Hanging By a Thread:
Health Freedom in America

© By Peter Barry Chowka

(July 20, 2009) On the morning of July 15, 2009, the big bold red headline of the Drudge Report screamed “RAHM IT THROUGH: NATIONALIZED HEALTH CARE IN WEEKS!” The word “Rahm” referred, of course, to President Obama's White House Chief of Staff, the partisan political street fighter Rahm Emanuel, who, it was reported, had decided to “ram” government mandated universal health care through the Congress before the August recess on a partisan vote basis, without the support of any Republicans.

And so, at last, here we have it: After years of incrementally moving toward this ignominious and dangerous point, there is now a 1,000 page Congressional plan (H.R. 3200) for “reforming” and transforming American health care – putting it under total government control – that will probably be passed and signed into law by Obama before the end of the year.

Organization chart of the House Democrats' Health Plan

Most of the debate – whether or not to have government-run universal health care – revolves around the issues of the exorbitant costs, inevitable tax increases, and impacts on the deficit, and hardly any of the discussion focuses on the transformation of one-sixth of the U.S. economy and the profound alterations of everyone's life, including the loss of medical privacy and freedom, that will result.

Since 1993, and increasingly in recent years, I have written and spoken out, to the point of near exhaustion, about the dangers of universal health care, especially regarding what's left of the field of alternative medicine. With a few exceptions, my extremely detailed and highly annotated warnings have fallen on deaf ears and have resulted in a lot of personal enmity and attacks directed at me.

For example, in 2007, when I criticized Michael Moore's film Sicko, a twisted and truly sick dis-infomercial for socialized medicine, I was accused of being a shill for Big Pharma and obviously a person who enjoyed gold plated health insurance. The reality is that neither is the case.

While the National Health Federation (NHF), true to its half century-plus long history, has often opposed universal health care, most other players on the CAM (complementary alternative medicine) front have thrown in their lot with Obama and the collectivists. John Weeks, for example, at his Integrator Blog site (he supported Obama in 2008), writes frequently about tidbit news items that suggest to him that interest in and viability of CAM are growing amidst the transition to a Draconian federally mandated allopathic health care model. Similarly, prolific Internet presence Mike Adams, while criticizing elements of Obama’s health care plans, supports a government-run system. In a July 17, 2009 article, Adams writes approvingly of Taiwan, noting “Taiwan runs a single payer system with no insurance companies mucking around with the paperwork or denying coverage to patients.” In the same article, Adams links to his “Health Revolution Petition,” in which he proposes “a ‘socialized-free-market’ system of health care that eliminates all health insurance and puts health care decisions back into the hands of the People.” Adams cites Scott Tips, President of the National Health Federation, and attorneys Jonathan Emord and Jim Turner (the Chair of Citizens for Health) as contributors in the “authorship credits” of his “socialized-free-market” petition.

Adams, by the way, like many from the CAM/integrative medicine field, targets “Big Pharma” as one of the – if not the – leading problem(s) necessitating government-run health care. In a section of his July 17, 2009 article, titled “How to slash health care costs by 90 percent,” Adams claims that “thirty percent [of the cost of today’s health care system in the U.S.] can be attributed to the monopoly profits of drug companies who routinely engage in price fixing fraud as a way to extract more money from state and national governments.” This claim may make people feel good but it is absurd. The reality, according to a 2004 report by the respected and non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS), is that Pharmaceutical Spending as a Percentage of Total Health Spending in the U.S. is only 12.3 percent. There are 23 countries ahead of the U.S. in this regard including a number that have universal health care. Poland, for example, spends 29.6 percent of its total health spending on pharmaceuticals. Even if “price fixing” could be eliminated, the savings would be a few percentage points, nothing close to “thirty percent.”

Longtime author, radio broadcaster, and natural health guru Gary Null, in an article at his Web site, recently joined the ranks of those who advocate government-run health care:

The government needs to immediately implement the groundwork for a universal health care plan. . . The health insurance industry should be forced out of business for the benefit of our nation's physical and mental health. This would save between 20 and 30 percent of all our nation’s healthcare costs and would easily pay for the demise of the private health insurance industry. It would also be a substantial savings for both employers and employees with disposal incomes. I propose an alternative model. Moving towards a single payer universal healthcare plan can be done incrementally by starting with a Single Payer system for those 50 plus million households earning less than $100,000. In later phases, employer plans can be absorbed into this model with a gradual increase in the household income range that would bring more families into a universal system.

And so it goes today in the worlds of CAM and “integrated medicine.”

At one time in the not so distant past, when true alternative medicine was available, many of its proponents realized the importance and were advocates of medical freedom, privacy, and choice – independent of big government involvement and control. In fact, in the decade of the 1970s, Libertarians and Conservatives, wary of big government, played decisive roles in helping to establish and popularize the viability of alternative cancer therapies which, for a number of years, carried the burden for all of natural or holistic healing during the dark period when natural healing was effectively suppressed. And most people in alt med back then, whatever their ideological preferences, seemed to realize that the government is not your friend.

