MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘socialized medicine’

A Medical Hydraulic Empire

Posted by M. C. on May 4, 2022

By Charles Curley

Fran Van Cleave

 The United States’ health outcomes place us at either 18th or 30th in the world, depending on which study you look at.  Neither ranking is particularly glorious, especially considering that the US has the most expensive health care in the world. Our doctors are punished by insurance companies when they take extra time to look for causes rather than just treat symptoms. The end result is the equivalent of putting duct tape over the “check engine light.” Who wants to pay for that, even with a zero co-pay? Anyone?

Never let a good crisis go to waste. — Winston Churchill

In the headlong rush toward socialized medicine in America, all sorts of arguments have been made. Here’s one we haven’t heard, and we find it one of the most unsettling.

Wikipedia says, “A hydraulic empire (also known as a hydraulic despotism, or water monopoly empire) is a social or government structure which maintains power and control through exclusive control over access to water. It arises through the need for flood control and irrigation, which requires central coordination and a specialized bureaucracy.” But a hydraulic empire need not be based on water. It can be some other commodity precious to human life. Like medicine.

Larry Niven wrote a novel about a hydraulic empire based on vitamins, Destiny’s Road. (1998) It should scare the hell out of you.

What is socialized medicine but a hydraulic empire based on medicine?

When one of us first wrote about this on Facebook in 2018, the post foresaw Soviet style direct political intervention in the health care system. “Sorry, Comrade, no vitamins for you today. You shouldn’t buck the Party.” “Your surgery has been postponed, Comrade. Comrade O’Brien took sick, and the party needs him.” Or maybe Venezuelan style socialism.

But recent events show it doesn’t take Soviet style authoritarianism. All it takes is political correctness and Critical Race Theory (CRT) as now practiced by a country’s governing elite. Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), under a Conservative government, may deny health care to “Racist” or “Homophobic” patients. While racism apparently is a problem in British health care, denying health care simply because a patient is racist is the wrong (but oh-so-politically-correct) solution.

Oh, and they are also using it to enforce so-called “equity”. For example, New York will prioritize non-White people in the distribution of COVID-19 treatments in short supply. “Non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity should be considered a risk factor, as longstanding systemic health and social inequities have contributed to an increased risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19.”

Similarly, Minnesota now requires healthcare providers to provide non-white patients with preferential access to monoclonal antibodies (mAbs). mAbs are used to treat and to avoid infections of COVID-19. Since the article was published, Minnesota has removed the specific mention of BPIOC in the scoring factors. Instead, as of January 12, 2022, providers are supposed to “Strive for fairness and protect against systematic unfairness and inequity. It’s anyone’s guess as to what that actually means and how it will be implemented. But worry not: Minnesota has a “Resource Library for Advancing Health Equity in Public Health”[https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/practice/resources/equitylibrary/index.html]. Utah was apparently also following race-based guidelines in providing medical care for COVID-19 patients, and now both Utah and Minnesota are threatened with lawsuits from America First Legal, a conservative law firm founded by Stephen Miller.

In democratic Germany, rules banning adults unvaccinated for COVID from public places are being applied to the Bundestag, prohibiting citizens from participating in the national legislature. It also applies to MPs, thereby denying thousands of Germans their right to parliamentary representation. Now that the left-leaning Social Democrats (SDP) and Greens are in power (in a coalition with the liberal Free Democrats), the political target is clear: the right-wing Alternative for Germany party (AfD). The AfD has the largest number of unvaccinated MPs and has campaigned against vaccine mandates.

For some months now, patients on waiting lists for organ transplants have been ordered to get the COVID vaccine or be taken off the waiting list for the limited number of organs available, which usually means death when their own organs fail. Strangely, the fact that myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) is a known and listed side effect for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines has not altered the demand by medical authorities that all patients must have the COVID vaccine in order to make them better transplant candidates.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

WaPo Editors: “Liberty” Requires Us to Implement Vaccine Passports | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on August 21, 2021

Mandating private and government employees to be immunized against covid-19 and requiring the use of standardized electronic passes as proof of immunization across the nation is what liberty is made of,

https://mises.org/wire/wapo-editors-liberty-requires-us-implement-vaccine-passports

Alice Salles

Mandating private and government employees to be immunized against covid-19 and requiring the use of standardized electronic passes as proof of immunization across the nation is what liberty is made of, the editors of the Washington Post argued last week

State governors such as Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R), who are blocking or attempting to block “government agencies, local businesses or both from mandating vaccination,” are engaged in “efforts that fly in the face of the values of liberty that their proponents purport to defend,” the editors added. 

