Note: PumaLiberty is in the process of exploring the basis of political (and related economic) woes currently facing our nation. While we will periodically share information created by other organizations, we do not necessarily endorse the content of any material that’s not generated by the PumaLiberty group. The following material is for informational purposes only.
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Please take time to watch this video; it will give you hope.

Note: PumaLiberty is in the process of exploring the basis of political (and related economic) woes currently facing our nation. While we will periodically share information created by other organizations, we do not necessarily endorse the content of any material that’s not generated by the PumaLiberty group. The following material is for informational purposes only.
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In doing a little research, I have learned that the Bilderbergs want a one world currency. To learn who the members of the Bilderberg Group are, please cut and paste this link into browser http://www.nndb.com/org/514/000042388/ . I further learned that a Geneva-based UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) called for a global currency. Their report was made public on September 7, http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_5178.shtml. In addition, the United Nations (UN), called for the dollar’s role in international trade to be reduced in order to protect emerging markets from financial speculation.

It has long been the goal of the Bilderbergs to eliminate national currencies in order to establish a one world government. You see, this would further weaken a country’s sovereignty. As we all know (at least the Conservative Movement), America’s sovereignty is being attacked from many difference fronts. However, a world currency would be a BIG attack on our national sovereignty. The whole point here is to create a one world government.

Furthermore, the Bilderbergs want to divide the globe into three parts, or unions: the North American Union, the Asian-Pacific Union, and of course, the European Union (which has already been established). These three unions would make it easy for the world government to administer control. The one world currency would probably be controlled by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which is is an international organization that oversees the global financial system.

If we want to maintain our sovereignty and our freedom, we cannot afford to let this happen. America has got to go back to the gold standard http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123440593696275773.html . How can we accomplish this? I don’t have the answer. However, like anything else, awareness is a step in the right direction.

Note: PumaLiberty is in the process of exploring the basis of political (and related economic) woes currently facing our nation. While we will periodically share information created by other organizations, we do not necessarily endorse the content of any material that’s not generated by the PumaLiberty group. The following material is for informational purposes only.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16119

by James Corbett
Global Research, November 18, 2009
The Corbett Report – 2009-11-16

When the Nobel Prize committee announced their choice for this year’s Peace Prize winner[1], they stressed that a key factor in awarding Obama the prize had been the commitment to a nuclear-free world he had outlined in speeches such as the one he delivered in Prague earlier this year.[2] “The committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons” said the committee chairman when announcing that Obama had won the prize.

Assuming that the committee truly believed that the Obama presidency would signal a meaningful change in American nuclear policy, they did not have long to wait for a clear refutation of that thesis. Having learned in advance that Obama would be visiting Japan ahead of last week’s APEC summit in Singapore, the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki extended formal invitations for Obama to visit their cities.[3] Had he done so, he would have become the first U.S. president to visit the cities since they were the victims of the world’s first nuclear attacks. However, Obama turned down the requests, citing scheduling concerns and offering vague promises to visit the cities sometime in the future.[4]

While such a move may come as a surprise to the Nobel committee, it is decidedly less shocking to those who have been studying American nuclear policy for decades. One such man is Motofumi Asai, the President of the Hiroshima Peace Institute, who noted in a recent interview with The Corbett Report that, while surprised that Obama says he intends to visit Hiroshima one day, “anyhow, it is clearly not now.”[5]

“In a very long historical term, his speech in Prague in April may be remembered as a departure from the nuclear century to the non-nuclear century” Asai said about the nuclear rhetoric that won Obama the Peace Prize. But, he added, “I am rather sober about the prospects of a change of U.S. nuclear policy.”

Observers of the Obama administration’s actions on the nuclear front would indeed have good reason to be ’sober’ about the prospects of Obama living up to his nuclear disarmament rhetoric. As The Washington Times reported last month, the Obama administration has reaffirmed an unspoken decades-old U.S. policy to officially ignore Israel’s nuclear stockpile.[6] This support ensures that Israel does not have to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would require them to relinquish their hundreds of nuclear bombs. As The Washington Times report makes explicit, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu accidentally revealed in a television interview that Obama’s rhetoric about a nuclear-free world is not meant to apply to America or its allies:

“It was utterly clear from the context of the speech that he was speaking about North Korea and Iran,” the Israeli leader said. “But I want to remind you that in my first meeting with President Obama in Washington I received from him, and I asked to receive from him, an itemized list of the strategic understandings that have existed for many years between Israel and the United States on that issue. It was not for naught that I requested, and it was not for naught that I received [that document].”

Note: PumaLiberty is in the process of exploring the basis of political (and related economic) woes currently facing our nation. While we will periodically share information created by other organizations, we do not necessarily endorse the content of any material that’s not generated by the PumaLiberty group. The following material is for informational purposes only.

America The Betrayed
Walt Whitman: “Poet of the People”
By Richard C Cook
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15952

Global Research, November 6, 2009
Richard C. Cook

If you want to get an idea of what America once was like, read the poems of Walt Whitman. Whitman was born on Long Island in 1819 and grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. His family was poor, but even though he left school at the age of 11 he gave himself an education by reading and working in the printing shop of a newspaper until he gradually became a published writer. He worked as a teacher and news reporter and owned his own newspaper by the age of 20.

In 1848 Whitman was a delegate to the founding convention of the Free Soil Party. During the Civil War he worked as a nurse in Union military hospitals and held several government jobs, including interviewing Confederate prisoners for pardons. Some of his greatest poems came from his war experiences, including his famous elegy upon the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, “Oh Captain! My Captain!” His great collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, was self-published. He died a national hero in 1892 in Camden, New Jersey, where thousands of people came to pay their respects.

Whitman has always been viewed as a poet of the people, in contrast to the pretentious dandies from academia who have controlled official American culture for much of our history. He wrote of workmen, farmers, sailors, soldiers, lovers, criminals, and prostitutes.

In the text of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, he wrote of himself as, “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest.” He had discovered a great secret, one that is known to everyone who is young at heart: that the free individual, always potentially a “kosmos,” stands at a much higher level in the scale of creation than any man-made collective.

Thus was Whitman a hero to the Beatniks of the 1950s who tried to rediscover an authentic American voice in the streets and on the roads and highways of this great land. The spirit of Whitman was surely present through the rebellion of the 1960s, when America’s young men and women rose up and fought the Establishment to stop the Vietnam War and bring civil rights to racial minorities.

The Establishment fought back with a vengeance and, through the most egregious betrayal in history, reduced the world’s greatest industrial democracy to the pathetic shadow of its former self we are today.

The first thing the Establishment did was destroy the industrial job base by shipping millions of good jobs to China and other Third World nations, where slave laborers could be forced to churn out consumer products at a fraction of the cost of similar work done by American workers.

Acting through the CIA and organized crime, the Establishment flooded the cities and college campuses with illegal drugs in order to rot the minds and souls of our youth.

