Socialized Health Care

New Rules: Menus must say what's in your meal - Trans Fats to be banned.
July 20, 2007
Seattle Times http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=transfat20m&date=20070720&query=trans+fats

By Carol M. Ostrom health reporter

Despite objections from restaurant owners and food-industry officials, the King County Board of Health on Thursday banned artificial trans fat and required nutrition labeling for menu items in chain restaurants.

With the vote, King County joins a handful of jurisdictions in the country to ban artificial trans fats in restaurant meals and becomes only the second to require nutrition labeling on menus.

While most restaurant owners and their supporters testified against the trans-fat ban -- most said they're already getting rid of trans fats but they simply hate mandates -- they saved their harshest words for the nutrition-labeling requirement. See http://www.dietadvisor.com/news_banning_trans_fats.htm for comments by John W. Cartmell, MS, Certified Nutritionist.

Robert Reich Tells the Truth About Health Care Reform
Sept. 26, 2007
Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT7Y0TOBuG4&feature=player_embedded#

The former Secretary of Labor under Clinton and more recently an Obama economic adviser, spoke candidly at a Colloquium on Political Science at UC Berkeley on Sept. 26, 2007, on what a candidate for president would say if that candidate did not care about becoming president.

"We have the only health care system in the world designed to avoid sick people. What I'm going to do is I'm going to try to reorganize it to be more amenable to treating sick people, but that means you, particularly you young people, particularly you young, healthy people, you're going to have to pay more." (nervous laughter and restrained applause)

"And by the way, we are going to have to, if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you .maybe going for another couple of months, it's too expensive. So we're going to let you die." (scattered applause and cheers)

Smoker Refused Operation on Broken Ankle
9-17-2007
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1563108/Smoker-refused-operation-on-broken-ankle.html

A smoker is facing years of pain after a National Heath Service (NHS) hospital refused to set his broken ankle unless he gives up cigarettes. John Nuttall, 57, needs the operation to fix the ankle he broke in three places two years ago and which was not healed by a plaster cast.

Doctors at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro have refused to operate to rebuild the ankle because they say Mr. Nuttall's heavy smoking would reduce the chance of a full recovery. "Smoking has a very big influence on the outcome of this type of surgery and the healing process would be hindered significantly."

Children herded like cattle into Maryland courthouse for forced vaccinations
11-19-07
http://www.newstarget.com:80/022267.html

Following the State of Maryland's threats against parents who refuse to have their children vaccinated, children were herded into a Price George County courthouse being guarded by armed personnel with attack dogs. Inside, the children were forcibly vaccinated, many against their will, under orders from the State Attorney General, various State Judges and the local School Board Director, all of whom illegally conspired to threaten parents with imprisonment if they did not submit their children to vaccinations.

The State of Maryland has now turned to Gestapo tactics to force its medical will upon the People, stripping parents of any right to decide how they wish to protect their own children from infectious disease. Health authorities there have already announced their intent to essentially kidnap parents and throw them in jail, removing them from their children for up to thirty days if they continue to refuse to have their children vaccinated. This will all be conducted at gunpoint, with armed personnel and attack dogs at the ready, making sure nobody steps out of line, and suppressing any attempt at public dissent against the Orwellian vaccination policies.

The entire campaign against these parents is blatantly illegal. There is no law in Maryland requiring the vaccination of children, thus parents who refuse to do so may not be legally charged with violating any law.

Testimony of illegal alien care from 1 Florida hospital
5-13-08
http://www.diggersrealm.com/mt/archives/002793.html

Socialized health care will cause increased costs from care of illegal immigrants.

Japan, Seeking Trim Waists
6-13-08
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/world/asia/13fat.html?_r=2&ei=5087&em=&en=c6f2623fbee96495&ex=1213502400&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

To reach its goals of shrinking the overweight population by 10 percent over the next four years and 25 percent over the next seven years, the government will impose financial penalties on companies and local governments that fail to meet specific targets. Most Japanese are covered under public health care or through their work.

Critics say the government guidelines are too strict and that more than half of all men will be considered overweight. The effect, they say, will be to encourage overmedication and ultimately, will raise health care costs.

NJ flu-shot mandate for preschoolers draws outcry
10-16-08
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,439609,00.html

New Jersey parents are furious over a first-in-the-nation requirement that children get a flu shot in order to attend preschools and day-care centers. The decision should be the parents', not the state's, they contend.

