainting and panting at the gall of people in post-woke America to actually use the outdated term “individual” in a non-pejorative or ironic way? – makes the choice about what risks to take and which health care choices present the possibility of a benefit to his or her life and wellbeing. The United States was once a nation of free individuals and will be again one way or another. A good start is for each of us to reassert the fundamental truth that a free society is one that prizes the rights and responsibilities of individuals instead of groups based on race, amorous predilection or any other artificial construct designed – ironically – to separate us from one another, rather than – as the squealing social justice warriors would have it – bring us together as a nation.

Here’s a fun thought experiment. Paul and his cronies want to make medicine a collective concern, meaning the individual has no meaning beyond a unit of expenditure and no rights at all beyond the right to pay crazy high taxes to be told to wait in line, hopefully long enough so that “we” don’t have to pay for any healthcare at all. Logically therefore he should be happy to have the collective make all his healthcare decisions. Collectively, the nation would be better off if we were spared his incessant, narcissistic bloviations so if Paul were, say, to come down with migraines which prevented his writing further damaging articles, while his painful migraines could be cured with caffeine and aspirin, should his agony be alleviated, society would once more be afflicted by his utterances. So “we” believe that a $0.85 course of treatment has “no demonstrated medical benefit.” No aspirin and caffeine for you, Paul! Not quite a death panel, but it sure would be fun to deliver him the news. Loudly. In a brightly lit room.

So the snarky version, which I shouldn’t even say because it will get me in trouble, is death panels and sales taxes is how we do this.

I can’t improve on this at all. I’ll let it stand as is.

Soak it in, kids. This is the kind of rank stupidity, immorality and appalling arrogance that gets one a fake Nobel Prize in Economics. (I say fake because Alfred Nobel did not create a prize for what he thought was no more useful than reading pig’s entrails by the full moon, and certainly never considered a real intellectual discipline in any way.)

I’ve saved this bit for dessert. You know where Krugman made these remarks in favor of a government deciding who gets to live and who gets to die based on cost-benefit analysis? He publicly endorsed the American government operate death panels in February 2013 at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C. Yup, that’s not a typo; in a Jewish house of worship in the Capital of a nation that sacrificed blood and treasure to put an end to Nazi Germany – a government that excelled at death panels – Paul Krugman extolled the virtues of the central government deciding who lives and who dies, based on the money available from sales taxes.

Leaving aside the spectacular tastelessness demonstrated in his choice of venue for these awful remarks, the weirdest part of Krugman’s sudden moment of candor is that for every other good or service in a free market economy, “death”/rationing panels and increased taxes are not required to improve quality and decrease costs. Quite the contrary. Part of what I find utterly baffling about the pure idiocy which seems to be part of everyone (or everyone who’s had an impact thus far) who approaches “healthcare” is leaving basic economic principles at the entranceway to the debate stage, without ever referring to those core ideas ever again.

But because the busybodies never tire of tinkering with a terrible system that is only getting worse with every attempt they make to “improve” it, they never want to state the logical conclusion which is a self-appointed group of elites who get to decide who lives and dies. Although it is an obvious logical outcome to a system of centralized cost controls, no politician wants to admit they’re electing themselves to the panel which decides your grandmother dies while theirs lives. Therefore they are at great pains to lie to you to convince you that – for some vague reasons they never get around to presenting – this would not happen in America. 

Maybe if Presidential Candidate and perpetual Communist Gadfly from Vermont Bernie Sanders could take a break from praising Chavez and Maduro’s Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela to, you know, check out the pesky details of the supposedly wonderful British NHS, his passion for universal government-run medical “care” in the US might be dimmed. Probably not. Facts have never been much of a concern for self-proclaimed Leftists. Bernie’s got four houses and is a millionaire, after a lifetime in “public service,” and as a Senator, he’s got awesome health insurance, so why should he care how awful healthcare becomes for the lumpen proletariat? Heck, true to form, like Marx, he considers rural dwellers to be “sacks of potatoes” not even worthy to be included in the supposed great Class Struggle being waged – in a theoretical universe far, far away – between Capital and Labor.

A man I had the great pleasure to meet, Les Halpin, was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease). In fighting his disease, he did a great deal of research into any and all promising, emerging treatments. In the course of his highly-motivated research, he came across some promising potential treatments which may have proven valuable and effective in treating if not curing ALS.

He lobbied for the right to try experimental medicines, and to allow all other Britons the same right. He set up a foundation so that other very sick people would be able to lobby the British government to try anything that might extend or improve their lives.

On the whole, with the exception of brave people fighting to restore individuality to medicine, far too many governments love the idea of complete cradle to grave control over your body. Americans have been conditioned to live in this bizarre universe.

That’s your future, unless we rational adults modify the course we are on.

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[1] Executive Order 13877—Improving Price and Quality Transparency in American Healthcare To Put Patients First | The American Presidency Project (ucsb.edu)

[2] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/elderly-go-blind-as-nhs-ignores-eye-surgery-rationing-advice-bp5x77t0g

[3] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/red-alert-politics/krugman-death-panels-and-sales-taxes-is-how-we-do-this

[4] She made this absurd statement while trying to tell us all how great tighter micromanagement of our personal medical care was going to be.

[5] Fun fact: While Vladimir Lenin called for the creation of a Comintern – Communist International – which would sow propaganda in (initially, in his plans) non-Communist countries, the fools who were to set about forging their own iron chains in the midst of freedom were actually named by Ludwig von Mises.

[6] 'The founders would be ashamed': Kevin McCarthy slams new remote Congress rules, Susan Ferrechio, New York Post, 15 May 2020. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA, 23^rd District) at the time was House Minority Leader.