They dumbed down education to the point where young people who graduate today know little and can do less of a practical nature. Vocational training is dead. A high school graduate is worth virtually nothing in the job market, and many college graduates are semi-literate and self-absorbed, often lacking backbone, skills, or initiative. Some high school and college graduates are even drug addicts or alcoholics.

They turned the economy over to thieves from Wall Street and created a military machine that turns youth into murderers and assassins whose job it is to conquer the world for the fat cats of global capital.

They ruined the arts, literature, and music through crass commercialization, making it almost impossible for any real original creativity to be produced or communicated. The one bright light in this darkness is the internet, which is being threatened by commercial suppression of freedom of expression by the ambitions of big communications companies. Thank goodness too for the rare creative genius like Michael Moore who has the courage to hold up a mirror to this deeply diseased society.

Then they wrecked people’s health with processed food and constant inducements to a sedentary lifestyle while pumping us full of dangerous vaccines and prescription drugs. They drummed it into everyone’s head that we are basically weak, ill, helpless creatures who can only survive by taking pills and making constant trips to doctors, hospitals, and clinics.

They induced us to fight over our possessions and freedoms in law courts with the aid of greedy lawyers in front of rapacious judges who have built up the largest prison population in the world.

They pulled money and credit out of the inner cities and rural areas leaving those segments of the nation and their populations to rot.

The list could go on and on and on.

Today we are in the midst of not just a recession but a terminal depression. Getting the banks to lend again so people can buy homes at what are still over-inflated prices or so they might compete with immigrants to get construction jobs through building of more useless office buildings or military bases is not a recovery. The “greening of America” is a myth. There is no resurgence of alternative energy investment or new public infrastructure apart from a few highway projects.

American family farming is practically dead and is under a new assault from speculators who are undercutting prices and forcing foreclosures. The local manufacturing sector never came back after the calamitous decline produced by the Paul Volcker recession of 1979-1983, when interest rates were deliberately raised to over 20 percent to kill off family-owned businesses so that global corporations could step in and take over. Since then we had the “Reagan Revolution” when the banks took over the economy, the Clinton dot.com bubble of the 1990s which crashed in 2000, and the George W. Bush/Alan Greenspan housing bubble which blew up in 2008. Now Main Street lies shattered and shuttered as a result of the crimes and treacheries of the last 30 years.

True, there is a rebellion brewing, including a monetary reform movement that has attacked the power of the Federal Reserve, as well as a few progressive voices that call for a much larger economic “stimulus” than the Obama administration has seen fit to implement.

But is there any practical plan on the part of either political party or organized movement to restore America to what it once was–a place where ordinary people could live, work, learn, and flourish? The answer is a resounding “No.” Not a chance. And “Change You Can Believe In” hasn’t changed a thing. All it has done has been to produce another financial bubble, this time using huge amounts of public debt through the sale of U.S. Treasury bonds. Business is not growing and jobs are not coming back. The only thing that has gone up has been the meeting of military recruitment quotas.

I was at the seminar held by Mr. Edward Griffin who wrote The Creature of Jekyll Island. I was impressed and exhilarated to meet Mr. Griffin the first time.

What his advice was to go back to the party and to make change internally.

Get involved.

We have been protesting for over a year now. We just had the largest protest against fiscal irresponsibility in Washington DC. That rally, the 9/12 March on Washington DC, had over a million people in attendance. What did the media reported? Tens of thousands of people showed up. That is very misleading report. I was there marching and volunteering at the march. It really doesn’t matter if you are Republican, Democrat, Independent or Libertarian, but if you believe in liberty and pursuit of freedom, then we are all united in common ground.

We’ve been yelling for a long time and we have been protesting outside the Federal Reserve, the Capitol Hill, the state capital , outside the office of Nancy Pelosi, and still the media is just ignoring us.
But it’s time to change strategic course and get back to the basic.

Protesting is easy and effective in short term. We get a permits, make a few signs, build a viral marketing base and you’ll get a few thousand people mad as listening to people hoot and holler.

It is effective at galvanizing people, building communication, networking and creating momentum. But protesting is useless if the momentum is not captured and put to effective use in a proactive manner.

This is the right time to start organizing, creating awareness and educating about the Cap and Trade Bill, Copenhagen Treaty and Obamacare Bill. We have to start connecting the dots and look at the bigger picture.

I don’t know about you but if I ask my neighbor and ask them what a Tea Party is or what is Cap and Trade Bill or Copenhagen Treaty or Obamacare bill, they wouldn’t know. Why? Because we are so busy going from Point A to Point B and as long as we are in our comfort zone, we don’t care.

Despite our protests and rallies having tens of thousands in attendance, people outside the Tea Party circles are still uninformed about wasted tax dollars and will continue to be wasted unless we have some real change in all elected offices.

What are we going to do? We will set up a grassroots infrastructure with neighborhood coordinators, and district leaders.

We will hand out fliers, inviting people to homes for lunch and dinner events, hold public meetings, having a night out at local bars and businesses, and creating awareness of what is going on in our government.

We will be working towards creating awareness for fiscally responsible candidates for 2010.

It is hard work. Protesting is easy but if we want change, we are going to work hard at it.

It’s time to stop yelling at people who aren’t listening, who are going to keep ignoring us and it’s time to start listening to, talking with and educating our neighbors and family in one-on-one basis.

It’s time to take our energy, our momentum and our common sense to every single person in every state. So create your informational fliers, organize a community discussions, invite people over dinner and educate.

Lose the anger. I’m also angry, but it will not get me anywhere.
We don’t need people yelling, we need informed voters for the 2010 elections.

Let’s hit the streets, be positive and educate.

The time for change is November 2010, the time to prepare for hope and change.

Note: PumaLiberty is in the process of exploring the basis of political (and related economic) woes currently facing our nation. While we will periodically share information created by other organizations, we do not necessarily endorse the content of any material that’s not generated by the PumaLiberty group. The following material is for informational purposes only.

The End of Money and the Future of Civilization
Review of Thomas Greco’s book

by Richard C. Cook
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Global Research, October 14, 2009

It’s too late for anyone to pretend that the U.S. government, whether under President Barack Obama or anyone else, can divert our nation from long-term economic decline. The U.S. is increasingly in a state of political, economic, and moral paralysis, caught as it were between the “rock” of protracted recession and the “hard place” of terminal government debt.

Even if the stock market can be shored up by more government borrowing for “stimulus” spending, it’s a temporary reprieve, because nothing can bring back the consumer purchasing power that was lost when the banks stopped pumping money into the economy through out-of-control mortgage lending. We simply no longer have the job base for people to earn the income they need to live.