“The highly transmissible delta variant of the coronavirus has ushered in mask mandates in some places, but vaccination remains the key to containing the pandemic once and for all,” the editors wrote. But to ensure we can all trust those who claim to be vaccinated, they added, states should be “developing a smartphone-compatible certificate that’s easily downloadable and easily scannable.” 

With this standardized approach to the vaccine mandate, they argued, Americans who are reluctant to get the jab would be forced to think differently. “At the least, enabling vaccine requirements will help organizations keep their spaces safer. At best, they also could inspire some holdouts to get the shot at long last.”

But if “safety” is so important to these editors, shouldn’t we also consider the safety of medical treatments (i.e., vaccines) themselves? Moreover, shouldn’t we consider the ways that providers of vaccines can be held accountable when their vaccines do harm? 

That discussion, apparently, is not on the table. I have yet to see a proponent of covid-19 vaccine mandates that talks about the vaccine industry’s immunity before federal law and how the current vaccination campaign is just a continuation of that scheme.

Ronald Reagan’s Socialized Medicine 

The covid-19 vaccine isn’t the first inoculation program that is both financially backed by the government and immune from legal accountability in US history. 

Thanks to President Ronald Reagan’s National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986, vaccine makers are able to develop vaccines, many of which are produced using unethical methods such as using cells taken from aborted fetal tissue, deliberately mislead patients and health officials by making false efficacy claims, and go on doing so unabatedly even after countless victims come forward saying they have been injured—sometimes for life—by their products. 

Due to the 1986 law, these victims don’t get the chance to have their cases heard by a jury of their peers. Instead, their cases must necessarily be funneled through the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which was created in 1988 after the NCVIA was signed into law.

The VICP is in place to shield manufacturers from liability related to their vaccine products, as explained by AMA Journal of Ethics.

The act establishes a special court program for vaccine injury claims that caps damages and allows for the injured party to be compensated without having to prove that the maker committed any wrongdoing. (emphasis added)

Since its inception, the VICP has paid out about $4.6 billion in settlements. But while the VICP is funded by an excise tax on each vaccine purchased, it is run by the US government. 

Considering that pharmaceuticals were threatening to give up on producing vaccines due to the expensive injury-related court battles prior to 1986 and that they remain unwilling to stand behind their products’ safety to this day, it is clear that given the opportunity to function in a market unprotected by the federal government, these manufacturers would likely have not managed to stay in business. It is in this context that the covid-19 vaccines exist. 

Because currently the covid vaccines do not have full Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorization, injury claims must be funneled through a different but similar program, the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), run by the Health and Human Services Department. But it is only a matter of time before the vaccine “courts” take over. 

With record-breaking numbers of adverse reactions reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and growing concerns regarding the covid vaccines’ effectiveness, paper pushers are promising more mandates will come once the FDA concedes the vaccine manufacturers full approval. Considering that all other vaccines currently in use regularly across the nation were given the same FDA approval and yet remain immune from legal accountability, why should we trust whatever the health czars have to say? Author:

Alice Salles

Alice Salles was born and raised in Brazil but has lived in America for over ten years. She now lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana with her husband Nick Hankoff and their three children.  

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Why the Left Will Continue To Win – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on July 27, 2019

Thus, the left will continue to win the war as long as it is the only side that is intent upon fighting.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/07/jack-kerwick/why-the-left-will-continue-to-win-big-conservatism-and-the-failure-to-fight/

By

One thing that is essential to victory is what Master Al calls, “ruthless intent.”

To prevail over the enemy, one must not only possess the capability to destroy him, but the willingness to do so.

Bearing this in mind, it should be painfully obvious that Big Conservatives, i.e. those in the so-called mainstream “conservative” media, or “the Big Con,” who are forever imploring the members of their audiences to “fight” the left so as to prevail in the “cultural wars,” or this “second Civil War,” are either dishonest or profoundly inept.

Big Conservatives at least speak as if they conceive of our contemporary politics as war by other means. We know that the left sees matters this way. Yet Big Conservatives, though they possess the ability—the resources in money and influence—to fight the left, their will for doing so is sorely lacking.