Children from 6 months to 5 years old who attend a child-care center or preschool have to receive the flu vaccine, along with a pneumococcal vaccine. The Health Council was acting on the recommendations of the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has depicted children under 5 as a group particularly in need of flu shots. State health officials and the CDC insist the flu vaccine is safe and effective,

"Vaccines not only protect the child being vaccinated but also the general community and the most vulnerable individuals within the community," New Jersey's Health Department said in a statement. It has depicted young children as "particularly efficient" in transmitting the flu to others.

Opposition to the policy is vehement. Assemblywoman Charlotte Vandervalk, one of the speakers at the rally, said she now has 34 co-sponsors for a bill that would allow for conscientious objections to mandatory vaccinations. "The right to informed consent is so basic," she said in an interview. "Parents have a right to decide for their own children what is injected in their bodies."

New Jersey's health department has come out strongly against the legislation. "Broad exemptions to mandatory vaccination weaken the entire compliance and enforcement structure," it said.

The department also contends that New Jersey is particularly vulnerable to vaccine-preventable diseases - with a high population density, a mobile population and many recently arrived immigrants. "In light of New Jersey's special traits, the highest number of children possible must receive vaccines to protect them and others," the department said.

Among the speakers was Robin Stavola of Colts Neck, N.J., who said her daughter, Holly, died in 2000 at age 5 less than two weeks after receiving eight different vaccines, including a booster shot.

"There's not been a response from the government that is credible in terms of doing the scientific research that will screen out vulnerable children," said Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder of the National Vaccine Information Center in Vienna, Va., an advocacy group skeptical of vaccination policies. "There's an acknowledgment that prescription drugs can cause different reactions in people, but there's a blanket statement by health authorities that we all have to vaccinate, all in the same way," Fisher said. She was harshly critical last year when school officials in Maryland's Prince George's County threatened to impose jail terms and fines on parents whose children didn't get required vaccinations.

Tough love for fat people: Tax their food to pay for healthcare
7-27-09
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2009/07/tough-love-for-fatties-tax-their-food-pay-for-healthcare.html

In the debate over healthcare reform, the added cost of caring for patients with obesity-related diseases has become a common refrain: most recent is a study released today by the Urban Institute titled "Reducing Obesity: Policy Strategies From the Tobacco Wars." that cites evidence of a turning political tide for proposals that would hold the obese and other consumers of nutritionally suspect foods accountable for their (lifestyle) choices.

See http://www.dietadvisor.com/news_tough_love_for_fat_people.htm for comments by John W. Cartmell, MS, Certified Nutritionist.

Judge Napolitano on Forced Vaccinations in Massachusetts
9-22-09 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXSB2oca7f8

Health and Safety Snoops to Enter Family Homes

9-15-09 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6917328.ece

Health and safety inspectors are to be given unprecedented access to family homes to ensure that parents are protecting their children from household accidents.

New guidance drawn up at the request of the Department of Health urges councils and other public sector bodies to “collect data” on properties where children are thought to be at “greatest risk of unintentional injury”.

The draft guidance by a committee at the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) has been criticised as intrusive and further evidence of the “creeping nanny state”.

Comments by Mark Levin

In his bestselling book, "Liberty or Tyranny", Mark Levin makes the following points regarding Medicare, Medicaid, and socialized health care:

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson used the umbrella of the Social Security Act to establish two massive new entitlement programs---Medicare and Medicaid.
Because Medicare pays providers directly, Medicare users have little incentive to behave cost-efficiently. As in Social Security, virtually everyone "contributes" to the system through a payroll tax. There is no relationship between taxes paid and benefits received, and there are no trust funds set aside for future payments. The payroll taxes are spent by the government from the moment they are deducted from the employees' salaries.
Medicare and Medicaid together cover 86 million people, or about a quarter of the nation's entire population.
Medicare is running up bigger IOUs, and more quickly, than even Social Security.
Future generations are left paying off the crushing debt created by all of it, since the government spends far more than it raises. The pillaging of future generations not only continues, but the Statists propose much more of it in the form of government run "national" or "universal" health care.
In 2006, the Census Bureau reported that there were 46.6 million people without health insurance.
- About 9.5 million were not United States citizens.
- Another 17 million lived in households with incomes exceeding $50,000.00 a year and could presumably purchase their own health care coverage.
- Eighteen million of the 46.6. million uninsured were between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four, most of whom were in good health and not necessarily in need of health-care coverage or chose not to purchase it.
- Only 30 percent of the nonelderly population who became uninsured in a given year remained uninsured for more than twelve months. Almost 50 percent regained their health coverage within four months.

The 47 million "uninsured" figure is widely inaccurate.

Why is it accepted as fact that the government can deliver health-care services more efficiently and to all who need them?
Oregon resident, Barbara Wagner Learned in May 2008 that her lung cancer, in remission for nearly two years, had come back. Her oncologist prescribed a drug that could slow the cancer growth and extend her life, but Wagner was notified by the Oregon Health Plan that it wouldn't cover it. It would however cover comfort and care, including, if she chose, assisted suicide.
\In Great Britain, the National Health Service has mandated that all patients admitted to a hospital be treated within four hours. Consequently, thousands of patients are forced to wait in ambulances parked outside emergency rooms.
Patients wait between one and two years to receive hip and knee replacements surgeries.
Like physicians, dentists are employed by the government and required to meet annual treatment quotas. Once the quotas are filled, the dentists are not paid to perform additional work. Recently, dentists in parts of Britain turned away patients and went on vacation because they had met their annual quotas.
A recent survey in Britain indicates that as many as one in three doctors believe that elderly patients should not be given free treatment if it is unlikely to help them over the long term. Half believe that smokers should be denied bypass surgery, and a quarter believe the obese should not be eligible for hip replacement surgery.
Unlike private care, where the difficult, mistaken, or even bad decisions or policies or a single insurance company, hospital, or doctor are usually limited in their societal impact, such governmental decisions and policies have a wide effect on the health care industry, medical profession, and population of patients. The centralization of health care decisions making ensures further rationing by government, with fewer avenues of escape by needy individuals who are denied critical health services.
President Barack Obama's first choice for "Health Care Czar" and secretary of Health and Human Services was Tom Daschle. In his book, "Critical" What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis", he proposes the establishment of a Federal Health Board, which would make health-care recommendations binding on all federal health programs. Daschle's medical Politburo is truly a nightmare: a few well-placed political appointees and their bureaucratic support staff rationing health-care resource and deciding who gets treatment and who does not and, ultimately, who lives and who dies. The individual will be seduced by the notion that he is receiving a benefit from the state when in reality the government is merely rationing benefits. Rather than the individual making cost-benefit and cost-quality decisions about his own condition, the State will do it for him.

Email Comments from a Canadian

As someone who lives with the Canada health care plan, I let me give you some facts about this medical plan we have in Canada.

1) We pay a premium of $96 per month for two of us. But 55% of my earnings go to taxes, the biggest portion of which goes for health care..

2) You can get in to see a doctor quick enough to be diagnosed, but the waiting list for treatment or surgery may be weeks or years. A cousin was diagnosed with a heart blockage. Put on a waiting list . Died before he could get treated.

3) The usual treatment is drugs. Have a pain, here is a drug to take- not what is causing the pain and why. No checking for other problems because they want to move as many patients thru as possible for Government re-imbursement.

4) Emergency room visits routinely require hours to be seen..

5) Government allots only so many operations per year. When that is done, no more operations unless you go to your local newspaper and plead your case and embarrass the government.

6) The Government is good at finding new ways to tax us, but they don't call it a tax anymore; it's now a "user fee".

7) A friend age 65 needs an operation for a blockage in her leg, but because she is a smoker they will not do it - despite paying into the health care system all these years. Now there is talk that maybe we should also not treat fat and obese people either because they are a drain on the health care system. Let me see now, what we want in Canada is a health care system for healthy people only. That should reduce our health care costs.

8) Forget about a second opinion, whoever sees you is who you get.

9) I am not allowed by law to spend my money on getting an operation because that would be jumping the queue. I must wait my turn except if I am a hockey player or athlete, then I can get in right away.

10) Immigrants are covered automatically at tax payers' expense, having never contributed a dollar to the system or ever paid a premium.

11) Oh yeah, we now give free needles to drug users to try and keep them healthy. But people with diabetes, who pay into the health care system, have to pay for their needles.

Author unknown.

John W. Cartmell, MS comments:

The reason smokers heal more slowly and are prone to more complications after surgery is likely due to Vitamin C deficiency. Smoking typically depletes about 20 mg of Vit. C per cigarette, or 400 mg of C per pack. The amount of Vitamin C in an average orange is 60-100 mg. Vitamin C is needed to form collagen, the connective tissue protein that holds one cell to another. Deficiency of Vit. C can cause trouble with healing after surgery. Deficiency can also increase the risk of hemorrhaging during surgery. It shouldn't be necessary to deny smokers surgery if supplement with Vit. C before and after surgery.