The underlying cause of the crisis is in fact the debt-based monetary system, whereby the U.S. ruling class long ago sold out our nation and its people to the international banking cartel of which the Rockefeller and Morgan interests have been the chief representatives for over a century. It was lending on a previously unheard of scale for overpriced assets to people and businesses unable to repay that created the bubbles that burst in 2008, not only in the housing market but also in such areas as commercial real estate, equities, commodities, and derivatives. It was an explosion that reverberated throughout the world.

The Obama administration’s response to the crisis has been to print Treasury bonds both for the financial system bailouts and the sputtering Keynesian stimulus that so far has gone substantially into military infrastructure. This bond bubble is what I have referred to as “Obama’s Last Picture Show.” http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12512

Government debt is fundamentally inflationary. For a generation, the U.S. dollar has been inflating at an increasing rate, with the economy being kept in a growth posture by selling our debt instruments abroad or allowing foreigners holding dollars to purchase property and other assets on our own soil. The website EconomyinCrisis.org reports that in 2007, the most recent year for which data are available, “foreign entities spent $267.8 billion to acquire or establish U.S. businesses.” http://www.economyincrisis.org/articles/show/2801

Foreigners are spending their dollars as fast as possible, because they are now plummeting in value. It’s increasingly clear that sooner rather than later, the dollar will be dumped by foreign purchasers of bonds, particularly China, and possibly even the oil-producing nations.

These nations know full well that bonds denominated in dollars can never be completely repaid, even if the bonds can be rolled over into fresh debt. It’s this dynamic that is dragging the U.S. economy to the cliff, because real economic growth stopped long ago when our manufacturing jobs were exported. This is because most of the growth since Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 has been only on paper through financial bubbles. This included the dot.com bubble of the Clinton years that blew up in 2000-2001.

Now, after the Treasury bond bubble of 2009, there is nothing left in America to inflate. With so many jobs gone, the American family home was the last thing of value we owned.

Note: PumaLiberty is in the process of exploring the basis of political (and related economic) woes currently facing our nation. While we will periodically share information created by other organizations, we do not necessarily endorse the content of any material that’s not generated by the PumaLiberty group. The following material is for informational purposes only.

This is a comment by Dr. Seidman on healthcare reform. He deserves a bigger voice than just a comment on the website.

Professionalism and the Billing Event

I’m an old guy. I began the practice of medicine in 1958 when I entered medical school. In 1966 I began a neurosurgery residency. My mentors were men of honor. When they operated on a patient, he remained their patient. If the surgery failed and there was need for a second surgery, there was never a second charge to the patient. The patient’s problem was the surgeon’s problem. No additional charge was made for any subsequent difficulty arising from the decision to do surgery. The dictum: “You cut ‘em, you own ‘em”. I did not charge for a second surgery as a result of a failed first surgery. I saw my patients, without charge, on the anniversary of their surgery. It was good PR and it was good medicine. We prided ourselves on honor and good results.

When my patient was dying of a malignant brain tumor, I saw my patient at his home. I helped the family deal with his dying at home. My personal physician is a real doctor. He cares for his patients and cares about his patients. He knows me; he talks to me and listens to me. That is what real doctors do. He made a house call on a dying patient, Medicare refused to pay for his house call. My doctor is an internist. He does not have a global fee as a surgeon used to have. He charges by the action. Medicare refused to pay because my doctor went to the address where care was being given. It was a different address than the records at Medicare showed. It would be humorous if it were not so stupid.

Health care was 6% of the GDP.

Now health care, in reality sickness care, is 17% of the GDP. What happened? In a word – government and in another word – bureaucracy. Five hundred thousand people are employed in the offices of Medicare and Medicaid. Fifty eight thousand alone are employed in California’s Medicaid, called Medi-cal.

After 1965 the practice of medicine changed. Government provided Medicare and Medicaid. The County Hospital, previously responsible for the indigent or those unwilling to pay for medical care, was allowed to wither. Prior to government takeover, care of the poor was the responsibility of all, medical schools, county hospitals, church and synagogue affiliated hospitals, and physicians. Physicians in private practice donated their time to the county hospital, to medical school teaching, to intern and resident training, to volunteering at the county hospital, to attending free clinics, etc. The system worked; people of all economic levels got care. In 1965 the Congress and Lyndon Johnson passed Medicare and Medicaid. The concept was “more equal” medical care. Medical care for the poor was recognized but the politicians, like all politicians, wanted “more equal”. You remember, “Some animals are more equal than others”. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, government involvement and bureaucracy grew.

In 1988, 300 people were employed in the Alabama Medicaid bureaucracy. In 1991, 511 were employed. In 2002 the number reached 9,726, a 3,242% increase in bureaucrats in eleven years. None of these people provide medical care or health care or sickness care. All absorb tax dollars. What do they do? They do not administer, administration is done under contract to a private company. They do not provide care. What is the purpose of the bureaucracy? Apparently, to make sure that tax dollars are well spent. Enough said. It was 6% of GDP; now it is 17% of GDP. How high can it go with Obama’s “universal health care”?Now we have evolved to the abortive concept of the billing event. The billing event is defined as a charge for every activity associated with contact with a patient. Now charges for a surgery are re-initiated after 30 days following the initial surgery. Now a failed surgery leading to second surgery is charged at a rate higher than the first surgery. How much insanity can we buy? Now, surgeons are paid more to fail than succeed.

The billing event is perfected by the Kaiser Health Plan. This is the largest Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) in the United States. Kaiser works to enhance the frequency and enlargement of the billing event. It functions to chain the “provider”, previously called the physician, to a desk to see patients for specific periods of time. A half unit is four hours and a full unit is eight hours. During these time periods, the provider will see as many patients and prescribe as many tests, prescriptions and medical activities as conceivable. By creating medical activities the provider is rewarded. Each activity is associated with co-pay or other form of billing event. Brief time periods with patients producing larger numbers of billing events are rewarded. Talking to the patient, providing advice, spending time to listen is discouraged. There is no billing code for reassurance, consoling, encouragement or empathy. No billing event takes place while holding a patient’s hand or using the physician’s brain to make a clinical diagnosis. Clinical diagnosis is a lost art in monopolistic organizations.

Many times the provider is not a physician but a physician substitute, a certified medical assistant, a nurse practitioner, a physician’s assistant or other. The Kaiser organization is lobbying the California legislature to have one physician “supervise” four non-physicians in “care” of the Kaiser patient. Presently the Kaiser physician can supervise only 2 non-physicians. My experience suggests that the non-physicians were assigned to the least aware patients who could not determine the qualifications of the incumbent individual. They all wear white coats.

The billing events are created in lieu of a clinical diagnosis. The clinical diagnosis is the foundation of medical care. Or at least it was. The clinical diagnosis is the result of an intelligent and attentive physician listening to the patient, asking pertinent questions and reaching a conclusion as to what is troubling the patient. In earlier days of good medical care, an educated and attentive physician could make a correct diagnosis eighty-five percent of the time. With no help from MRI scans, CT scans, laboratory tests, x-rays or other diagnostic testing, the correct diagnosis would occur in the hands and mind of what I call a “real doctor”. In my experience with the Kaiser organization a correct clinical diagnosis was never established. It may never have been considered; it did not produce a billing event.

