AMERICAÕS SOCIALIZED HEALTH CARE
by Dr. Lawrence Wilson
© April 2024, L.D. Wilson Consultants, Inc.
All information in this article is for
educational purposes only. It is
not for the diagnosis, treatment, prescription or cure of any disease or health
condition.
Health care
systems in most developed nations are in financial difficulty. Health benefits are being cut back due
to exploding costs. Degenerative illnesses such as diabetes and cancer are at epidemic
levels in spite of new drugs and treatments. While doctors, politicians and
insurers blame each other, they rarely mention the real problem.
Skyrocketing
costs are due to the structure of health care in all these nations. All are
mainly socialized, including America. This means they operate as top-down
bureaucracies, out of touch with peopleÕs real needs.
THREE HEALTH CARE SECTORS
America
really has three health care sectors:
á
The socialized sector comprises
about 65-70% and includes Medicare, Medicaid and the Indian Health
Service. It also includes the
Veterans Administration, the Public Health Service, programs such as Kidscare
and the bulk of medical research. The latter includes the National Institutes
of Health, National Cancer Institute, National Heart Institute and about 30
other government institutes. The ÔdonorsÕ for this research have little say
over what or how wisely their health research dollars are spent.
All
the above are funded from taxes confiscated from the people at the point of a
gun, making them a less-than-compassionate system. All are insulated from the health care marketplace and thus
from rational decision-making. All
are run as huge bureaucracies, with their inherent problems of fraud and high
administrative overhead. Medicare
rules alone are 133,000 pages.
This makes the 10,000-page income tax code look like a model of
simplicity.
á
The regulated sector, which is
called the private sector, comprises most of the rest of the health care system. It is not a free market or private
sector by any means. The correct
word is the over-regulated sector because it is riddled with thousands of
cartel-inspired rules and regulations that cripple most of the real competition
from alternative method of healing, for example, and from alternative healing
devices that must be approved by the FDA, which is thoroughly corrupt and does
not allow most of them.
á
The true private sector is very
small in health care. These are
mainly unlicensed ÔhealersÕ who offer a variety of services, almost under the
radar of the regulated and socialized sectors of health care. Yet they care for thousands of people,
generally with simple, natural healing methods such as nutrition, herbs,
massage, foot reflexology, shamanic methods, bodywork and a few others.
THE WAR ON CANCER
An
example of the dismal failure of the socialized sector in America is the Ôwar
on cancerÕ, administered by the National Cancer Institute. It has cost taxpayers some $30 billion
over a 35-year period. After
adjusting for a longer life span, between 1950 and 1989, the incidence of
cancer rose by about 44%. Breast cancer and colon cancer in men
have risen about 50%, while some others have risen 100%. (See Epstein, S.,
Losing the War on Cancer, Int J Health Serv., 1990 (20)1:53-71 and Epstein, S., Evaluation of
the national cancer program and proposed reforms, Amer J Indust Med., 1993;
24:109-133). A recent
article in the Journal of the AMA was entitled "Are Increasing Five-Year
Survival Rates Evidence of Success Against Cancer?" The answer was, No.
(JAMA, 2000, 284(4) June 14:2975-2978).
The
news mostly announces new cures and new drugs, but nothing about the waste of
money of federal cancer research.
A recent news broadcast said some cancer had declined Òdue to lifestyle
changesÓ. For this we paid $30
billion. However, this waste is
predictable because national research laboratories are not primarily interested
in a cancer cure, no matter what they claim. They are interested foremost in
keeping their jobs and second in getting more money next year from Congress.
This is the nature of all bureaucracies.
PRIVATE HEALTH CARE?
The
so-called private sector of American health care is better termed the regulated
sector. It includes insurance companies, HMOs and licensed physicians. To
receive any government reimbursement they must "play by the rules"
imposed by the socialized sector. As a result, this sector is mainly an
extension of the socialized sector.
Insurance
companies are burdened with over 1000 state and federal mandates regarding what
services they must cover. HMOs are also heavily regulated and are in fact
creations of the US Congress via the HMO Act of 1973. Without government
subsidies and overrides of state laws that forbade physicians from being paid
to deny care, they would not exist.
Medical
schools also receive government subsidies and grants. This means what is taught
is influenced, if not dictated, by these funding sources. Physicians are regulated by state
licensing boards and, of course, must abide by Medicare and HMO regulations if
they choose to work in these settings. To call any of these aspects of the
health care system "private" is a joke.
