Category Archives: BAB’s A List

What ObamaCare Will Mean for You— and What You Can Do About It Today

BAB's A List, Barack Obama, Communism, Free Markets, Government, Healthcare, Propaganda, Regulation, Socialism, Taxation, The State

By Robert James Bidinotto

Now that the House and Senate finally have completed work on their enormous health-care bills, we can see what the final provisions will be. Their differences are far less important than their similarities. Either bill will be a disaster for our economy—for our personal well-being, both financial and medical—for our precious rights and freedoms—and for the futures of our children and grandchildren.

Both bills are now coming up for crucial floor votes. Many in Congress are very nervous about what their votes will mean for their political careers.

This coming week is critical in the process of passing or defeating this legislation, once and for all. Now is the time that you can weigh in and make a real difference with your congressman and senators.

Here is what you need to know. Rather than overwhelm you with arcane details of each bill, it is more important that you understand in principle what ObamaCare will mean for you and your family.

ObamaCare will mean:

Outrageous Costs. At a time of exploding federal spending and budget deficits, both the House and Senate bills would add far more than a trillion dollars to the mind-boggling financial liabilities we taxpayers already face. Even the stated price tags of these bills are fraudulent products of statistical manipulations. One way they pretend to reduce costs is to remove a quarter-trillion dollars in doctor Medicare reimbursements from the bills, but instead add that gargantuan spending into separate legislation. Another way they pretend to balance the books (“deficit neutrality”) is to impose years of tax increases to fund these bills, before the outrageous spending actually kicks in. When it does, the “cost curve” in later decades will soar upward, and deficits will pile up by the billions. In addition, the bills would vastly expand the already-bankrupt Medicaid program; this would impose on state governments, which already face crushing budget crises, tens of billions of dollars in new taxing and spending commitments. You will ultimately pick up that tab, too.

Soaring Taxes. ObamaCare is not “insurance,” but a gigantic new entitlement scheme meant to “spread the wealth around.” To pay for this spending spree, both bills will drain our ailing private economy of hundreds of billions of dollars in higher taxes. These taxes will fall disproportionately upon the young and healthy: They will be forced to buy costly policies, thus expanding the “pool” of payers who will subsidize those older and sicker. Higher taxes also will fall heavily upon “the rich.” But these include the same entrepreneurs and employers whom we expect to create businesses and jobs to lift us out of the recession—and also the very doctors whom we expect to provide the medical services to the millions of new patients. The legislation also proposes hefty taxes on better private-insurance plans, which would penalize and undermine existing employer-employee benefits packages. These are just a few of the many new taxes and fees the bills would impose on us.

Perverse Incentives. ObamaCare would subsidize and greatly expand the demand for health care, while discouraging the supply of health care. It would create a gigantic new federal entitlement program that would add millions of new, taxpayer-subsidized claimants for health-insurance coverage. Then it would force insurers to accept all comers—regardless of any actuarial risk factors—and to provide them coverage that is far beyond what many people actually require. On the other side of the equation, ObamaCare will increase taxes on those private insurers (who now average only 2-3% profit margins), while expecting them somehow to pay all the new benefits. It will also increase taxes and fees on hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and the inventors of new medical devices—thus punishing those who create and provide medical treatments. Inevitably, this will deter many of them from developing or offering vital new medical treatments for patients, and it will even force some of them out of business.

Government rationing. When soaring demand for medical care overwhelms shrinking supply of providers, the only outcome would be government rationing of medical care—which has occurred in all socialized-medicine regimes.

Lost Individual Choice. All talk of adding “choice and competition” to the health-insurance market is a complete fraud. The bills do not free individuals to buy insurance across state lines—“choice and competition” that would actually reduce the cost of insurance. Instead, the bills propose a host of new mandates on private individuals, employers, and private insurers. Under penalty of fines or jail, individuals will be forced to buy costly coverage; employers will be forced to provide it and to comply with countless petty regulations; and doctors, hospitals, and private insurers will be forced to comply with a mountain of new government orders, requirements, restrictions, demands, and regulations. Compliance with all these ever-expanding governmental edicts will drive up the costs for physicians, hospitals, medicines, treatments, and private insurance premiums. Skyrocketing costs will force more and more people into the “public option.” Meanwhile, the bills would slash reimbursements to Medicare Advantage plans, killing a private-insurance option now exercised and enjoyed by one-fourth of all seniors.