On a personal basis, I may have learned more in the small provincial hospitals in Burilam and Surin, Thailand than in more formal experiences. The only real tool we had was clinical diagnosis. We did surgery every day. Our surgeries were based on clinical diagnosis; we made judgments based on what the patient told us and our physical examination. We had limited IV fluids and no blood replacement. Our laboratory was primitive or nonexistent and our x-ray machine did not work very often. Our infection rate was less than that experienced in a major university teaching hospital in New England where I was resident. We learned to do surgery quickly and bloodlessly. There was no blood to replace any losses. It was fun to fly by the seat of your pants and make people better.

The CPT Expert is the 512 page bible of billing events. It is a numbers game with a relentless tendency to upgrade the number.
For example:
New Patient: 99201: Office or other outpatient visit for the evaluation and management of a new patient, which requires these three key components: a problem focused history; a problem-focused examination; straightforward medical decision making. Counseling and/or coordination of care with other providers or agencies are provided with the nature of the problem(s) and the patient’s or the family’s needs. Usually, the presenting problem(s) are self limited or minor. Physicians typically spend 10 minutes face-to-face with the patient and/or the family. New Patient: 90202…Physicians typically spend 20 minutes face-to-face…………. New Patient: 90203…Detailed… low complexity…30 minutes face-to-face…………… New Patient: 90204…Comprehensive…moderate complexity…45 minutes……….. New Patient: 90205…Comprehensive…high complexity…60 minutes……………….

In my neurosurgical practice, all new patients received a minimum of 45 minutes for their interview and physical examination. It is not possible to get to know the patient, determine the clinical diagnosis, confirm the clinical diagnosis, describe a course of treatment, and explain the situation in less time than 45 minutes. The interview (history) led to the clinical diagnosis. The physical examination would confirm the clinical diagnosis. All subsequent (follow-up) visits received a minimum of 15 minutes. I, like my respected colleagues, saw every x-ray, every CT scan, MRI scan, every laboratory result; I was responsible. I reviewed all studies on every one of my patients. I was well paid. I could afford to be generous. My colleagues, the ones still practicing, tell me they are paid half or less of what I used to be paid. They are pushed.

When the geniuses at Medicare and Medicaid reduced the compensation to physicians caring for patients, the response was to see more patients in less time. The compensation of the government clerical employees was never reduced, now about $132,000, a 38% increase from 2002-2006. Medicare trustees forecast a 26% reduction in Medicare physician fees between 2006 and 2013. In 1989, the fee for cataract surgery was $1573; in 2006 Medicare allowed $684 – a 57% reduction. Coronary bypass surgery paid $3,957 in 1989; in 2006 Medicare allowed $2,049.. Billing events are not restricted. HMOs and their physician employees receive compensation under the Medicare Advantage program. Billing events are encouraged, though the government’s plan was to reduce costs, it has not worked.

The perpetuation of ignorance and incompetence is the result of monolithic organizations derived from the government mandates. The HMO was an attempt to “save money” by encouraging the patient to receive comprehensive care through one organization. It did not work. Costs did not go down. Billing events increased. Personal experience with the Kaiser Health Plan confirmed the high priced, dysfunctional organization.

The Third Largest Employer in the World

The National Health Service (NHS) is the third largest employer in the world. Only the Chinese Red Army and the Indian National Railway system have more employees. More than 1.4 million are employed by National Health Service of Great Britain. More than 640,000 are administrators, 111,000 are physicians, 380,000 are nurses and the remainder is paramedical and janitorial personnel. Of the 111,000 physicians most are not educated in British medical schools. The largest number was educated in third world medical schools. Of the 737 HIV positive nurses working in the NHS (2002), 727 were from Africa, 8 from India and one from the USA and one from Australia. If a British patient is fortunate enough to leave a NHS hospital without acquiring AIDS, he is subject to 850,000 adverse events and 40,000 to 72,000 deaths per year due to medical error or accident. The incidence in the NHS in 2002 was twice the incidence of medical error in the USA. At a cost of $44,000 per adverse incident and 850,000 incidents the cost to the British taxpayer is $37,400,000,000.00. The answer to the problem by the Office of Health Economics, “it is always cheaper for the National Health Service to allow a patient to die than seek out his illness and treat it”. Doctor Anthony Daniels, who writes for the City Journal under the name of Theodore Dalrymple, describes British hospitals as the dirtiest and most broken down in Europe. And that ladies and gentlemen is the solution we are being presented in our country by the present administration.

The Canadian Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons does not recognize the specialty credentials of doctors trained in India and Pakistan and many other countries. The British Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons does recognize the specialty credentials of doctors trained in India and Pakistan and many other countries. In the USA, physicians trained in India and Pakistan must complete a residency program in the USA or Canada to be eligible for licensing in the USA. Why the obvious discrepancy? The British government has destroyed the freedom to practice medicine and the incentives to enjoy the practice of medicine. The National Health Service is desperate for bodies to fill the vacancies. We are following in the footsteps of failure as we reduce the joy of medical practice and the ability to create and the freedom formerly associated with medical practice.

Death rates: UK versus USA
• Breast Cancer: UK 46% USA 25%
• Prostate Cancer: UK 57% USA 19%
• Major Surgery: UK 10% USA 2.5%
• Seriously Ill in Hospital: UK 14% USA 2%

Ageism is the result of rationing health care to seniors in the UK. “Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.” Life saving treatment is denied to women over 70 with breast cancer. Since care must be rationed when run by the government, why not use age? Coronary care units have upper age limits. Women over 65 must beg for a mammogram. England has the worst cancer survival rates of all the 8 first world countries (53% to the rest of the developed world’s 78%). Age discrimination is the inevitable consequence of decades of rationing of sickness care in a state-run, tax funded system. Overworked, poorly trained, and underpaid medical personnel, working under terrible conditions routinely find excuses for not providing clinically necessary treatment.

In 2004, in the Scottish National Health Service, one in 12 medical positions was vacant. Unfilled were 800 nurse’s jobs and 235 consultant’s (medical specialists) jobs. There was no shortage of administrators. If you would be referred to a specialist in Scotland, the wait times are as follows: Dr. Kumar, orthopedic surgeon, 94 weeks; Dr. McMahon, general surgeon, 93 weeks; Dr. Blyth, orthopedic surgeon, 90 weeks; the shortest time to see an ENT specialist in Scotland was Dr. Morrissey in 54 weeks. The National Health Service was founded in 1948 on the principle of health care as a human right. When elderly folks in Great Britain need it the most, health care is denied. Universal health care run by bureaucrats and politicians is a progressively catastrophic concept.

