The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy (48 page)

The costs of such a system would be a fraction of what taxpayers are currently spending, and it would likely prove much more effective. Ultimately, the American public must see to it that children learn civics, for as Thomas Jefferson said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

CARING FOR HEALTH

A
SIDE FROM DISHING OUT
the usual bland media content full of stories about celebrities, political scandals, and petty crimes, the mass media gives the public the false impression that only experts and medical doctors can determine what constitutes good health and how to achieve it. Every talk show and newscast turns to an expert from the globalist-controlled government agencies or corporations to present their version of health news. Their advice is constantly validated by ubiquitous drug advertising, emanating from the same corporations.

Yet change is in the air. Many people are taking charge of their own health and seeking alternative means of ensuring a satisfying and productive life. Even some medical professionals are turning away from profit-driven corporate medicine and finding new ways to improve public health.

Dr. Len Saputo, a practicing physician for more than forty years, encourages a paradigm shift in how medicine should be practiced. Over the years, Saputo saw the quality of health care in the United States sink to new lows as the medical community shifted from concern for the patient to a concern for profit. In 1994, Saputo founded the Health Medicine Forum, which changed the outlook and practices of many health-care practitioners in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“I entered the profession aspiring to be a healer, as did most of my colleagues,” wrote Saputo in his 2009 book
A Return to Healing.
“We wanted to attend to the health and medical needs of
whole persons;
we were inspired to serve our patients through our aspiration to provide genuine healing and to promote healthy living based on science and common sense. Sadly, this ideal has been replaced by the corporate bottom line, resulting in a dysfunctional system focused almost entirely on what I prefer to call
disease care
[original emphasis].

“The physician’s natural focus on the health needs of a unique, living person embedded in his family and society has today been largely replaced by a model that reduces each person to his body, his body to a machine, and his health needs to a set of symptoms to be treated mainly with drugs—too often ignoring the patient’s mind, emotions, spirit, environment, and lifestyle.”

Today, Dr. Saputo and many other physicians are turning to natural biochemical solutions to treat health problems. The base premise of this type of treatment lies in a simple recognition—if all of a body’s cells are functioning properly, there is no cause for sickness. “The restoration of good health and vitality is accomplished by supporting the body and allowing the natural healing process to take charge,” explained Saputo. Those who undertake this type of progressive medicine “boldly acknowledge the importance of treating body, mind, and spirit—the imperative of caring for the whole person, not just the disease…. They are choosing prevention, wellness, natural solutions, and the integrative model—and they are blazing the path to the integral-health medicine of the future.”

Many medical professionals have followed Dr. Saputo’s standard, asking not how to fund the current American health-care system but how to find better ways of securing and maintaining better health. Instead of asking which drugs should be used to cure an illness, they are asking whether or not drugs should be used as primary treatment. In 2007, the National Health Interview Survey reported that approximately four out of every ten Americans had used some form of complementary or alternative medicine during that year. Reportedly, complementary and alternative therapies now account for 11.2 percent of total out-of-pocket health-care expenses—approximately $33.9 billion a year.

Before the 2008 presidential election, more than five thousand U.S. physicians signed an open letter to then candidate Barack Obama urging him and Congress “to stand up for the health of the American people and implement a nonprofit, single-payer national health insurance system.” The physicians noted: “A single-payer health system could realize administrative savings of more than $300 billion annually—enough to cover the uninsured and to eliminate co-payments and deductibles for all Americans.” Single-payer national health insurance is a system in which a single public or quasi-public agency organizes health financing, yet delivery of the care remains largely private. Such systems are currently in use in Canada, Great Britain, and other nations.

The doctors said incremental changes to health-care policy by the Democrats would not solve health-care problems, and that Republican plans to pursue market-based strategies would only exacerbate the situation. “What needs to be changed is the system itself,” they wrote. One of the letter’s signers, Dr. Oliver Fein, a professor of clinical medicine and public health at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, stated, “With the sudden economic downturn, more people than ever before are worried about how to pay for health care. A single-payer system—an improved Medicare for all—would lift those worries, provide care to all who need it and require no new money. It’s the only morally and fiscally responsible approach to take.”

Despite spending more than twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care (more than $7,000 per person), America’s health-care system is not only expensive but inadequate. The United States ranks below fifty other nations in life expectancy, including Canada, Bermuda, Norway, Jordan, South Korea, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Puerto Rico. In child mortality (the death of a child under one year old per 1,000 live births), the United States shamefully dropped behind 180 other nations, including Serbia, Chile, Russia, Fiji, Botswana, Jamaica, Thailand, China, Mexico, and Libya.

“The reason we spend more and get less than the rest of the world is because we have a patchwork system of for-profit payers,” explained the website for the Physicians for a National Health Program, an organization of more than seventeen thousand physicians. “Private insurers necessarily waste health dollars on things that have nothing to do with care: overhead, underwriting, billing, sales and marketing departments as well as huge profits and exorbitant executive pay. Doctors and hospitals must maintain costly administrative staffs to deal with the bureaucracy. Combined, this needless administration consumes one-third (31 percent) of Americans’ health dollars. Single-payer financing is the only way to recapture this wasted money.”

John C. Goodman, president of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis, said, “The only sensible alternative to relying on a welfare state to solve our health care needs is a renewed reliance on private sector institutions that utilize individual choice and free markets to insure against unforeseen contingencies. In the case of Medicare, our single largest health care problem, such a solution would need to do three things: liberate the patients, liberate the doctors, and pre-fund the system as we move through time.