In Mr. Nuttall's case, a deficiency of Vit. C might not be the only thing causing his fractured ankle to not heal properly. Deficiencies in calcium and Vit. D could also cause impaired healing of a bone fracture regardless of smoking. But the focus of Britain's national health care, like conventional medicine, is to treat the disease rather than promote better health.

It's important to remember that in a socialized health care system, where everyone helps pay for your health care, your health is everyone's business and you don't have the right to indulge in what is defined as "high risk behavior". You may be punished by fines or denial of health care benefits if you indulge in lifestyle choices like using tobacco, caffeine, alcohol, or failure to comply with dietary protocols for conditions like obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol or heart disease.

With socialized health care, you pay with ever increasing taxes for less care and less freedom of choice. If Maryland can force vaccinations on children against the will of their parents, you can imagine what it will be like with national health care.

As for the often quoted "47 million Americans without health care", this figure appears to be dramatically inflated. If Mark Levin's figures above are correct, then discounting his numbers from 47 million gives a corrected figure of approximately 2.5 million (0.8%) of Americans without health insurance. Not exactly what you would call a "crisis" needing immediate attention and fast-track legislation when 297.5 million of Americans (99.2%) have health insurance. Congress must be careful that in their haste to address the so called "crisis" in health care, we don't end up with a national system that is worse than what we have now for the nearly 100% of Americans currently insured.

Personally, I have the following questions and concerns about socialized health care:

1. The government already receives substantial tax revenue from the health care industry. If the government becomes the provider of health insurance, it will receive all of the profits from health care. With such a monopoly, and ever increasing government spending, do you really think health care costs won't increase and the quality of care won't decline?

2. When the government provides a service, it often ends up costing more. We've had government run health care since the 1960s under Medicare and Medicaid. According to best selling book, "Glenn Beck's Common Sense", Medicare Part A (hospital visits) and Part B (doctor visits) have a combined unfunded liability of $68 trillion. In less than three years, Medicare Part D (prescription drugs) has run up unfunded liabilities of $17.2 trillion. Shouldn't the government prove it can make Medicare cost effective before expanding the system to cover everyone? How can socialized health care ever control costs unless treatment options are restricted and taxes regularly increased?

3. Disease care is not health care. The common symptom in every disease is the loss of health, and the loss of health is the one symptom conventional health care consistently fails to treat. Socialized health care will likely still focus on treatment of symptoms (primarily with drugs), rather than promoting health to prevent disease, or restoring health in the face of disease. Long term drug treatment increases the risk of drug side effects, which are usually treated with more drugs. One drug leads to another, and before you know it, you've gone down the road to drugs and missed the turn back to health. No matter if health care is independent or government owned, it's still bad medicine to only treat symptoms and not promote health, and treatment times and costs will continue to increase as a result.

4. The stated intent of a government program is often later ignored. Social security taxes were supposed to accrue in a trust account and be used only to pay benefits. Now money goes into the trust fund, pays for current benefits, and anything left goes into the general fund to pay for other government services. How can we be sure the government won't use socialized health care as a means to tax the people without protest, using some of the money for purposes unrelated to health care regardless of the original law or its intent?

5. In a socialized health care system, it's everyone's business who's running up excessive costs, because everyone is paying the premium. What's to keep the government from using the health care system to force lifestyle compliance with government standards by punishing people who smoke, or diabetics or obese patients who cheat, with fines, jail time or loss of benefits? What's to keep the health care system from refusing care for the elderly unless they agree to euthanasia? What risks to individual freedom and privacy will a socialized health care system present?

6. The US government has failed to enforce immigration laws and maintain security of our borders for over 40 years. Illegal immigrants receive "free" health care and are a tremendous financial burden on our health care system. If we establish socialized health care, will it cover illegal aliens? Almost certainly, with the original intent of the national health care system, "to provide health care for Americans", ignored. As of 2007, $2.5 Billion dollars a year are spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens http;//www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html.

John W. Cartmell, MS
www.dietadvisor.com

Socialized Health Care As public support for socialized health care increases, so does the potential for government intrusion into private choices in health care and lifestyle.

Socialized Health Care
As public support for socialized health care increases,
so does the potential for government intrusion into private choices in health care and lifestyle.