The National Health Service has removed the human incentives to the practice of medicine. When there is no fame, no fortune, no fun and no freedom, competent people will not become physicians. Who is going to spend until age 35 to become a neurosurgeon to be treated with the indignities that characterize the current mess?

As frequently as twice a year, the British Parliament or the Secretary of Health or the Prime Minister proposes health care reform. Much noise, many papers, some spinning about, some hiring and firing but nothing changes. When there is no freedom, the status quo wins. Inertia is the system. Doctors receive 7% of the total spending. Nurses receive about 30%. Bureaucrats and paramedics, as they are listed in the UK, receive about 64%. Try turning an aircraft carrier; it is easier than turning a bureaucrat or a politician.

Canadian Medicare

As in the UK there is no health care in Canada. Canada and the UK provide sickness care; health care, as such, is a misnomer. The sickness care provided by the Canadian “system” is associated with “unreasonable” waiting times. Canadians wait more than 18 weeks for definitive medical care. Progressive decreasing expenditures on hospital construction, new equipment, medical school enrollment, increasing hospital debt, decreasing physician and nurse availability is again associated with the lack of fame, fortune, fun and freedom available to a doctor in Canada. Great institutions like the Montreal Neurologic Institute have deteriorated in national and international reputation.

The clinical outcome of coronary artery bypass surgery grafting is poor in Canada. The usual time between the recommendation of surgery and the performance of surgery is 97 days. Patients who waited the 97 days or longer experienced:

• Reduced physical functioning
• Reduced vitality
• Reduced general health
• Increased mental problems
• Increased mortality (they died)
• Only 53% returned to work (85% of those waiting shorter periods were able to return to work)
• The longer patients waited for definitive care the more bad events occurred

Mrs. Clinton described patients as “greedy” when they exercised their freedom to receive desired medical and surgical care. She did not describe former president Clinton as greedy when he underwent his coronary bypass surgery after a brief wait. It does depend on who is wearing the shoe. Of course, the rich and powerful will get medical care whenever and wherever. Politicians never are deprived, even in Canada. The Canadian citizen is not free to choose his doctor; the doctor is not free to choose his patient. The employment contract with the Canadian Prime Minister contained a health care clause, Mr. Martin could go wherever he wanted and, of course, the taxpayers paid for it.

The Canadian Supreme Court found prolonged waiting times for sickness care to be a violation of human rights. Nothing has changed. “Human rights” is an abstract concept.

Today in the USA

We have 50% fewer general practioners and primary care physicians today than we did 20 years ago. We have 34% fewer medical school graduates wanting a neurosurgical residency. Women are 50% of the physician workforce. Women doctors frequently work less years and often share the job of a doctor. (We were once a calling, then a profession, now a job.) Our primary care providers (PCPs) are herded into offices where they see bodies on an assembly line. They do not see the x-ray, or the CT scan, or the MRI. They may read the report, no feedback occurs between the radiologist and the GP. They do not visit “their patient” in the hospital. They do not see the surgeon or the surgery. The GP cannot know who is clever, swift, competent, and careful with tissue, has minimal blood loss, has the lowest use of narcotics following surgery, has the lowest infection rates, has the shortest hospitalizations and the lowest number of repeat operations. Whose patient is the patient, Kaiser’s? The Medical Clinic’s? The Hospital’s?

The new paradigm: The physician substitute refers the patient to the surgery department, the surgeon operates, the intensivist sees the patient in the post-anesthetic area and in the ICU, the hospitalist sees the patient on the surgical floor, the surgeon may see the patient once or maybe never again, at time of discharge another person will dictate the discharge summary. If a nursing home is necessary, another person will see the patient in the nursing home. Whatever happened to the archaic concept of the physician’s patient or the patient’s doctor? That archaic concept is incompatible with maximum billing events. Every doctor-patient contact in the new paradigm is a billing event. More different doctors creates more different billing events.

My patient remained my patient as long as my patient wanted me to be his doctor. It was not confusing. It was much less expensive. Maybe it was more like an old fashioned marriage. One surgery-one billing event and care for as long as the patient wanted. New problems could demand a new procedure, but my side was my side and God’s side was God’s side.

Note: PumaLiberty is in the process of exploring the basis of political (and related economic) woes currently facing our nation. While we will periodically share information created by other organizations, we do not necessarily endorse the content of any material that’s not generated by the PumaLiberty group. The following material is for informational purposes only.

http://www.augustforecast.com/2009/08/21/social-utility-how-much-are-grandpa-and-grandma-worth

By Rus­sell L. Blay­lock, M.D.

In a pre­vious essay, I dis­cussed a con­cept that is always on the mind of the socialist planner and that is “social utility”. To fully under­stand this con­cept one has to under­stand the socialist phi­los­ophy, if it can indeed be called a phi­los­ophy — in gen­eral, philoso­phies are ana­lyt­ical. In their world view, which is basi­cally a gnostic one, the world is occu­pied by two basic forms of human life — those who are wise and chosen and those who make up the common rabble — the masses.

The wise, in an older gnostic view, are anointed by the divine force to lead mankind and mold his nature based on an under­standing derived from arcane knowl­edge care­fully guarded by mys­tics of the ancient world. This idea, that cer­tain men are chosen to rule mankind has per­me­ated many gov­ern­ments of the world since and in modern times has attained a less meta­phys­ical tint, but which is still divided between those who cling to the ancient notions of gnos­ti­cism, such as the theosophists (Alice Bailey), and the modern view of the New World Order Move­ment. Of course, they inter­mingle quite often. We are wit­nessing an exploding interest in wisdom derived from the gnostic gospels, as taught by its chief dis­ciple Elaine Pagels. Many intel­lec­tuals, high-ranking pol­i­cy­makers and even clergy have accepted gnostic beliefs.

When it is accepted that cer­tain men are chosen to rule purely based on their divine anoint­ment and that they rule not based on raw power, but by the fact that they pos­sess a wisdom far beyond the common man, it becomes accepted that the masses (ordi­nary people) must obey — it is their duty.

In the view of the gnostic, society is chaotic, poorly planned and unjust. There­fore, through a series of care­fully thought out plans, in their view, society can be molded or engi­neered to create a more free, just and hap­pier society than would oth­er­wise occur. This requires that the masses, the people, be con­vinced to adhere to the “plan” and if they are not con­vinced they must be tricked into accepting the plan. As Edmund Burke said, -“The people never give up their lib­er­ties but under some delu­sion”. The last resort is out­right force.

The wise ones see society as a parent views their small chil­dren, they must be made to take their med­i­cine because only the wisdom of the par­ents can know that in the long run it will be good for them — the idea of the pater­nal­istic society. Like­wise, they are assured that the common rabble will never have the vision and intel­lec­tual capacity to under­stand the plan in its entirety. We see this level of arro­gance in all their writings.

Armed with this world view, the self-appointed elite have con­cluded that since they must engi­neer the per­fect society, they alone must gauge a person’s worth in terms of social utility — what does the indi­vidual or group have to offer to the New World Order. In this view, social utility is based on one’s con­tri­bu­tion to the plan. The socialist only deals in terms of society as a whole or to the economy in general.

One who works, pays taxes and is not a burden on the state is of higher social utility than is a retired or dis­abled person, who not only does not con­tribute skills (work) or pay taxes, but more likely is a burden on the state. In the col­lec­tivist way of thinking (seeing society as a whole and having no con­cern for the indi­vidual) the latter person should be removed from the society, either by pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive euthanasia. It is pos­i­tive if one actively kills a person and neg­a­tive if they just deny those per­sons access to life sus­taining care — in both cases they are just as dead.

The Amer­ican gnostic elite have chosen neg­a­tive euthanasia as the system that will be most accepted by the people, the masses. The mech­a­nism for this mode of killing is rationing of health care. It is ironic that during this debate on national socialist health care many vocal defenders deny that the admin­is­tra­tion wants to kill anyone, yet if we read the words of those who designed this plan, that is exactly what they say. More on that later.

His­to­rian Paul Johnson wrote in his book, Intel­lec­tuals, that “social engi­neering is the cre­ation of mil­lenarian intel­lec­tuals who believe that they can refashion the uni­verse by the light of their unaided reason. It is the birthright of the total­i­tarian tra­di­tion.” These intel­lec­tuals are the chosen wise ones of modern times. Socialist Edward Alsworth Ross in his book Social Con­trol, makes plain that some, the wise, must create a plan that estab­lishes con­trol over the society and that it is these leaders who must con­trol the behavior and actions of the people. This book, which was highly influ­en­tial among pol­i­cy­makers, was written in 1910. In the chapter on The Need for Social Con­trol he explains:

“Although the social fabric is at first held together by sheer force of arms, time grad­u­ally masks naked might, and moral and spir­i­tual influ­ences partly replace brute force. It is in the com­posite society, then, where the need of con­trol is most imper­a­tive and unremit­ting, that the var­ious instru­ments of reg­u­la­tion receive their highest forms and finish. Here has been per­fected the tech­nique of almost every kind of control.”

He then goes on to say:

“The only thing that can enable a society to dis­pense with con­trol is some sort of favor­able selec­tion. The way to pro­duce a short-clawed feline is not to trim the claws of suc­ces­sive gen­er­a­tions of kit­tens, but to pick out the shortest clawed cats and breed from them.

This, of course is a call for eugenic engi­neering of society to breed for desir­able people and rid society of the unfit and unde­sir­able. It is impor­tant to keep in mind that those sup­porting these dra­conian eugenic pro­grams were not dis­grun­tled dreamers cog­i­tating in some New York coffee house, they were men and women of high social rank, intel­lec­tuals, pres­i­dents of major uni­ver­si­ties, pol­i­cy­makers, cor­po­rate heads and even pres­i­dents of the United States. These were people in posi­tions of power and influ­ence who could enforce these dreams of a Utopian society and that made them very dangerous.

Lily Kay, in her book, The Mol­e­c­ular Vision of Life, a his­tory of mol­e­c­ular biology, she states:

“By the time of the launching of the mol­e­c­ular biology pro­gram, the Rock­e­feller phil­an­thropies had con­sid­er­able expe­ri­ence with eugenics. … they did sup­port eugenics projects, such as the ster­il­iza­tion cam­paign of the National Com­mittee for Mental Hygiene to restrict the breeding of the feeble-minded, The Rock­e­feller phil­an­thropies also acted in the area of eugenics through the Bureau of Social Hygiene (BSH) and the Laura Spellman Rock­e­feller Memo­rial (LSRM).”

Enthu­siasm for social engi­neering and elim­i­nating the “unfit” reached beyond our shores with links being made to the German eugenics move­ment, a favorite topic of Hitler and the National Socialist. Edwin Black in his his­tory of the eugenic move­ment, War on the Weak, says:

“The third Inter­na­tional Con­gress of Eugenics was held in New York City in August of 1932, once again at the Amer­ican Museum of Nat­ural His­tory. Although orga­ni­za­tion such as the Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion were donating vast sums to German eugenics for research and travel, the grants were fre­quently lim­ited to spe­cific activ­i­ties within Ger­many or neigh­boring countries.”

The reason for quoting this mate­rial is to show how even in a country such as ours the brightest and most edu­cated class can some­times be obsessed with dan­gerous ideas that can harm indi­vid­uals. These indi­vid­uals become espe­cially dan­gerous when they con­trol the reins of edu­ca­tion, dis­sem­i­na­tion of news and gov­ern­ment policy-making. As the title of Richard Weaver’s book says—Ideas Have Con­se­quences.

The Modern Social Engineers

Unknown to many, once again a group of our most politically-connected intel­lec­tuals are pur­suing an idea that can harm a great many people in our society. Much of the funding for these ideas once again flows from the major foun­da­tions in our country, espe­cially the and the Ford Foun­da­tion, Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion and affil­i­ates the Carnegie Foun­da­tion. These major foun­da­tions are net­worked with hun­dreds of other foun­da­tions and research study groups, giving them enor­mous influ­ence in society and among politi­cians who can carry out these ideas by spe­cific legislation.

I have chosen the Hast­ings Center for my source of writ­ings on the new under­stand­ings on health care as being pro­moted by this admin­is­tra­tion. I say this admin­is­tra­tion, but I am cer­tain this bill was not drafted in any con­gres­sional office, but rather had been pre­pared long ago by one of the foun­da­tion think tanks. I base this on my knowl­edge of the foun­da­tions’ obses­sion with health care plan­ning and social­ized med­i­cine and the com­plexity of this bill.

The Hast­ings Center, as some will remember, was involved in much con­tro­versy many years ago as the group pro­moting the idea of neg­a­tive euthanasia to estab­lish more equity in health care dis­tri­b­u­tion. They were not as openly rad­ical as the Hem­lock Society, which felt it their duty to elim­i­nate those con­sid­ered unfit for life and for pro­moting the idea of having panels of experts decide to decide who shall live and who shall die in nursing homes.

One of the fel­lows of the Hast­ings Center is Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Pres­i­dent Obama’s health care czar and a source of con­stant input on health care “reform”. His schol­arly paper is included in a package of arti­cles expressing the Hast­ings Cen­ters posi­tion on health care reform and life in general.

On this web­site they make the fol­lowing statement:

“Death may not have changed, but dying is quite dif­ferent from what it used to be, thanks to med­ical tech­nolo­gies that have extended life and made dying fre­quently a lin­gering process rather than a sudden event. People with failing kid­neys can sur­vive on dial­ysis for 20 or more years. People with incur­able cancer can live for months or years with chemotherapy and radi­a­tion treat­ments. Vic­tims of car acci­dents who would once have died of head trauma can now be kept alive by ven­ti­la­tors and feeding tubes. Mean­time, life-saving ther­a­pies for what were once sudden killers, like heart attack, mean that increasing num­bers of us end up with chronic com­pli­ca­tions or decline into dementia.”