THE FREE MARKET SECTOR
Perhaps
two percent of the health care system is private or free market. It is composed
of the unregulated, non-mainstream holistic and alternative healing schools and
practitioners. People pay cash for their services and products. Practitioners
and suppliers must respond to peopleÕs needs to stay in business.
I
have a medical degree but have worked as an unlicensed nutrition consultant
(not a dietitian) for 29 years. My attention is focused 100% on what clients
need, not on getting grants or subsidies, receiving insurance reimbursement or
paying lobbyists to plead my case in Washington. In the free market sector, costs for vitamins, for example,
have decreased.
Sadly,
many alternative practitioners who were shut out of mainstream medicine have
lobbied for licenses. There is no
real need, except they can charge more, keep out the competition and hopefully
force insurers or the government to reimburse their services. These include chiropractors, some
naturopaths, acupuncturists, physical therapists and others.
THE MEDICAL CARTEL
A
cartel occurs when one organization controls the entire production and
distribution of a commodity. It is
most important to understand that medicine in America is a cartel. Through licensing and other laws
enacted in the early part of the twentieth century, one group, The American
Medical Association, controls how many medical schools exist, how many students
enroll, what is taught in the schools, the availability of hospital
residencies, and indirectly through licensing laws, who will get jobs in
medicine. No other industry in
America is so tightly controlled by one group or union.
Alternative
therapies and practitioners have been ruthlessly suppressed, with their
proponents often being run out of the country. Thousands of Americans flee each year to Mexico and Europe
to obtain products and therapies banned in the United States, but in use for up
to 50 years elsewhere.
The
kingpin of the cartel is the restrictive state medical licensing laws, passed
in the early part of the twentieth
century. Previously, there were no
licenses and the health care system worked well. However, the drug doctors were not making enough money. The AMA, formed in 1847, was quite candid about their
intentions. They sought vigorously
to reduce the supply of doctors by eliminating their competition and
controlling the number of medical graduates. By their efforts, the number of healing schools fell from
140 in 1900 to 77 in 1940.
The
purpose of a cartel is to improve the income of its members. From this perspective, American health
care is a resounding success.
Goodman and Musgrave, in their excellent book, Patient Power, explain that Òthe AMA
endorsed the idea of a medical cartel and made participation in it an ethically
mandatoryÓ. (p. 140)
In
his book, Price
discrimination in Medicine, Kessel states ÒThe delegation by the state
legislatures to the AMA of the power to regulate the medical industry in the
public interest is on a par with giving the American Iron and Steel Institute
the power to determine the output of steelÓ (p. 29.)
THE FDA AND THE DRUG INDUSTRY
The
large drug companies and the FDA operate pretty much as a unit. Anyone who believes the FDA is an
impartial or even helpful agency needs to read The History of a Crime; How Could It Happen by Harvey
Wiley, MD, first director of the FDA.
In the book, which was banned for a time in the US, he meticulously
details how the FDA became infiltrated by food and drug companies and its
mission completely subverted. The
same adulterated foods Dr. Wiley objected to in 1906 – bleached flour and
sugared, caffeinated soft drinks – are still approved by the FDA 100
years later. As a physician, I
believe no other single agency has caused more deaths than the FDA.
Physicians
are the legal drug pushers in our society. Those that step out of line and prefer to prescribe
vitamins, herbs or non-patentable drugs often lose their licenses, though they
do no harm. Only one state,
Arizona, has a second medical homeopathic board that allows medical doctors to
escape from under the thumb of the state board of medical examiners and
practice as they see fit. In the
past two years, a few states enacted laws to protect physicians from losing
their licenses just because they use methods unapproved by their medical board.
Through
physician licensing and hundreds of other rules, only those who practice drug
medicine hold licenses, work in hospitals and HMOs, and direct government
research institutes. This effectively blocks change. Most alternative health
practitioners who practice a far less expensive type of healing are shut out of
the mainstream.
Special-interest
laboratory laws also abound. In America one cannot walk into a laboratory and
request a cholesterol test. One must first go to a doctor to obtain ÔpermissionÕ.
Results may not be sent to the patient, only back to the doctor. This means
another doctor visit. Thanks to these rules, a ten-dollar test may cost $100.00
or more. The extra cost discourages people from caring for their health.
Instead, they wait until a crisis occurs, which further raises the cost of
health care. In Mexico, by contrast, one just walks into a laboratory, orders
the test and receives the results.