Broken promises. In sum, the pending legislation will not cover all the uninsured; it will not add to freedom of choice for consumers; it will not be “deficit-neutral”; it will not “bend the cost curve downward”; it will not prevent illegal aliens from receiving taxpayer-subsidized medical care; it will not prevent government payments from funding controversial procedures such as abortions; and it will not allow people to “keep their current coverage.” All of these are the loud promises of ObamaCare’s advocates; all are demonstrable falsehoods.

Instead, ObamaCare will do only one thing, which was the overt objective of its proponents from the outset: put the federal government in charge of the delivery of all health care in America.

A single-payer, government-run program of socialized medicine is the stated objective of those who designed this legislative monstrosity—from President Obama, to the vast coalition of unions and advocacy groups, to the congressional leaders who drafted these bills. They explicitly intend to bankrupt the private-insurance marketplace, so that only the government option remains. Far from adding “choice and competition,” then, ObamaCare aims at imposing on us a government health-care monopoly.

But only if we allow it to happen. Because this power-grab still can be stopped.

Congress remains deeply divided over many provisions of this legislation. If it passes, it only will be by a handful of votes. That means we can defeat this monstrosity by changing just a few minds. Now—this week—is the time for you to raise your voice and put on the pressure.

To contact your congressman, by phone, mail, or email, go here:

http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW_by_State.shtml

and contact your two senators by going here:

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

Tell them the following, preferably putting the ideas into your own words:

The House and Senate bills will not create “universal, affordable insurance.” They instead would create a gargantuan, unaffordable new federal entitlement program. They would further explode our soaring deficits; hugely increase tax burdens on our ailing economy; create perverse incentives that would expand the demand for medical services, while discouraging and punishing the suppliers of medical care; and deprive Americans of true choice and competition, by imposing an endless stream of new “mandates” on individuals and employers. This legislation would destroy existing private health-insurance plans, and ultimately destroy the quality and affordability of health care in America.

This legislation is so flawed and destructive in principle that it cannot be “fixed” or amended; it must be scrapped in its entirety. True health-care reform is necessary, but it must be based on our free-market system—such as:

• allowing individuals to purchase insurance from companies across state lines, and letting them take that coverage with them when they change jobs;
• letting individuals buy high-deductible, low-cost catastrophic coverage, by freeing insurers from laws that force them to offer only costly, state-mandated provisions in their policies;
• enacting tort reform, to eliminate the costly practice of “defensive medicine.”

Such reforms would expand coverage to millions of the uninsured, while actually reducing costs to employers, policy-holders, and individual taxpayers.

I feel so strongly about this, that I cannot consider you for re-election unless you vote against this legislation, in any shape or form.

* * *

Whether or not you have ever contacted a congressman or senator, now is the time to do it. This week may be the last time we can influence the outcome on this issue.

Your health, your financial well-being, and your nation’s future hang in the balance.

Please act today—then forward this message to your family, friends, and associates. If you are on Facebook, an annotated version of this can be found and linked out:

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?created&&suggest&note_id=211096360608

Update III: Middle America Or Meathead’s America?

America, BAB's A List, Christian Right, Human Accomplishment, Iraq, Israel, Just War, Paleoconservatism, Palestinian Authority, Political Philosophy, Republicans, The State, Welfare

THE EXCERPT is from “Is heartland America Ignorant And Gullible?”, my new WND.COM column, now (Sept. 12) on Taki’s:

“Given the perpetual parade of ‘intellectuals’ who are not intelligent in our media — Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, PBS and the ‘parrot press’ — I don’t expect you to be familiar with political philosopher Paul E. Gottfried. Nevertheless, Paul (he’s a friend) is one of the most important intellectuals in America.”

“Historian Eugene Genovese calls Paul incorruptible, ‘an American intellectual of superior talent.’ Author and historian John Lukacs praises Professor Gottfried as ‘a very profound thinker.’ And L. Brent Bozell III salutes his ‘amazing intellectual courage’ — courage in the face of the malign, philistine forces of the liberal and neoconservative mainstream.”

Over the years, I’ve interviewed Professor Gottfried pursuant to the publication of his many books. I do so again on the occasion of the publication of “Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers.”

READ THE interview, “Is heartland America Ignorant And Gullible?”, now on WND.COM. And on Taki’s Magazine on the weekend.

Update I (Sept. 11): Please note that the always-genial and brutally candid Paul Gottfried has replied to his detractors in the Comments Section. Some of the critics have been quite harsh (and this forum is moderated).

Update II: Randy, the war on Iraq is not going to be adjudicated again here, not ever. I chronicled the invasion of Iraq at great length, applying fact and every ounce of reason in my possession to repudiate and denounce that war crime. The case is closed! Neoconservative ideologues stand in the dock for aiding and abetting a war crime. Any reader is welcome to read my article archive on the topic (search the blog archives too). I can well imagine that many ideologues who supported the war urgently need to make peace with their maker, or consciences, for their role in a crime of such moral and material magnitude.

Update III (Sept. 12): Hayim, one doesn’t have to endorse everything Paul Gottfried writes or espouses to appreciate his contribution and steadfast principles. As someone who is ostracized by even more factions than Paul, I recognize the strength of character it takes to resist group pressure to conform and compromise one’s notion of right and wrong.

As to the article you cited, and which I skimmed: I have quoted Dershowitz on Israel and find his commentary worthwhile. I do not appreciate the dichotomy—or hypocrisy—the likes of Dershowitz evince in that they are hard-core rightists when it comes to Israel’s right to preserve its ethnic identity. But anyone arguing that the preservation of the historical America is essential to the preservation of freedom itself is a racist in Dershowitz’ books. That aspect of the Jewish Diaspora sickens me. Israelis are nothing like these American Jews.

In “Harvard Hucksters Hype Israeli Pseudo-Historians,” I expressed exactly what I thought of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of “The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.”

Norman Finkelstein I include among “dwarfs standing on the shoulders of Jewish giants. Noam Chomsky (‘The Godfather’), Steven and Hillary Rose … Joel Kovel, Tanya Reinhart in Tel Aviv, and Michael Cohen in Swansea—these are but a few of the new anti-Semitism’s leading Jewish lights.”

Where I agree with Paul is in his assertion that there is among the anointed Jewish leadership a crass abuse of “the Holocaust for propagandistic purposes.” No doubt about it. And it’s repulsive. To the extend Finkelstein exposes this, to that extent he makes a valid point. The Holocaust industry makes even me turn away from a catastrophe that has truncated my own family tree.

I also find the premise of the Daniel Goldhagen book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, appalling.

I think that on the whole Joan Peterson’s book is pretty good. If there are a few factual problems—and I don’t know that there are—they serve in this context as a fig leaf for those who would deny the central truth about the Jewish settlement of Israel:

“The territory within which the State of Israel was established did not form part of any larger state that opposed its creation. The territory was, moreover, one where Jews formed a majority on land they had purchased legitimately.”

Unanimously, this Jewish majority issued a declaration of independence promising that ‘the State of Israel will … foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants,’ not for the benefit of mankind. They promised that the country would ‘be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisioned by the prophets of Israel”; that it would ‘ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex,’ and ‘safeguard the Holy Places of all religions.”

It is a joke to claim, as the anti-Israel right does, that Israel doesn’t respect the rights of all its inhabitants, Arabs included. Let the Raimondos of this world—hopefully there is only one of his kind—go live/or vacation in the Palestinian Authority.

Above all, it is undeniable that Arabs had trashed the Holy Land throughout their occupation of the place. It took Jews to dry the swamps—they died in droves of malaria doing so—to plant orchards, start industries, and generally build from a howling wilderness a prosperous country.

You won’t find me lamenting that wonderful achievement.

Preparing For Unhealthy Propaganda

BAB's A List, Communism, Economy, Healthcare, Individual Rights, Objectivism, Political Economy, Propaganda, Socialism

As valid today as it was when it was first written for the occasion of Hillary Healthcare, Dr. George Reisman’s 1994 essay, “THE REAL RIGHT TO MEDICAL CARE VERSUS SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, is a must read in anticipation of Obama’s obfuscating oratory tonight. As Dr. Reisman puts it, “It’s a demonstration that government intervention inspired by the philosophy of collectivism is the cause of America’s medical crisis and that a free market in medical care is the solution for the crisis.”

Begin with the premise undergirding the Obama argument:

“For over a century, virtually all proposals for economic or social reform have been based on the thoroughly mistaken philosophical and theoretical foundations of Marxism, and have aimed at the ultimate achievement of a socialist society, in the belief that socialism represented the most rational and moral system of mankind’s social organization. On the basis of this conviction, individual freedom was progressively restricted and the power of the state progressively enlarged. Individual freedom—laissez faire capitalism—was assumed to be a system of chaos and of the exploitation of the masses by the capitalists. The onslaught of the socialists (who in this country call themselves “liberals”)—the step-by-step achievement of their political agenda—encountered virtually no philosophical resistance. Not surprisingly, again and again, the “liberals” defeated their ill-equipped conservative adversaries, who at most could only delay their advance. The victories of the “liberals” were inevitable because it was a battle of men with the seeming vision of a better world that could be achieved by means of intelligent human effort based on a body of ideas (however mistaken those ideas were), against men who, while they valued the relatively free world they saw around them, had no significant philosophical or theoretical knowledge of how to defend it.”