Recognition of the threats to freedom – and to the privacy and choice that are crucial to any true clinical alternative – is today coming not from CAM but from groups like the Institute for Health Freedom (IHF).

The IHF’s monthly newsletter Health Freedom Watch, e-mailed to subscribers on July 15, 2009, contained several alarming articles. (The emphasis is by the IHF in its original e-mail.)

House Health-Reform Bill Establishes “Real Time” Data System to Determine Financial Responsibility and Eligibility for Health Care

The House’s health-reform bill released today (July 15)—titled “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009”—includes provisions for the federal government to establish data standards for: determining one’s “financial responsibility at the point of service” and deciding one’s eligibility to seek a “specific service” from a “specific physician” at a “specific facility.”  The section of the bill titled “Standards for Financial and Administrative Transactions,” reads: “(D) enable the real-time (or near real-time) determination of an individual’s financial responsibility at the point of service and, to the extent possible, prior to service, including whether the individual is eligible for a specific service with a specific physician at a specific facility, which may include utilization of a machine-readable health plan beneficiary identification card;…” See page 58 of the House's health-reform bill.

National ID for Health Insurance and Other Provisions Included in Senate HELP Committee Health-Reform Bill

In addition to the insurance mandates and public option cited above, additional provisions in the Senate HELP Committee’s “Affordable Health Choices Act” that may be of interest to health-freedom advocates include:

National health plan identifier:  The bill reads, “Not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of this section, the [HHS] Secretary shall promulgate a final rule to establish a National Health Plan Identifier system.”

Reporting of insurance status:  Every entity providing health insurance would be required to report to the federal government: the name, address and taxpayer ID number of each individual covered, the number of months during the calendar year each individual was covered, and  “such other information as the Secretary may prescribe.”

A requirement of IRS notice to taxpayers not enrolled in health plans of services available through the new exchanges.

Creation of a new federal agency to “encourage, as appropriate, the development and use of clinical registries and the development of health outcomes research data networks from electronic health records, post marketing drug and medical device surveillance efforts, and other forms of electronic health data….”

An amendment to the Public Health Service Act’s HIT [Health Insurance Technology] Policy Committee: “The use of certified electronic health records to collect and report quality measures accepted by the Secretary.”

Grants to establish community teams to support a medical home model:  The bill would provide for capitated payments to teams of health-care providers led by primary-care physicians.  It notes that “such team[s] may include specialists, nurses, nutritionists, dieticians, social workers, behavioral and mental health providers, licensed complementary and alternative medicine practitioners…”

Source:  “Affordable Health Choices Act,” Senate HELP Committee, July 2009:  http://help.senate.gov/BAI09A84_xml.pdf

Most of the debate on Obama’s and the Democrats’ plans for universal health care has focused on the costs and the likelihood of higher taxes to pay for an enormous new federal bureaucracy to regulate and control health care. The argument against the plan was given considerable weight on July 16 with the statement by Douglas Elmendorf, the head of the Congressional Budget Office, as reported by the Washington Post (July 17):

President Obama's plan to expand health coverage to the uninsured is likely to dig the nation deeper into debt unless policymakers adopt politically painful controls on spending, such as sharp reductions in payments to doctors, hospitals and other providers, congressional budget analysts said yesterday.

Meanwhile, there is scarcely any discussion of what universal health care will mean for personal freedom, privacy, choice – and quality of health care. The issues are really very simple, however. In interviews I conducted for articles about the proposals by the Clinton administration for universal health care in 1993, comments by two people stand out – as they offered incisive and concise summaries of the most relevant issues both then and now.
 

Nicholas Gonzalez, M.D., who practices nutritional cancer treatments in New York City, commented that national health care reform “could be the end of alternative medicine.” The government health care reformers, according to Gonzalez, “think that the reason people are sick is that they don't have enough high-tech medicine. But high-tech medicine doesn't even work for rich people! The real reason that people are sick is that orthodox medicine is asking the wrong questions. . . The goal of health care reform is to have a dictionary in Washington listing 'acceptable' treatments. If you look up 'breast cancer,' there are the 'acceptable' treatments – and anything else will be disallowed. They essentially want all doctors to conform to government standards.”
 

Reinforcing Gonzalez' points, also in 1993, journalist Jon Rappoport told me “The main strategy [of the health care reformers] is excommunication into the outer darkness. If you're a holistic doctor and they don't like what you're doing, you'll be guilty of practicing 'illegal medicine' and they can just disconnect you from the plan and banish you completely. Then you're no longer in the grid, you're just out there somewhere.”

Peter Barry Chowka is a writer and investigative journalist who writes about politics, health care, and the media.