DEREGULATING HEALTH CARE
Whenever
an industry becomes mired in special-interest rules, deregulation is the
answer. It is a healing process that many industries periodically need. America
deregulated trucking, airlines, the phone system and power generation. In every
case, dire predictions of chaos did not come true and the public benefitted
greatly. Power deregulation has been very successful everywhere except
California, where it was not done correctly. This is important, because medical
deregulation must be fair and encourage competition in order to benefit the
public.
Private
regulation of health care is not new.
For her first 120 years, America had a true free market health care
system free of government interference.
Herbalists, hydrotherapists, nature cure practitioners, allopaths or
drug doctors, homeopaths, osteopaths and others offered services and competed
with one another. There were few
licensing laws so no group had a legal advantage. Whoever helped people the most prospered. Competition between many kinds of
practitioners kept prices low, people paid for exactly what they wanted and our
health statistics ranked first in the world. Today America ranks 19-22nd in the world in many
health care areas.
PREVENTION AND PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY
The
biggest problem with the drug medicine cartel is that drugs and surgery do not prevent disease, do not
address deep causes of disease and do not make people healthy. They mainly
suppress symptoms. According to the American Public Health Association, 48% of
the determinants of disease are now due to "behavioral lifestyle",
25% are due to genetic constitution, 16% to the environment and only 11% are
due to lack of access to medical care. Often drugs make people sicker, which
only adds to the cost. Malpractice lawsuits due to harm from the system add
even more cost.
According
to a recent article in the Journal of the AMA (JAMA 2000 July 26;284(4):483-5),
modern medicine is the fourth leading cause of death in America, just behind
cancer, heart disease and strokes.
This only includes deaths that occurred in hospitals. The Nutrition Institute of America
completed a broad survey of the side effects of drug medicine. They found that adverse drug effects
and medical errors account for some 669,000 deaths, making it the leading cause of
death in America. A 2009
report by Gary Null, PhD, entitled Death By Medicine also found that modern medicine is the
leading cause of death in America.
A NEW PARADIGM
An
entirely different model of health care is possible. Instead of focusing on
diagnosis and treatment of disease entities, it focuses on supplying missing
factors of health. The new model is a true science of preventive medicine.
There is no reason to wait to supply the factors of health. Prevention is
hundreds of times less expensive than treating a condition when it has fully
developed.
The
new model uses more sensitive assessment methods that detect imbalances long
before a disease occurs. Whether by checking one's spine, hair tissue mineral
analysis or acupuncture pulses, small problems can be detected and corrected
before they become serious ones. It is the only way to control health care
costs and really improve peopleÕs health.
The
new model stresses participation and presumes the patient is responsible for
his health. Changes in diet and lifestyle can only be recommended.
Self-discipline and desire to be well are required. An adult-adult or
client-consultant relationship with the doctor replaces the current
parent-child relationship. Patients need to ask a lot of questions. Taking responsibility
is healing in itself. It is empowering, replacing the futile and energy-wasting
attitudes of fear, denial and self-pity.
The
new model redefines health. It is not just an absence of cancer or heart
disease. It is the act of relating harmoniously with oneÕs physical, emotional,
intellectual and social environment. Health is never a commodity that can be
bought and sold, doled out to the poor or guaranteed by a government agency.
All such thinking is incorrect. Health is an outcome of understanding oneself
and perfecting oneÕs relationship with oneÕs surroundings.
ADOPTING THE NEW MODEL
The
health care cost crisis offers an opportunity to view health care like any
other industry. There is no market failure. How can there be market failure
when there is almost no health care market, in the sense of free agents who
willingly buy and sell based on free access to information?
Deregulating
health care would have to be part of dismantling the welfare state, as the two
are closely related. Medical licenses
are not only the basis for the cartelÕs control. They are meal tickets for any doctor who wants to
participate in the welfare state.
No one mentions how unfair this is. All Americans pay for the welfare system, but only licensed
practitioners receive benefit in the form of reimbursement for their services.
Replacing
licensing with private certification would break the power of the cartel and
help restore a free market. No
physician would be prosecuted and jailed for doing his best. Many people, brainwashed by 100 years
of life under the cartel, would object, as they have objected to all the other
deregulation efforts. I believe,
however, the American people would be much better off.
Instead
of the FDA, several competing consumer rating groups would do far more to
protect the American people than the current system. Lest this seem impossible,
it was the system used successfully in America for over 120 years. Several
organizations tested new medicines and medical devices and decided which
merited their seal of approval.
Though
we may not wish to admit it, American health care is only slightly less
socialized than the single payer systems of Europe and Canada. No wonder costs
are out of control. Deregulating health care would benefit all Americans and
restore a crippled system to sanity. Health care does not have to be
costly or dangerous.
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