In other word, because of advances in med­i­cine we can now give people longer lives, even though they have presently incur­able dis­eases and in their view this is wrong. Why?, because it just means they may end up with some­thing worse years later — such as dementia. That is much like saying it would be a waste to fix the fence because even­tu­ally it will wear out anyway.

A paper from this Hast­ings Center col­lec­tion is one by a senior con­sul­tant for the Center, Bruce Jen­nings, titled—Lib­erty: Free and Equal. In essence, it is a dis­cus­sion of how lib­erty is to be rede­fined in light of the “new thinking”. Social­ists have rede­fined most words dealing with their assaults on free soci­eties. For example, Lenin defined a moral act as one that fur­ther the socialist rev­o­lu­tion. Thus, killing mil­lions in gulags is moral because it pro­moted the com­mu­nist revolution.

On the first page he resorts to the mer­can­tilist idea that a country has a fixed amount of wealth and that it is the job of the social planner to make sure there is a “just” dis­tri­b­u­tion of this wealth. We can think of the economy as a pie of a fixed size in this view. He says:

“Such a con­flict is thought to arise, for example, when allowing all indi­vid­uals the freedom to accu­mu­late as much as they can under­mines the capacity of the entire society to ensure that each indi­vidual receives a fair share.”

In other words, the eco­nomic pie is only so large and if some take a larger slice, others get a smaller slice. Adam Smith, in the Wealth of Nations and many econ­o­mists since that time, have shown that this is not true – the size of the pie is ever-growing in a free market society and is deter­mined by the cre­ativity and genius of those oper­ating in a free society in which pri­vate prop­erty is pro­tected. These socialist plan­ners do not under­stand this because they are socialist and socialism can never create any­thing in terms of eco­nomic growth — it can only redis­tribute by force what the free market has produced.
We also find that socialist often rede­fine cer­tain words that they use to deceive the public. For example, as stated above Lenin taught that an act was moral if it pro­moted the rev­o­lu­tion. This jus­ti­fied the mass killing of tens of mil­lions of Rus­sians because it fur­thered the com­mu­nist rev­o­lu­tion. In his essay Lib­erty: Free and Equal, Bruce Jen­nings, a senior con­sul­tant for the Hast­ings Center says:

“The health reform con­ver­sa­tion has to be re-framed at the grass roots level so that a new way of seeing what lib­erty is and what it requires will grow out of that con­ver­sa­tion. One tenet of this move­ment should be that equity in access to health care, reduc­tion of group dis­par­i­ties in health status, and greater atten­tion to the social deter­mi­nants of the health of pop­u­la­tions and indi­vid­uals are all polity goals through which lib­erty will be enhanced, not diminished.”

So, we see that the def­i­n­i­tion of lib­erty is now turned on its head and we are told to view this assault on lib­erty as enhancing lib­erty. He means that when looking at the larger pic­ture and when wearing the spe­cial gog­gles of socialism, forceful redis­tri­b­u­tion of your earn­ings will appear as greater lib­erty. This is because in the socialist view, engi­neering of humanity will make health care more just.

Again, that depends on one’s under­standing of eco­nomics — if you accept the mer­can­tilist view of a nation’s wealth, that there is a pie to be divided, yes it is true jus­tice demands that access be redis­trib­uted, but in a truly free society where wealth cre­ation arises from indi­vid­uals and groups of free indi­vid­uals par­tic­i­pating in free market oper­a­tions, it is not true. In a free society we are not dividing up a fix amount of resources, we are allowing people to decide what is the best way for them, using their own money, to indi­vid­u­ally sat­isfy their health care needs and desires.

When the social­ists say that they are dividing “scarce resources” one needs to ask — What are the resources in ques­tion? In a free market resource avail­ability depends on demand and cre­ativity of the entre­pre­neur. In fact, in many of their pub­li­ca­tions they com­plain that con­sumer demand is dri­ving the devel­op­ment of more tech­nology and advances in med­i­cine. They cannot have it both ways.

One must under­stand that socialism is about com­pul­sion. The social­ists believes that their view of society is the only cor­rect one, since they are the chosen wise of gnos­ti­cism, and there­fore people must be made to follow their plans. As I stated in my pre­vious paper on National Health Insur­ance: The Socialist Night­mare, when the leg­is­lator encoun­ters resis­tance to the plan they become more frantic and dictatorial.

Jen­nings concludes:

“Lib­erty rethought can then be one of the touch­stones for a demo­c­ratic, grass roots move­ment for health reform that will demand health jus­tice in a nation of free and equal persons.”

In the paper he rejects the wisdom of many of the philoso­phers of freedom that one cannot have absolute enforced equality and per­sonal lib­erty. Using a per­verse logic he somehow twist the prin­ciple of using com­pul­sion by the gov­ern­ment, that is, to take from some (deny access to mainly the elderly, the chron­i­cally ill and the presently incur­able) and give to the ones anointed by those in power.

Equality as a prin­ciple in a free country means that the gov­ern­ment will not make laws that denies access to the ben­e­fits of freedom, which are directed at a select group or indi­vidual. For example, both seg­re­ga­tion laws and racial quotas specif­i­cally target cer­tain groups to be denied cer­tain free­doms or as being anointed. What is being dis­cussed by the socialist is that access should be guar­an­teed to the “poor”, a rather broad term, and selec­tively denied to those with the highest health care cost (the elderly and the chron­i­cally ill), which is mostly through no fault of their own.

Another paper of the series of Hast­ings Center pub­li­ca­tions is by Paul T. Menzel, a pro­fessor of phi­los­ophy at Pacific Lutheran Uni­ver­sity titled—Jus­tice and Fair­ness: Man­dating Uni­versal Par­tic­i­pa­tion. I found this paper to be espe­cially enlight­ening. He opens by stating that it is unjust that one person is cured of their ill­ness and left unscathed by the cost and another dies or is left finan­cially ruined. This health care plan, as with all such socialist health care plans, reverses the sit­u­a­tion and says, in essence, it is they, the elite, who should choose who lives and who dies, usu­ally meaning that the elderly, the chron­i­cally ill and the presently incur­able are in the latter category.

To attain “jus­tice” he says, manda­tory health care must be leg­is­lated. Any time some­thing is man­dated, someone must be denied their lib­er­ties. For instance, man­dated vac­cines means you will be forcibly vac­ci­nated, as in the case of the thou­sand chil­dren and teenagers in Mary­land who were forcibly vac­ci­nated in the court­room by the judge’s order. To man­date uni­versal health care, under their def­i­n­i­tion, means everyone will be forced into the system even against their will. This is the antithesis of freedom, despite their attempt to rede­fine freedom.
He says:

“We have already col­lec­tively decided to pre­vent hos­pi­tals from turning away the unin­sured. In such a con­text, allowing insur­ance to remain vol­un­tary is unfair to many of the unin­sured. The obvious way to alle­viate this unfair­ness is to man­date insurance.”