Anyone with any doubts about this should simply engage in the following thought-experiment.

Imagine that an alien from another planet, an alien, say, who knew nothing more than what “conservatives” and “liberals” claim to believe, came to Earth.  It’s inarguable that upon canvassing the scene for just the shortest periods of time, he would arrive at one of the following two conclusions:

(1)Self-identified conservatives cannot possibly believe what they claim to believe. The reason for this is quite simple: Between their talk—rhetoric regarding limited or Constitutional government; the sanctity of life; personal responsibility; equality before the law; equality of opportunity (as opposed to result); individual liberty; traditional marriage; revering the Founders, etc.—and their walk—the policies that they’ve either explicitly endorsed or permitted to be enacted—there lay an unbridgeable chasm.

(2)Second, self-identified conservatives are utterly ineffectual when it comes to arresting the advances of the left.

How could our alien draw any other inference?  Lip service to the Constitution notwithstanding, both Republican or “conservative” Presidents and Congresses, no less than their Democratic or “progressive” counterparts, have betrayed—repeatedly and dramatically betrayed—the vision of these United States that the men who ratified it originally intended for the Constitution to embody.

Consequently, given that the federal government has been divested of its federal character and made into precisely the sort of national behemoth that the Founders dreaded, the Constitution is, today, all but a dead letter, murdered by leftist ideologues, yes, but by self-avowed “conservatives” too.

Whether it is the income tax, fiat money, socialized medicine and health care (Medicare, Medicaid, etc.), or any number of the legions of government-subsidized agencies, programs and sectors that exist, Big Conservatives are as responsible as their ostensible opponents for, if not always necessarily the creation, then at least the preservation and expansion of these.

“Conservative” politicians, by way of the power with which their offices have endowed them, have directly subverted the Constitutional design, but the scribblers and chatterers in Big Conservatism have aided and abetted them at every turn.

So-called “affirmative action,” race and gender-based preferential treatment policies favoring non-white minorities and women over whites and white men, are endemic, and filicide in the womb (“abortion”) has been the law of the land since 1973.  Big Conservatives have indeed voiced their objection to such things, but their resistance has been about as timid and effective as their resistance to “same-sex marriage” became after a handful of lawyers on the Supreme Court “discovered” that homosexuals have a right to marry one another.

This is to say, Big Conservatives have done nothing more than proclaim their opposition to these things.  But even here, they articulate their positions only and always in their enemies’ terms.  For example, “affirmative action” is wrong because it is “racist” and “sexist,” but not toward the qualified whites, Asians, and men who are discriminated against in favor of less qualified non-whites and women, but toward the underqualified blacks and women who are its intended beneficiaries. Or Big Conservatives will object to filicide, but not, ultimately, because it consists in the destruction of an innocent human being in its mother’s womb, but because it irrevocably traumatizes the mother who kills her child, or because, insofar as black babies are disproportionately aborted, it is “racist.”

Big Conservatives not only stopped objecting to “same-sex marriage” as soon as the Supreme Court issued its ruling.  They say remarkably little about such implications of trans-genderism as the abolition, in some quarters, of gender-exclusive bathrooms.  As one popular blogger recently said, it’s laughable to think that conservatives can conserve Western Civilization; they can’t even conserve something as rudimentary as the ladies’ room.

We could continue endlessly. ..

The left bullies and pummels upon the right as much as it does because they know that they can.  Big Con radio and cable news hosts may derive a sense of self-satisfaction whenever they pat themselves on their collective shoulder for categorically refusing, on behalf of all conservatives, to exercise their right to self-defense when attacked by leftist thugs. But unless one is a pacifist—which, given their readiness to send young Americans off to wars in foreign lands, none of these Big Conservatives seems to be—this is nothing of which to be proud.  And it is certainly not the path to victory in this “second Civil War” that Big Conservatives insist we are engaged.

The “ruthless intention” to which Master Al speaks is a matter of being in it to win it, so to speak. Big Conservatives, inasmuch as they do nothing but essentially whine that the left dislikes them and favors itself by way of its “double standards”—all of the while accusing leftists of being the snowflakes—give no indication that they are interested in doing anything other than enriching themselves.

Big Conservatism has the ability to genuinely fight the left.  It lacks the will.

Thus, the left will continue to win the war as long as it is the only side that is intent upon fighting.

Be seeing you

So, tell me, where should I go? To the left, where nothing ...

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »