|
HEALTHPLANUSA.NET |
QUARTERLY NEWSLETTER |
|
Community For Affordable Health Care |
Vol XI, No 3, Oct, 2012 |
Transforming the $3 Trillion HealthCare
Industry into Affordable HealthCare
By Utilizing the $2 Trillion
Information Technology Industry
Through
innovation by moving from a Vertical to a Horizontal industry
Thus
eliminating $1 Trillion wasted
Insuring
every American without spending the Extra $1Trillion Projected.
To purchase a copy of
the business plan, become an entrepreneur,
and changed the course of history, go to the bookstore at
www.healthplanusa.net/index.asp
In This Issue:
1. Featured Article: 2012: THE MAKE OR BREAK FOR AMERICA
2. In
the News: '2016: Obama’s America'
3. International Healthcare: Putin, Chavez and Castro come
out for Obama.
4. Government Healthcare: Greek
Jobless Lose Health Benefits
5. Lean
HealthCare: A Medical Correlative
6. Misdirection in Healthcare: Atlas
Shrugged Part II
7. Overheard on Capitol Hill: Is America Exceptional?
8. Innovations in Healthcare: A
Parable of Health-Care Rationing
9. The
Health Plan for the USA: Deferred to the Book.
10. Restoring Accountability in Medical Practice by Moving
from a Vertical to a Horizontal Industry:
* * * * *
1. Feature
Article: 2012: The Make or Break for America
AGENDA GAMES: How Today’s
High-Stakes Political Combat Works.
EPILOGUE: THE “IT” YEAR OF 2012
First, the “It” girl—a
concept that means more than mere “perfection.” The “It” factor captures that
certain “something” one can’t quite define, but that redirects the attention
from anything else whenever “It” appears.
Professional
entertainers and those celebrity-centric people who follow this sort of thing
attribute the term to Elinor Glyn, who wrote the
magazine article that inspired the It film in 1927 starring Clara
Bow—although the honors for this particular perception of “It” actually go to
Rudyard Kipling.
But no matter. In
frenzied succession, there followed a series of “Its”: female celebrities, “It”
hairdos, “It” fashions, “It” songs, foods, and even exercise regimens. All
seemed to define their era, the prevailing mentality, or even an entire
generation.
By extension, the “It”
phenomenon took on another meaning, as in “This is ‘it’!” Whenever “It”
appeared, everyone was to understand that “It” was irreplaceable; that “It”
would never be—
and could never
be—superseded. So, “It” also took on yet another connotation: “The End,” or
“The Defining Moment.”
In American politics,
the “It” moments came with the close of World War II (“happy days” were here
again), with the Communist takeover Saigon (the first “war” America ever
“lost”)—and in 2012, the first time the Republic had ever been thought of as
“threatened.” The “It” years—the years everything changed, up close and
visible.
Since the 1970s,
traditionalists and patriots have seen “It” coming, and dreaded that there
would come a time when American ideals would not just be ridiculed in the
media, but dismantled by the courts. They worried that elections would
eventually be manipulated to such a degree that American values and ethics
could no longer be sustained. In the year 2012, the crossroads became clear.
But for this author,
it happened in a most unexpected way.
The following is a
true story:
I was sitting with a
neighbor in a café over lunch. It was the week before Christmas, 2011. Though
this neighbor had never been a particularly close friend (given our wildly
divergent political views), we had lived in the same community for so many
years, and even helped each other out on so many occasions, that we were, one
could say, on very good terms as long-time acquaintances, if not exactly
confidantes.
Many of my other
neighbors jokingly called this woman the “resident Commie” behind her back,
mostly because she proudly and openly admitted to being a Marxist in the
hippie-dippy days of our 1960s youth. She had participated in protests and
demonstrations, somehow managing to squeeze them in amongst her college studies
and various doctoral degrees.
But on this particular
day, she was protesting something altogether different. She confided, to my
astonishment, that she was leaving the Washington area—this place where
everything is vital and “happening”: the museums, the Kennedy Center, the
Fireworks over the Capital on the Fourth
of July, the plentiful ethnic restaurants, and Capitol Hill. She was headed for
fairer fields in the Great Southwest, of all places—home to the same
Confederacy and “rednecks” she had often denigrated.
“But why?” I asked,
perplexed. “I mean, you just revamped your entire house two years ago!”
Because, she said, “I
don’t like the turn the lifestyle has taken here.” What’s more, she saw “no
change in sight, regardless of who’s elected.”
My neighbor was
blissfully unaware, apparently, that the District of Columbia and its
surrounding bedroom communities exemplified the very lifestyle for which she
had once demonstrated, marched and chanted slogans during our coming-of-age
years—the only era, we both once thought, that really mattered.
Regardless of our
politics (we didn’t even know each other then), we imagined ourselves on the
cusp. We were first-wave Baby Boomers, born immediately after the War. The
“times, they were achangin’,” and lucky us, we were
part of “It”! We were the “It Generation,” the Ones Who’d Change the World.
The disappointed,
graying visage looking at me from across the table came as something of a
shock. Instead of being a smug representative of our “It” generation—her side
had “won,” after all—there was only “Me.”
Despite her multiple
Ph.D.’s in cutting-edge disciplines such as women’s studies, political
“science” and environmentalism, in my neighbor’s mind, the “Its” had
accomplished next to nothing, leaving the “Me Generation” in charge.
Like most young people
our age, I was never part of the “It” crowd, having stupidly declared a major
in a financially responsible (if not particularly emotionally satisfying)
career. I’d looked around for (and gratefully found) Mr. Right, rewarded my
parents with respectable, if not exactly stellar, grades, and “ate my peas” (to
use a quip from President Obama).
So, I was mightily
disturbed to hear that now, nearing retirement age, anybody at all was actually
in charge, much less this “Me Generation.”
“It” was all very
confusing… When did “It” turn into “Me”?
Was it merely “all so
simple then,” as per the song from the tear-jerker film, The Way We Were,
starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford?
Well, from the way my
neighbor was now shaking her gray locks, things certainly hadn’t turned out as
expected.
“Too many rules…,” she
complained. “And surveillance cameras—can you believe it, @#$% surveillance
EVERYWHERE?” In cathartic-like fashion, she elaborated:
… Can’t even take your
dog for a romp in the woods without some @#$% lazy pig snooping around making
sure you have a baggie clipped to your belt! And no trash cans! All these
taxes, and not a single @#$% garbage bin to dump your baggie full of droppings!
Do they really think people want to walk for an hour in the great, green outdoors
with a bag full of p_ _p in their hands?
And speaking of TAXES!
For what? The lights go out every time we have a little rain! In the
Capital of the Nation, for God’s sakes! I mean, this isn’t 1950! Aren’t we due
a few upgrades for all this money we’re shelling out? And my prescriptions….”
By now my neighbor’s
voice had reached enough pitch to draw attention:
“Do you believe,” she
continued, “that just two weeks after being hospitalized for a hysterectomy, my
pharmacy gets grief from the frigging government over a two-bit bottle of pain
medication! I mean, you’d think I was asking for crack, when all I
wanted was a refill that my doctor had already approved!”
I smiled. In
commiseration…among other things….
As my neighbor carried
on with her laundry list of grievances, my mind wandered: For some reason, I
fancied how she might have looked as a 10-year-old, riding a bike and thrilling
to the feel of the wind blowing through her hair. I imagined her frolicking
into the school building in the morning, flagging down a friend in the
hallway—no gauntlet of metal detectors and pat-downs standing in her way. No
concerns that some monster would jump out of nowhere and start shooting.
I imagined her
laughter and delight as she and her siblings lighted “sparklers” on the Fourth
of July. She might have caught me smiling, but it was not at her rant. Rather,
it was at the image of her enjoying buying a gooey ice-cream sandwich from a
machine at the local theater on a Saturday afternoon, with no notion of some
entity called the “food police.” Or as a teenager, with a bunch of other kids
at Tops Drive-in, ordering a burger—and the best, thickest milkshake in town.
I pictured her…or
maybe I was picturing us—or maybe the little girl in my mind’s eye was…me…?
The 1960s Boomers. The
“Me Generation.”
Whatever became of
those of us who were hopelessly…well, “nerdy” in today’s lingo? Never “brave” enough,
or “popular” enough, or self-serving enough to qualify for the “It” crowd. All those
“Me’s” who didn’t have the leisure (much less the parental support) to
demonstrate against anything! We didn’t know it then, but We were still
in the majority—on our way to independence, selfsufficiency
and self-reliance. Unfortunately, press accounts of the 60s pretended
otherwise, so we had no idea. “Changes … they were a-comin’,”
the pundits said. And the world would belong to the counterculture radicals. It
would be the “It” kids—like my nowgrown neighbor—the
“radicals” and the “counterculture” fighting against the Establishment—who
would rule America.
Yet, somehow “We, the
People” had found each other and reconnected, in cities all around the country
via the Internet. We may not have been actual classmates, but we had similar
stories, and deep down each of us knew an “It” day is a-comin’.
And now, apparently,
so did my left-leaning neighbor.
So, she had decided to
run, to run away—down to “Dixie,” of all places.
I wondered if she
realized that the great liberal activist folk singer we all loved, Joan Baez—even
with her astonishing voice and range—today would never make it past the stage
door with her signature piece, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” The word
“Dixie,” in any context, is so politically incorrect that it cannot be uttered
in public. Like the old Christmas standby, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,”
Baez’s “Dixie” song is a relic of the past, when terms like “husband,” “wife”
and “fiancé” were not referred to as “partners” in TV ads.
What a difference a
few years makes! I mused.
My neighbor,
unfortunately, will not escape the rules she helped precipitate—and now
despises—in the Great Southwest. So, who, will stand as the “resisters” now?
Which side will throw in the towel—or maybe throw down the gauntlet? “It” was
kind of hard to say.
The world’s
billionaires and the “mainstream” media work long and hard to narrow America’s
choice of candidates, be it national, state or local races—and no matter who,
technically, sits atop the heap with the most endorsements from average
Americans. Yet, both the media and the political parties tell us, over and
over, that “every vote counts.” Most people think it doesn’t.
Unless.
What if “We, the
People” did the unexpected? What if a candidate played the game and tricked the
pollsters? Polls, after all, are mostly extrapolations from a sampling of a few
hundred individuals. The media pays attention to them? Should we?
With a start, my
attention returned to my grumbling neighbor. Just how “radical” was she? Would
someone like her—a member of the “It” 60s-counterculture—be a help or a
hindrance now?
Maybe my neighbor’s
frame of mind was merely signaling a “fight or flight” response—like before the
Nazis invaded Poland in the 1930s, or before the tanks rolled into Hungary in
the 50s, or ahead of the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s… Maybe she’d go to the
polls at election time and vote the way she always had—Left.
In any case, my
neighbor’s angst made me think: Maybe this was really “It”!
http://www.midnightwhistlerpublishers.com/uploads/2/7/3/3/2733187/agenda_games_arc_1.pdf
http://www.beverlye.com/bookshelf.html
http://www.beverlye.com/reviews.html
Feedback
. . .
Subscribe MedicalTuesday
. . .
Subscribe HealthPlanUSA .
. .
* * * * *
2. In the
News: '2016: Obama’s America'
Get the real
unvarnished truth about what 2016 will look like if Obama gets re-elected. You
may not recognize the Home of the Free. There may not be any home of the free
left on the earth if he wins. Some Freedom of Speech has been compromised. Some
Freedom of Religion has vanished. This has been playing throughout our country
this month. The DVD is now available. If you missed the widescreen, watch it on
your PC by ordering it from Amazon and other outlets. It’s worth the price. It may save our
country.
To be alerted to theater listings near you, sign up here
'2016 -- Obama's America' -- why
is the media so afraid of this movie
If you thought being
one of the producers of one of the greatest anti-hate films in history, one
that exposed hatred, bigotry and anti-semitism would
make you immune from being labeled a hate monger, think again. "Schindlers List" left its mark on the world and did so
by telling the truth about man’s inhumanity to men. Yet the slings and arrows
came at me to impinge my credibility, the work of Dinesh D’Souza and to once
again use hate as their passport to the dark side.
Is there anyone else
out there who sometimes finds movie reviews lacking in substance and objectivity?
How about a film “review” written by an online journal prior to them even viewing the film?
Does that sound like the classic cart before the horse scenario? Anyone else
smell something dishonest, partisan and maybe even cynical? That kind of effort
can only be suspect in its mission and intent.
I speak of an online journal writing an attack piece on my latest film, ‘2016 – Obama’s
America’. It labeled the film, “Feature Length Obama Hate.” Nice. And they
hadn’t even seen the film.
That kind of action
has to come from pure chutzpah, ideology or just plain stupidity, you can
pick.
It seems the left in
America can only define something they don’t understand, something that
frightens them, something so truthful it hurts or something they have no real
response to that leaves them grasping for any kind of answer that comes with
the hope that maybe it will just go away…and if it doesn’t, do all possible to
destroy it.
That won’t happen. The
film is complete, it’s scheduled for release and it stands on it’s own as a well thought out visual documentary based on
two books written by author Dinesh D’Souza, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage’ and the
soon to be released “Obama’s America.”
A dear friend reminded
me to not take the attack(s) personally and remember what a true hero of
American liberalism, Nat Hentoff, wrote in his
aptly titled book, “Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee: How The American Left
and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other.” Mr. Hentoff
reminds all of us that the "right" and the "left" have both
made blunders in their zeal to shut down the other side. But this attempt at
fairness in reviewing a new film goes the extra mile in incredulity when the
review comes EVEN BEFORE the film’s release.
This effort to
de-legitimize the film is nothing less than “high-tech censorship,” since the
first attack was trying to impugn the motives of the filmmakers and questioning
how the project was funded and by whom, all in an attempt to dissuade people
from watching it.
I don’t remember
anyone in the mainstream press questioning Michael Moore about his motives (he
wore them on his sleeve) or where the funding came from (deep pockets of those
sharing his ideology). No questions asked….
The American way has always
been to present ideas and new opinions, then through reason, logic, debate and
even personalities, continue to expose as many points of view as possible. It
makes the country a better one and stronger one for all of us.
“2016 – Obama’s
America” presents a picture of an America changed through the passion of one
man and his determination to turn America into ‘just another country.’ The
movie should be required viewing by all Americans. Then you can do your own
homework and make up your own mind.
But there are forces
out there who don’t want you to view this movie and will try desperately to
keep you away from the theater by impugning the character of people like me who
created the work, hoping it’ll scare you away.
That’s not the
American way.
I hope you’ll ignore
these voices of fear and enjoy the show. And to these true forces of hate, who
would seek to bully people into not seeing a movie they themselves haven’t even
seen yet, let me remind them: it’s just a movie. Right?
Gerald R. Molen is the
Academy award winning producer of films such as "Schindler's List,"
"Jurassic Park," "Minority Report" and others. His film
"2016: Obama's America" will be released in theaters on August 10 and
17.
Feedback
. . .
Subscribe MedicalTuesday .
. .
Subscribe HealthPlanUSA .
. .
* * * * *
3. International Healthcare:
Putin, Chavez and Castro come out for Obama.
Three world leaders known for their
anti-American views are endorsing President Barack Obama’s re-election, Fox News reports.
Venezuela President Hugo Chavez, the socialist-leaning leader who won a fourth
term this month, reportedly said that Obama was a “good guy.”
Meanwhile, the daughter of Cuban President Raul Castro, Mariela Castro, in June
told CNN that, “As a citizen of the world, I would like (Obama) to win.”
She had been speaking in Spanish. The Castro family has ruled Cuba under
Communism for over 50 years.
And in Russia, President Vladimir Putin has said Obama’s re-election could
improve relations between the nations.
Putin, the former prime minister, also reportedly said the president was a
“genuine person" who "really wants to change much for the
better."
But Putin did tell The Wall Street Journal that he could work with Republican
challenger Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor had said Russia was
the “No. 1 geopolitical foe” of the US.
Putin called the remark "pre-election rhetoric," Fox reports.
© 2012 Newsmax.
All rights reserved
Read more on Newsmax.com: Report: Obama Backed By World Leaders With Anti-American
Views
Important: Do You Support Pres. Obama's Re-Election? Vote Here Now!
Feedback
. . .
Subscribe MedicalTuesday .
. .
Subscribe HealthPlanUSA .
. .
Why does American Exceptionalism Threaten the Rest
of the World?
* * * * *
4. Government Healthcare: Greek Jobless Lose Health Benefits
NYT: ATHENS — As the
head of Greece’s largest oncology
department, Dr. Kostas Syrigos thought he had seen
everything. But nothing prepared him for Elena, an unemployed woman whose breast cancer
had been diagnosed a year before she came to him.
By that time, her cancer had grown
to the size of an orange and broken through the skin, leaving a wound that she
was draining with paper napkins. “When we saw her we were speechless,” said Dr.
Syrigos, the chief of oncology at Sotiria
General Hospital in central Athens. “Everyone was crying. Things like that are
described in textbooks, but you never see them because until now, anybody who
got sick in this country could always get help.”
Life in Greece has
been turned on its head since the debt crisis took hold. But in few areas has
the change been more striking than in health care. Until recently, Greece had a
typical European health system, with employers and individuals contributing to
a fund that with government assistance financed universal care. People who lost
their jobs received health care and unemployment benefits for a year, but were
still treated by hospitals if they could not afford to pay even after the
benefits expired.
Things changed in
July 2011, when Greece signed a supplemental loan agreement with international
lenders to ward off financial collapse. Now, as stipulated in the deal, Greeks
must pay all costs out of pocket after their benefits expire.
About half of
Greece’s 1.2 million long-term unemployed lack health
insurance, a number that is expected to rise sharply in a country with an
unemployment rate of 25 percent and a moribund economy, said Savas Robolis, director of the
Labor Institute of the General Confederation of Greek Workers. A new $17.5
billion austerity package of budget cuts and tax increases, agreed upon Wednesday
with Greece’s international lenders, will make matters only worse, most
economists say. . .
The change is
particularly striking in cancer care, with its lengthy and expensive
treatments. When cancer is diagnosed among the uninsured, “the system simply
ignores them,” Dr. Syrigos said. He said, “They can’t
access chemotherapy,
surgery or even simple drugs.”
The health care
system itself is increasingly dysfunctional, and may worsen if the government
slashes an additional $2 billion in health spending, which it has proposed as
part of a new austerity plan aimed to lock down more financing. With the state
coffers drained, supplies have gotten so low that some patients have been
forced to bring their own supplies, like stents and syringes,
for treatments.
Hospitals and
pharmacies now demand cash payment for drugs, which for cancer patients can
amount to tens of thousands of dollars, money most of them do not have. With
the system deteriorating, Dr. Syrigos and several
colleagues have decided to take matters into their own hands.
Earlier this year,
they set up a surreptitious network to help uninsured cancer patients and other
ill people, which operates off the official grid using only spare medicines
donated by pharmacies, some pharmaceutical companies and even the families of
cancer patients who died. In Greece, doctors found to be helping an uninsured
person using hospital medicines must cover the cost from their own pockets.
At the Metropolitan
Social Clinic, a makeshift medical center near an abandoned American Air Force
base outside Athens, Dr. Giorgos Vichas
pointed one recent afternoon to plastic bags crammed with donated medicines
lining the dingy floors outside his office.
“We’re a Robin Hood
network,” said Dr. Vichas, a cardiologist who founded
the underground movement in January. . .
In a supply room, a
blue filing cabinet was filled with cancer drugs. But they were not enough to
take care of the rising number of cancer patients knocking on his door. Many of
the medicines are forwarded to Dr. Syrigos, who set
up an off-hours infirmary in the hospital three months ago to treat uninsured
cancer patients Dr. Vichas and other doctors in the
network send his way.
Dr. Syrigos’s staff members consistently volunteer to work
after their official shifts; the number of patients has risen to 35 from 5.
“Sometimes I come home tired, exhausted, seeing double,” said Korina Liberopoulou, a
pathologist on site one afternoon with five doctors and nurses. “But as long as
there are materials to work with, this practice will go on.”
Back at the medical
center, Dr. Vichas said he had never imagined being
so overwhelmed with people in need. . .
. . . [Elena] was
dismayed that the Greek state, as part of the bailout, had pulled back on a
pillar of protection for society. But the fact that doctors and ordinary Greeks
were organizing to pitch in where the state failed gave her hope in her
bleakest hours. “Here, there is somebody who cares,” Elena said.
For Dr. Vichas, the most powerful therapy may not be the medicines,
but the optimism that his Robin Hood group brings to those who have almost
given up. “What we’ve gained from the crisis is to come closer together,” he
said.
“This is resistance,”
he added, sweeping his eyes over the volunteers and patients bustling around
the clinic. “It is a nation, a people allowed to stand on their own two feet
again with the help they give each other.”
Dimitris Bounias contributed reporting.
The “tax, spend, & enslave your children” parties around the world do
not understand that there are limits on everything. The United States is
falling into the same trap. By putting health care into the government
“fiascos” it will only be time before we experience Greece where government
health care is not free anymore and human suffering prevails.
Feedback
. . .
Subscribe MedicalTuesday .
. .
Subscribe HealthPlanUSA .
. .
Government is not the solution
to our problems, government is the problem.
- Ronald Reagan
* * * * *
5. Lean HealthCare: A
Medical Correlative
Many
patients never learn or even suspect that the CT examination, the
echocardiogram, or the magnetic resonance imaging study that they underwent was
neither necessary nor indicated.
Chaos
in the Cockpit
Herbert L. Fred, MD, MACP
Tex Heart Inst J. 2012; 39(5): 614. PMCID: PMC3461665
On 1 June 2009, Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330 en route to
Paris from Rio de Janeiro, plunged into the south Atlantic, killing all 228
people aboard. French authorities finally concluded that the plane's 3 pilots
had not been trained adequately to fly the aircraft manually in the event of equipment
failure or a stall at high altitude.
According to a report issued on 5 July 2012,1 the Bureau of Investigation and
Analysis found that ice crystals had misled the plane's airspeed sensors and
that the autopilot had disconnected. Confusion heightened when faulty
instructions emerged from an automated navigational aid called the “flight director.”
Amid a barrage of alarms, the crew struggled to control the plane manually, but
they never understood that the aircraft was in a stall and never undertook the
appropriate recovery maneuvers. In fact, they followed the flight director's
instructions and went into a climb instead of into a dive, as they should have
to correct a stall.
William Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation in
Alexandria, Virginia, offered the following comment on the accident: “We are
seeing a situation where we have pilots that can't understand what the airplane
is doing unless a computer interprets it for them. This isn't a problem that is
unique to Airbus or unique to Air France. It's a new training challenge that
the whole industry has to face.”
The whole healthcare industry faces training challenges that are
eerily similar to those now evident in the airline industry. Indeed, we
continue to graduate physicians who lack sufficient clinical skills to render
good patient care without routinely reverting to and relying upon computers and
other technologically advanced devices.2 In
contrast to commercial aircraft accidents that typically injure or kill many
people at once—and in spectacular fashion—medical misfortunes rarely make
headlines. No one, for example, ever hears about the absolute halting of
patient-care activities when the hospital's computed tomographic (CT) scanner
breaks down.3,4 And many patients never learn or even
suspect that the CT examination, the echocardiogram, or the magnetic resonance
imaging study that they underwent was neither necessary nor indicated.
Although computers and like devices offer tremendous advantages,
they have important drawbacks as well. They occasionally malfunction, are not
always available, and produce findings that can be misinterpreted. They have no
judgment, common sense, or understanding. And they cannot reason, overcome
their deficiencies, or show concern for the welfare of human beings. A
well-trained doctor—or a well-trained pilot—can.5
Address for reprints: Herbert L. Fred, MD, MACP, 8181 Fannin St., Suite 316, Houston, TX 77054
Author
information ► Copyright and License information ►
References
1. Clark N. Report
on '09 Air France crash cites conflicting data in cockpit [Internet]
2. Fred HL. Hyposkillia: deficiency of clinical skills. Tex Heart Inst
J 2005;32(3):255–7.[PMC free article] [PubMed]
3. Fred HL. The
downside of medical progress: the mourning of a medical dinosaur. Tex Heart
Inst J 2009;36(1):4–7. [PMC free article] [PubMed]
4. Fred HL. C.T.
scanner dies. Hosp Pract (Minneap)
2001;36(1):23. [PubMed]
5. Fred HL.
Gimmicks. South Med J 1983;76(8):953.
Feedback
. . .
Subscribe MedicalTuesday .
. .
Subscribe HealthPlanUSA .
. .
The Future of Health Care Has to Be
Lean, Efficient and Personal.
* * * * *
6. Misdirection in Healthcare: Atlas Shrugged Part II
Atlas Shrugged' Film Banks on Election Fever
By DON STEINBERG, WSJ
To a strict
bottom-line capitalist, the new movie "Atlas Shrugged Part II" might
not look like a model enterprise. "Atlas Shrugged Part I," released
last year, cost businessman John Aglialoro about $25
million (and 19 years) to bring to the screen. Its domestic box-office take was
a tepid $4.6 million. Critics' reviews, arguably, were worse.
Few flops earn
sequels. But Mr. Aglialoro, chief executive of
exercise-equipment maker Cybex International CYBI 0.00%and
a longtime disciple of "Atlas Shrugged" author Ayn
Rand, thinks the timing is right. Rebuffed by Hollywood, he and fellow producer
Harmon Kaslow, whose horror credits include
"Cemetery Gates" and "Boo," have built their own studio,
hopeful that a nation embroiled in debate over the distribution of wealth will
put "Part II" in the black. The urgency quickened when Mitt Romney
named as his running mate another Rand acolyte, Rep. Paul Ryan (though he has
soft-pedaled his enthusiasm for her in the campaign). The movie hits theaters
Oct. 12.
"Atlas
Shrugged," published in 1957, was the last novel by the Russian-born Ms.
Rand, who at age 12 saw her father's business confiscated in the Bolshevik
Revolution. The 1,100-page book, written in three parts, is a futuristic fable
about the dangers of collectivist government. Call it poli-sci-fi.
It's set in an America with a faltering economy, misled by bureaucrats who keep
devising ways to take money from successful innovators in the name of public
good.
Business leaders,
meanwhile, are mysteriously vanishing. It turns out they're going on strike,
fed up with supporting the world—hence the title. They decamp to a hidden gulch
and pledge to "never live for the sake of another man." The heroine, Dagny Taggart, is desperately trying to save her family's
railroad company and discovers possible salvation in a motor that could
generate limitless energy by capturing static electricity from the air. But its
inventor, John Galt, already has taken his leave.
The polarizing book
has been labeled the Bible of Selfishness. It also has inspired millions. Mr. Aglialoro says he was "zapped" when he read
"Atlas" in his 20s.
"I
thought, 'Wow, gee, you're entitled without guilt to your own life,' " he
says. "Benevolence and charity are wonderful things, when they're
voluntary and on your terms. But what arrogance to have an entitlement society
that expects it. Or to feel that you've got to 'give back.' I don't know what
the hell you took in the first place that you feel you have to give back."
The film
adaptation became its own saga. The mercurial Ms. Rand adapted her novel
"The Fountainhead" for a King Vidor film starring Gary Cooper in 1949
and hated much of the movie, according to a 2004 biography by Jeffrey Britting. After her death in 1982, repeated efforts to turn
her "Atlas" into cinema fizzled. Angelina Jolie was attached;
Philadelphia Flyers owner Ed Snider optioned the rights; Randall Wallace
("Braveheart," "Pearl Harbor")
wrote a script that covered the opus in a single film. In 1992, Mr. Aglialoro paid $1 million for a 15-year lease on the film
rights, a duration he had to extend.
"I thought it
would be a short period of time for investors to come in," he says.
"But all these entities couldn't get it done. Ultimately, it's not a movie
Hollywood wants to embrace."
Finally made on a
modest budget (after huge start-up expenses, production was around $5.5
million), "Part I" was pounded by critics, who rated it at 11%
"fresh," lower than "Showgirls" and "Ishtar,"
according to RottenTomatoes.com. Viewers, however, scored it at 74%.
"Part II"
faced a new setback when Cybex lost a liability
lawsuit in 2010 alleging that one of its weight machines had tipped over on a
woman, leaving her paralyzed.
"I feel so sorry
for her," Mr. Aglialoro says. "She jumped
up on there and pulled the machine back on herself while she was
stretching." The parties settled for $19.5 million in February. Cybex stock dropped so low the company faced delisting.
"The
lawsuit was crippling," Mr. Aglialoro says. He
put just $5 million into "Part II" but recruited additional investors,
allowing Atlas Productions to spend $10 million on production and $10 million
more on marketing. The new film will open on three times as many screens as the
first installment. It's slicker and faster-paced, with a train crash and a
jet-plane chase. The lead roles have all been filled by different actors, with
Samantha Mathis replacing Taylor Schilling as Taggart. Cameos include Sean
Hannity, Grover Norquist and Teller of Penn &
Teller (Teller speaks). And in inspired casting, the two top government officials
are played by Ray Wise and Paul McCrane, who were
murderous hoods together in "RoboCop" and
have spent careers portraying creepy villains with oversize foreheads.
The producers
showed snippets to supporters of presidential candidate and fervent libertarian
Ron Paul at the Republican convention and held screenings at the Heritage
Foundation and Cato Institute in Washington.
"I'm making this
as a warning," says Mr. Aglialoro. "It's
about what happens when heroic producers disappear, and they leave the job of
creating prosperity to the moochers and, God forbid, the politicians."
Mr. Kaslow admits that after all their effort, one hurdle
remains: "The challenge is that our audience doesn't go to the movies that
often."
WSJ: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444592404578032291709944404.html
Feedback
. . .
Subscribe MedicalTuesday .
. .
Subscribe HealthPlanUSA .
. .
Well-Meaning
Regulations Worsen Quality of Care.
* * * * *
7. Overheard on Capitol Hill: American Exceptionalism
Is America Exceptional?
The following is adapted
from a speech delivered on September 20, 2012, in Washington, D.C., at
Hillsdale College’s third annual Constitution Day Dinner.
ONCE UPON A TIME, hardly anyone dissented from the idea
that, for better or worse, the United States of America was different from all
other nations. This is not surprising, since the attributes that made it
different were vividly evident from the day of its birth. Let me say a few
words about three of them in particular.
First of all, unlike all other
nations past or present, this one accepted as a self-evident truth that all men
are created equal. What this meant was that its Founders aimed to create a
society in which, for the first time in the history of the world, the
individual’s fate would be determined not by who his father was, but by his own
freely chosen pursuit of his own ambitions. In other words, America was to be
something new under the sun: a society in which hereditary status and class
distinctions would be erased, leaving individuals free to act and to be judged
on their merits alone. There remained, of course, the two atavistic
contradictions of slavery and the position of women; but so intolerable did
these contradictions ultimately prove that they had to be resolved—even if, as
in the case of the former, it took the bloodiest war the nation has ever
fought.
Secondly, in all other countries
membership or citizenship was a matter of birth, of blood, of lineage, of
rootedness in the soil. Thus, foreigners who were admitted for one reason or
another could never become full-fledged members of the society. But America was
the incarnation of an idea, and therefore no such factors came into play. To
become a full-fledged American, it was only necessary to pledge allegiance to
the new Republic and to the principles for which it stood.
Thirdly, in all other nations,
the rights, if any, enjoyed by their citizens were conferred by human agencies:
kings and princes and occasionally parliaments. As such, these rights amounted
to privileges that could be revoked at will by the same human agencies. In
America, by contrast, the citizen’s rights were declared from the beginning to
have come from God and to be “inalienable”—that is, immune to legitimate
revocation.
As time went on, other characteristics that were unique
to America gradually manifested themselves. For instance, in the 20th century,
social scientists began speculating as to why America was the only country in
the developed world where socialism had failed to take root. As it happens, I
myself first came upon the term “American exceptionalism” not in Alexis de
Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, where it has mistakenly been
thought to have originated, but in a book by the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, who used it in connection with the absence in
America of a strong socialist party. More recently I have discovered that the
term may actually have originated with Joseph Stalin, of all people, who coined
the term in the same connection but only in order to dismiss it. Thus, when an
American Communist leader informed him that American workers had no intention
of playing the role Marx had assigned to the worldwide proletariat as the
vanguard of the coming socialist revolution, Stalin reputedly shouted something
like, “Away with this heresy of American exceptionalism!” And yet Stalin and
his followers were themselves exceptional in denying that America was
exceptional in the plainly observable ways I have mentioned. If, however,
almost everyone agreed that America was different, there was a great deal of
disagreement over whether its exceptionalism made it into a force for good or a
force for evil. This too went back to the beginning, when the denigrators
outnumbered the enthusiasts.
At first, anti-American passions were understandably
fuelled by the dangerous political challenge posed to the monarchies of Europe
by the republican ideas of the American Revolution. But the political side of
anti-Americanism was soon joined to a cultural indictment that proved to have
more staying power. Here is how the brilliant but volatile historian Henry
Adams—the descendent of two American presidents—described the cultural
indictment as it was framed in the earliest days of the Republic:
In the foreigner’s range of observation, love of money
was the most conspicuous and most common trait of the American character . . .
. No foreigner of that day—neither poet, painter, or philosopher—could detect
in American life anything higher than vulgarity . . . . Englishmen especially
indulged in unbounded invective against the sordid character of American
society . . . . Contemporary critics could see neither generosity, economy,
honor, nor ideas of any kind in the American breast.
In his younger days, Adams defended America against these
foreign critics; but in later life, snobbishly recoiling from the changes
wrought by rapid industrialization following the Civil War, he would hurl the
same charge at the America of the so-called Gilded Age.
We see a similar conflict in Tocqueville. Democracy
in America was mainly a defense of the country’s political system and many
of its egalitarian habits and mores. But where its cultural and spiritual life
was concerned, Tocqueville expressed much the same contempt as the critics
cited by Henry Adams. The Americans, he wrote, with “their exclusively
commercial habits,” were so fixated “upon purely practical objects” that they
neglected “the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts,” and it was only
their proximity to Europe that allowed them “to neglect these pursuits without
lapsing into barbarism.” Many years later, another Frenchman, Georges
Clemenceau, went Tocqueville one better: “America,” he quipped, “is the only
nation in history which miraculously has gone from barbarism to decadence
without the usual interval of civilization.”. . .
Like Tocqueville and the foreigners cited by Henry Adams,
moreover, these more recent works attribute this crassly philistine attitude to
the love of money and “the exclusively commercial habits” that went with it—in
other words, to the species of freedom that has done more than anything else
ever invented to lift masses of people out of poverty and that would later be
known as capitalism. America, these critics were declaring, was exceptional all
right—exceptionally bad, or even downright evil.
On the other hand, there have always been defenders of
American exceptionalism as a vital force for good. Thus, several decades before
switching sides, Henry Adams charged America’s foreign critics with blindness
to the country’s amazing virtues. Whereas, Adams wrote, European philosophers
and poets could see only rapacity and vulgarity here, the poorest European
peasants could discern that “the hard, practical money-getting American
democrat was in truth living in a world of dream” and was “already guiding
Nature with a kinder and wiser hand than had ever yet been felt in human
history.” It was this dream, Adams went on to say, that beckoned to the poor of
the old world, calling upon them to come and share in the limitless
opportunities it offered—opportunities unimaginable anywhere else.
For a long time now, to speak personally, I have taken my
stand with the young Adams, to whom America was exceptionally good, against his
embittered older self, to whom it had become exceptionally bad. In my own
younger days, I was on the Left, and from the utopian vantage point to which
leftism invariably transports its adherents, it was the flaws in American
society—the radical 1960s trinity of war, racism, and poverty—that stood out
most vividly. It rarely occurred to me or my fellow leftists to ask a simple
question: Compared to what is America so bad?