“By liberating the patients I mean giving them more control over their money—at a minimum, one-third of their Medicare dollars. Designate what the patient is able to pay for with this money, and then give him control over it. Based on our experience with health savings accounts, people who are managing their own money make radically different choices. They find ways to be far more prudent and economical in their consumption.”

Dr. John Geyman, professor emeritus of family medicine at the University of Washington and author of
Do Not Resuscitate: Why the Health Insurance Industry Is Dying and How We Must Replace It,
said the private health system is obsolete and the insurance industry is to blame. “While there is widespread consensus that the nation’s health care system is broken and in urgent need for reform, too little attention has been paid to the role of the private insurance industry in perpetuating our problems. Over the past 40 years, private insurance has evolved from a not-for-profit activity into a $300-billion-a-year, for-profit, investor-owned industry. The six biggest insurers made over $10 billion in profits in 2006. They did so by enrolling healthy people, denying claims, and screening out the sick, who are increasingly being shunted into our beleaguered public safety net programs…. These for-profit companies have burdened our system with enormously wasteful administrative costs and skyrocketing CEO salaries, while leaving tens of millions uninsured and underinsured. The risk pool has been badly fragmented among more than 1,300 private insurers, defeating the goal of insurance, which is to provide coverage by sharing risk across a broad population. Premium prices continue to climb at a double-digit rate alongside other health costs.

“Thus, the average family premium for employer-based coverage was $11,500 in 2006, an increase of 87 percent from 2000. At the rate we are going, health insurance premiums will consume almost one-third of average household income by 2010 and all of household income by 2025. This clearly is not sustainable.”

With all the incredible advances in medical science in recent years, the problems with health care obviously are not in the technology. It all boils down to who will make the decision ultimately affecting any national health-care plan. Unfortunately, this turns out to be the Congress, that collection of do-nothings, adulterers, tax cheats, liars, mercenaries, and arrogant windbags. By 2010, the global corporatists and their lobbyists had won out. Single-payer health insurance was off the table. What’s to be done?

THE BALLOT BOX

W
HILE ADDRESSING THE
N
ATIONAL
Democratic Convention in 1896, thrice presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan declared, “If they ask us why we do not embody in our platforms all the things that we believe in, we reply that when we have restored the money of the Constitution, all other necessary reform will be possible; but that until this is done, there is no other reform that can be accomplished.” Mr. Bryan surely would be spinning in his grave if he saw the abuses being practiced today under the name of government finance.

“Constitutional money” is clearly spelled out in the U.S. Constitution under Article I. In Section 8, the Constitution reads, “The Congress shall have the power…to coin money, [and] regulate the value thereof….” It is important to note that fiat money—the Federal Reserve paper dollars that are considered the nation’s legitimate currency—is not mentioned. But, in Section 10, the Constitution makes it clear that “No state shall…make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts….” As explained earlier in this work, fiat money—the U.S. paper dollar—is rapidly becoming worthless due to the amounts in circulation and the ballooning debt behind it.

America will not experience any genuine reform until there is a meaningful overhaul of the financial system. Because our economy is part of a global economy, an overhaul may have to include the entire world.

Even accounting for the Obama administration’s plans and budget, Michel Chossudovsky, a professor of economics at the University of Ottawa and director of the Centre for Research on Globalization, predicted, “There are no solutions under the prevailing global financial architecture. Meaningful policies cannot be achieved without radically reforming the workings of the international banking system.”

Chossudovsky suggested a complete “overhaul of the monetary system including the functions and ownership of the central bank, the arrest and prosecution of those involved in financial fraud both in the financial system and in governmental agencies, the freeze of all accounts where fraudulent transfers have been deposited, the cancellation of debts resulting from fraudulent trade and/or market manipulation.

“People across the land, nationally and internationally, must mobilize. This struggle to democratize the financial and fiscal apparatus must be broad-based and democratic encompassing all sectors of society at all levels, in all countries. What is ultimately required is to disarm the financial establishment: confiscate those assets which were obtained through fraud and financial manipulation; restore the savings of households through reverse transfers; return the bailout money to the Treasury, freeze the activities of the hedge funds; freeze the gamut of speculative transactions including short-selling and derivative trade.”

Economist William K. Black has supported the idea that bailouts are pernicious to overall economic health. In an interview with PBS commentator Bill Moyers, Black said, “Now, going forward, get rid of the people that have caused the problems. That’s a pretty straightforward thing, as well. Why would we keep CEOs and CFOs and other senior officers that caused the problems? That’s…nuts…. So stop that current system. We’re hiding the losses, instead of trying to find out the real losses. Stop that, because you need good information to make good decisions…. Follow what works instead of what’s failed. Start appointing people who have records of success, instead of records of failure…. There are lots of things we can do. Even today, as late as it is. Even though they’ve had a terrible start to the administration. They could change, and they could change within weeks.”

According to Dr. Charles K. Rowley, Duncan Black Professor of Economics at George Mason University and general director of the Locke Institute, “The prognosis is catastrophic if projected government policies are not cut back. According to the White House’s own estimates, the federal budget deficit in 2009 will be $1.6 trillion, approximately 11.2 percent of the overall economy, the highest on record since the end of the Second World War. In 2019, the national debt will represent 76.5 percent of the US national economy, the highest proportion since just after the Second World War. In such circumstances, the international reserve status of the US dollar will not survive. As it fades, so interest rates on government securities will rise and the real burden of servicing the debt will increase. In such circumstances, the US economy will teeter on the edge of a black hole.”