Like the ACORN intim­i­da­tion of banks, forcing them to give loans to people who were bad finan­cial risk, forcing hos­pi­tals to take non-pay patients in mass num­bers, espe­cially illegal aliens, has led to bank­ruptcy of many smaller hos­pi­tals and serious finan­cial strain on many others. It also means, because of cost shifting, the insured and self-pay patient will pay more than just for their ser­vices. But then, that pushes more to accept the idea of social­ized medicine.

One of the most con­tro­ver­sial issues is the new system of analysis called Quality Adjusted Life Years — which divides cost with how long one would expect the person to live. For example, fixing an 85 year-old person’s cataracts just so they could see well, only to have them die a year later, seem unjust and foolish to a social planner. To the person and their loved ones, it is humane and rational.

If you treat people like a sta­tistic, as do social plan­ners, many inhu­mane things can be jus­ti­fied. We also see that a policy that won approval when the above example is used, soon expands to reclas­sify a person age 55 as “too old” for a health care ser­vice, as hap­pens in both the UK and Canada.

Effi­ciency, Quality Care and Money

In gen­eral, the old adage — you get what you pay for — is true. If you have bare-bones health care, you get mar­ginal care and if you pay more, you can get the best med­ical sci­ence has to offer. Most of the plan­ners for national health care plans intended for the public to get bare bones care, but they sold them on accepting the care by telling them it would offer unlim­ited ser­vice and quality.

Now we are hearing a dif­ferent story from the plan­ners. Sud­denly, we are hearing major players in health care sug­gest that we should “turn back the clock” on health tech­nology and top dollar care. In other words, people should settle for care at a 1960 level rather than a 2009 level. Pro­fessor Callahan states it this way:

“Serious progress would mean turning back the clock; learning to take care of our­selves, to tol­erate some degree of dis­com­fort, to accept the reality of aging and death.”

Fur­ther he says:

“One could make a good case that improve­ments in edu­ca­tion and job cre­ation could be a better use of lim­ited funds than better med­ical care. Social and eco­nomic progress would have double and even triple ben­e­fits beyond improved health.”

Thomas Murray, the pres­i­dent of the Hast­ings center agrees. He says that, “At times the best invest­ment for health may be in edu­ca­tion, job cre­ation, or envi­ron­mental pro­tec­tions, not in health care.”

Daniel Callahan notes that the carrot and stick approach may have to be used to guide people to accept changes in health care. As for the sticks he says:

“The stick will be the mes­sage that you should take care of your­self and not expect med­i­cine to save you when your time runs out — that is no longer an option.”

Already, gov­ern­ment funded med­ical care pro­vides less med­ical care than pri­vately insured patients, espe­cially those with expen­sive plans. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Obama’s health czar, wrote an article for the Hast­ings Center in 1996 in which he said;

“Medicare ben­e­fi­cia­ries receive fewer ser­vices with some dis­cre­tionary ser­vices cov­ered and some ser­vices that intu­itively seem basic cov­ered; Med­icaid ben­e­fi­cia­ries and unin­sured per­sons receive far fewer services.”

Dr. Emanuel goes on to sug­gest that:

“Con­versely, ser­vices pro­vided to indi­vid­uals who are irre­versibly pre­vented from being or becoming par­tic­i­pating cit­i­zens are not basic and should not be guar­an­teed. An obvious example is not guar­an­teeing health ser­vices to patients with dementia. A less obvious example is guar­an­teeing neu­ropsy­cho­log­ical ser­vices to ensure chil­dren with learning dis­abil­i­ties can read and learn to reason.”

Does Doctor Emanuel sug­gest that the Alzheimer patients should receive no care? What about the early Alzheimer patients, should they be seen for a bladder infec­tion, a degen­er­a­tive hip or diar­rhea? Or should we just let the family deal with it so we can use that money for other social engi­neering project, per­haps a new pro­jector to show sex-education pro­pa­ganda to grade-school chil­dren. It is obvious that under such a system, we must mea­sure a person’s “social utility” to deter­mine if they are worth the expenditure.

Who Are the Elderly?

From a series of state­ments by Doctor Emanuel it is apparent that he, and many others in posi­tions of power, con­clude that the elderly have lived their lives and it is time for them to move on, espe­cially if they are costing the state money. This is not a new theme among the elit­ists of society, as we went through this with Social Secu­rity as well.

One must then ask-Who are the elderly and why do they deserve to live? This ques­tion poised by the social­ists, assumes that one must give a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion to the fed­eral gov­ern­ment for existing in this society. This is the social utility argu­ment. If you serve no useful pur­pose in the society, as far as some social use­ful­ness, then you have no social utility and are no longer wel­come. This is not really that far away from the German National Socialist Party’s thinking, which referred to those with no social utility as “use­less eaters” and the dis­abled, chron­i­cally ill and incur­ables as “life unworthy of life”.

I remember when I was a boy my dad intro­ducing me to this very old fellow. We got to talking and I learned that the old gen­tleman had fought in the Spanish Amer­ican War. He told me things that I could never learn from a his­tory book and it stuck with me all my life. My dad later told me that there were older people all over who had inter­esting sto­ries to tell, people who had done amazing things and accom­plished much in life. They were a store­house of his­tory, wisdom and inter­esting sto­ries of life during America’s greatest moments.

I have gotten to know many who sur­vived the Great Depres­sion, World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam. I even met a fellow once who saw the Hin­den­burg burn. My mom used to tell me sto­ries of lis­tening to FDR on the radio and my Aunt Ann was working as a tele­phone oper­ator when it was announced that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. These things are invaluable.

To have the older gen­er­a­tion around as long as pos­sible is a great value to us all. There was a time when we hon­ored our par­ents and grand­par­ents as sources of great wisdom, yet in modern times we just see them as old fogies that have no idea how to send emails or pro­gram a DVD. We are now being taught by our “elite leaders” and intel­lec­tuals that we would all be better off if the elderly would just accept death and that denying them health care can speed the process.

Note: PumaLiberty is in the process of exploring the basis of political (and related economic) woes currently facing our nation. While we will periodically share information created by other organizations, we do not necessarily endorse the content of any material that’s not generated by the PumaLiberty group. The following material is for informational purposes only.
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Have a look at these videos:

Ron Paul – Fed is a Government Unto Itself

Ron Paul: Fed works in Collusion with Big Banks

The story of the Fed is a twisted tale, but highly fascinating. In our research, we’ve so far found that G. Edward Griffin is one of the more educational proponents for ending the Federal Reserve System. If you’re interested, read his book The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve.

Also, here’s a collection of videos you might find informative:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=g.+edward+griffin+on+the+federal+reserve+system&page=2

Happy reading and watching!