Move on to an understanding of your rights. Who exactly is violating these immutable rights?

“… the right to medical care does not mean a right to medical care as such, but to the medical care one can buy from willing providers. One’s right to medical care is violated not when there is medical care that one cannot afford to buy, but when there is medical care that one could afford to buy if one were not prevented from doing so by the initiation of physical force. It is violated by medical licensing legislation and by every other form of legislation and regulation that artificially raises the cost of medical care and thereby prevents people from obtaining the medical care they otherwise could have obtained from willing providers. The precise nature of such legislation and regulation we shall see in detail, in due course.”

“This then is the concept of rights, and specifically of rights to things, that I uphold. One’s rights to things are rights only to things one can obtain in free trade, with the voluntary consent of those who are to provide them. All such rights are predicated upon full respect for the persons and property of others.”

The solution? A Free Market in Medical Care:

“To be successful, such reform must approach the problem of bringing down medical costs from two sides: on the one side, the reduction and ultimate total elimination of the artificial increase in demand for medical care fostered by the alleged need-based right to medical care and the collectivization of costs to pay for it. On the other side, the reduction and ultimate total elimination of the artificial increase in medical costs caused both by the alleged need-based right to medical care and by medical licensing. Everything that rolls back the artificial increase in demand for medical care will, of course, operate to reduce medical costs, but there also needs to be more direct action as well. This is necessary both in order to speed up the process of cost reduction and insofar as the artificial increase in demand for medical care has led to increased government intervention into medical care and to irrational standards of medical malpractice. These latter will not go away just by means of reducing the artificial increase in demand for medical care. Nor will medical licensing and its contribution to the high cost of medical care.”

“Approaching the matter from both sides will make possible a process of mutually self-reinforcing cumulative success in bringing down medical costs. That is, not only will the rollback of the artificial increase in the demand for medical care bring down the cost of medical care, but everything that serves directly to bring down the cost of medical care will make such rollback all the more likely.”

READ the entire piece.

Updated: The More Things Change In Psychiatry, The More They Remain The Same

BAB's A List, Film, Hollywood, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, The State

“Changeling,” directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Angelina Jolie, is a welcome surprise. I’ve never thought much of Jolie as an actress; she emotes on stage more than she does as an activist. But she may be maturing into a good performer. Jolie captures the character and the period extremely well and doesn’t overact, or introduce “You Go Girl” elements into this period piece (Los Angeles circa 1928). In short, Jolie is very good as a fragile, single mother who goes up against the profession that has always operated hand-in-glove with the state: psychiatry in all its corrupt permutations.

I am hoping to reproduce for you, on Barely a Blog, a piece BAB A-Lister Thomas Szasz wrote about the film.

Update: As promised:

The Therapeutic State
Psychiatry: The Shame of Medicine
by Thomas Szasz

The practice of medicine rests on cooperation and the ethical-legal premise that treatment is justified by the patient’s consent, not his illness. In contrast, the practice of psychiatry rests on coercion and the ethical-legal premise that treatment is justified by the mental illness attributed to the patient and must be “provided” regardless of whether the patient consents or not. How do physicians, medical ethicists, and the legal system reconcile the routine use of involuntary psychiatric interventions with the basic moral rule of medicine, “Primum non nocere,” a Latin phrase meaning “First do no harm”?

The answer is: by the medicalization of conflict as disease, and coercion as treatment. Carl Wernicke (1848-1905), one of founders of modern neuropathology, observed, “The medical treatment of [mental] patients began with the infringement of their personal freedom.” Today, it is psychiatric heresy to note, much less emphasize, that psychiatry-as-coercion is an arm of the punitive apparatus of the state. Absent the coercive promise and power of mental health laws, psychiatry as we know it would disappear.

Ever since its beginning approximately 300 years ago, psychiatry’s basic function has been the restraint and punishment of troublesome individuals justified as hospitalization and medical care. For two centuries, all psychiatry was involuntary psychiatry. A little more than 100 years ago individuals began to seek psychiatric help for their own problems. As a result, the psychiatrist became a full-fledged double agent and psychiatry a trap. The film “Changeling”–written by J. Michael Straczynski and directed by Clint Eastwood–is a current example.

The story, set in Los Angeles in 1928, is said to be the “true story” of a woman, Christine Collins, whose son, Walter, is kidnapped. The police are corrupt, and little effort is made to find Walter. Months pass. To repair its damaged image, the police decide to stage a reunion between an abandoned youngster pretending to be Walter and his mother, played by Angelina Jolie. Unsurprisingly, she realizes that the fake Walter is not her son. After confronting the police and city authorities, she is vilified as an unfit mother, branded delusional, and incarcerated in a “psychopathic ward,” where she is subjected to the brutalities of sadistic psychiatrists and nurses, and watches fellow victims being punished by electric shock treatment–ten years before its invention. So much for the truth of the story.

Clueless about the true nature of the psychiatric terrorization to which the Jolie character is subjected, film critic Kirk Honeycutt praises Clint Eastwood who “again brilliantly portrays the struggle of the outsider against a fraudulent system. . . . ‘Changeling’ brushes away the romantic notion of a more innocent time to reveal a Los Angeles circa 1928 awash in corruption and steeped in a culture that treats women as hysterical and unreliable beings when they challenge male wisdom.’”

The Jolie character does not simply challenge “male wisdom.” Instead, her actions illustrate the insight of the Hungarian proverb, “It is dangerous to be wrong but fatal to be right.” The psychiatrist as brutal agent of the state enters the story only after the mother proves–by securing the testimony of her son’s teacher and dentist–that “Walter” is an impostor. The psychiatrically incarcerated individual’s greatest crime–for which psychiatrists cannot forgive her–is that she is innocent of lawbreaking and objects to being deprived of liberty.

Psychiatric coercion is medicalized terrorism. So-called critics of psychiatry–who often fail or refuse to distinguish coerced from contractual psychiatry–are unable or unwilling to acknowledge this disturbing truth. As a result, the more things change in psychiatry, the more they remain the same, as the following conveniently forgotten example illustrates.

On May 21, 1839, Elizabeth Parsons Ware (1816-1897) married the Reverend Theophilus Packard. The couple and their six children resided in Kankakee County, Illinois. After years of marriage, Mrs. Packard began to question her husband’s religious and pro-slavery beliefs and express opinions contrary to his. In 1860 Mr. Packard decided that his wife was insane and proceeded to have her committed. She learned of this decision on June 18, 1860, when the county sheriff arrived at the Packard home to take her into custody. The law at the time stated that married women “may be entered or detained in the hospital [the Jacksonville State Insane Asylum] at the request of the husband of the woman or the guardian . . . without the evidence of insanity required in other cases.”

Mrs. Packard spent the next three years in the Asylum. In 1863, due largely to pressure from her children who wished her released, the doctors declared her incurable and released her. Mrs. Packard stayed close to her children, retained their support, founded the Anti-Insane Asylum Society, and published several books, including Marital Power Exemplified, or Three Years Imprisonment for Religious Belief (1864) and The Prisoners’ Hidden Life, Or Insane Asylums Unveiled (1868).

The Beginning, Not the End
Little did Mrs. Packard realize that she was living at the beginning, not the end, of the Psychiatric Inquisition. Today, “inquiry” into the minds of unwanted others is a pseudoscientific racket supported by the therapeutic state. Millions of school children, old people in nursing homes, and persons detained in prisons are persecuted with psychiatric diagnoses and punished with psychiatric treatments. Nor is that all. Untold numbers of Americans are now psychiatric parolees, sentenced by judges–playing doctors–to submit to psychiatric treatment as so-called outpatients, or face incarceration and forced treatment as inpatients.

The subtext of films such as “Changeling” is always subtle psychiatric propaganda seeking to make people believe they are witnessing past “psychiatric abuses.” The truth is that every new psychiatric policy or practice labeled an “advance” is a step toward making psychiatric deception and brutalization more legal and more difficult for the victim to resist. As I write this column, I learn from an “antipsychiatry” website that a man named Ray Sandford is being subjected to court-ordered outpatient electroshock treatment.
“Each and every Wednesday, early in the morning, staff shows up at Ray’s sheltered living home called Victory House in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, adjacent to Minneapolis. Staff escorts Ray the 15 miles to Mercy Hospital. There, Ray is given another of his weekly electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) treatments, also known as electroshock. All against his will. On an outpatient basis. And it’s been going on for months.”

As the forced psychiatric treatment of competent adults living in their own homes becomes the “standard of medical practice,” the failure to provide such betrayal and brutality becomes medical malpractice. In a democracy people are said to get the kind of government they deserve. In a pharmacracy they get the kind of psychiatry they deserve.

Thomas Szasz (tszasz@aol.com) is professor of psychiatry emeritus at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. His latest books, both from Syracuse University Press, are The Medicalization of Everyday Life: Selected Essays and Psychiatry, The Science of Lies.