From our modern perspective, much more was wrong with
Periclean Athens, or the Italy of the Medicis, or
England under the first Queen Elizabeth, or 19th-century Russia under the
Romanovs. But this has not disqualified them from being universally ranked
among the highest points of human civilization and achievement. After more than
40 years of pondering the question “Compared to what?” I have come to believe
with all my heart that the United States belongs on that exalted list. It is
true that we have not earned a place on it, as the others mainly did, by our
contribution to the arts. Yet it is worth pointing out that even in the sphere
of the arts, we have not done too badly. To speak only of literature, names
like Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Robert Frost, and many others
attest that we have, in fact, done far better than might generally have been
expected of a nation conceived primarily to achieve other ends. These ends were
social, political, and economic, and it is in them that we have indeed excelled
the most.
We have excelled by following our Founding Fathers in
directing our energies, as our Constitution exhorts us to do, to the
preservation of the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, as
well as to the pursuit of happiness tacitly understood by the Declaration of
Independence to require prosperity as a precondition. (In his original draft of
the Declaration, of course, Jefferson used the word “property” instead of
“pursuit of happiness.”) By remaining faithful in principle—and to a
considerable extent in practice—to the ideas by which the Founders hoped to
accomplish these ends, we and our forebears have fashioned a country in which
more liberty and more prosperity are more widely shared than among any other
people in human history. Yes, even today that holds true, despite policies
unfaithful both to the letter and to the spirit of the traditional American
system that have resulted in a series of political and economic setbacks.
So far as liberty is concerned, until recently no one but
libertarians have been arguing that we were insufficiently free in the United
States. If anything, some conservatives, dismayed by such phenomena as the
spread of pornography and sexual license, thought that we had too much freedom
for our own good. But thanks to modern liberalism’s barely concealed hostility
to the free market, not to mention the threat posed by Obamacare to religious
and economic freedom, many conservatives are now echoing these libertarian
arguments, if in a milder form.
Judging by what they say and the policies they pursue,
modern liberals are not all that concerned about liberty. What they really care
about, and what they assign a higher value to, is economic equality (as
reflected in the now famous phrase, “spread the wealth around”). Yet here is what
the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in 1976 about this very issue in
connection with the redistributionist ideology then regnant at the United
Nations:
And equality . . . what is the record? The record was
stated most succinctly by an Israeli socialist who told William F. Buckley, Jr.
that those nations which have put liberty ahead of equality have ended up doing
better by equality than those with the reverse priority . . . . This is our
case. We are of the liberty party, and it might surprise us what energies might
be released were we to unfurl those banners.
Four years later, Ronald Reagan came along to unfurl
those banners. And just as Moynihan predicted, the result was the release of
new political and economic energies that reversed the political and economic
decline of the Carter years and that led to our victory in the Cold War.
Of course, the party of liberty Moynihan was talking
about was the United States of America and the party of economic equality was
the socialist countries of what was then called the Third World. But within
America today, an analogous split has opened up, with the Republicans
constituting the party of liberty and the Democrats more and more becoming the
party of redistribution. Hence the Democrats never stop claiming that the rich
are failing to pay their fair share of taxes. Yet after surveying the numbers,
the economist Walter Williams of George Mason University asks an excellent
question: “What standard of fairness dictates that the top ten percent of
income earners pay 71 percent of the federal income tax burden while 47 percent
of Americans pay absolutely nothing?” To which an editorial in the Wall
Street Journal replies: “There is nothing fair about confiscatory tax
policy that reduces growth, denies opportunity, and keeps more people in
poverty.”
Then too there is the assumption, blithely accepted by
the party of economic equality, that the gap between rich and poor—or even
between the rich and the middle class—self-evidently amounts to a violation of
social justice. Yet far from being self-evident, this assumption stems from a
highly questionable concept of social justice—one that rules out or minimizes
the role played by talent, character, ambition, initiative, daring, work, and
spirit in producing unequal outcomes in “the pursuit of happiness.”
Furthermore, both the assumption and its correlative
concept of social justice run counter to the American grain. As study after
study has shown, and as the petering out of the Occupy Wall Street movement has
recently confirmed, what Tocqueville observed on this point in the 1830s
remains true today: Americans, unlike Europeans, he wrote, “do not hate the
higher classes of society” even if “they are not favorably inclined toward them
. . . .” Which is to say that most Americans are not prone to the envy of the
rich that eats away at their self-appointed spokesmen on the Left.
Nor are most Americans subject to the accompanying
passion for economic egalitarianism that made for the spread of socialism in
other countries. What explains the absence of that levelling passion is that it
has been starved by the opportunities America has afforded millions upon
millions to better their lot and the advantage they have been free to take of
those opportunities—which in turn explains how unprecedented and unmatched
levels of prosperity have been created here and how they have come to be shared
more widely here than anywhere else.
Tocqueville also put his finger on a second and related
reason for the persistence of this particular feature of American
exceptionalism: “The word poor is used here in a relative, not an absolute
sense. Poor men in America would often appear rich in comparison with the poor
of Europe.” A story I was once told by a Soviet dissident provides an amusing
illustration. It seems that the Soviet authorities used to encourage the
repeated screening of The Grapes of Wrath, a movie about the Great
Depression-era migration of starving farmers from the Dust Bowl to California
in their broken-down pickups. But contrary to expectation, what Soviet
audiences got from this film was not an impression of how wretched was the
plight of the poor in America. Instead they came away marvelling
that in America, “even the peasants own trucks.”
Tocqueville further observed that in America, “the poor,
instead of forming the immense majority of the nation, as is always the case in
aristocratic communities, are comparatively few in number, and the laws do not
bind them together by the ties of irremediable and hereditary penury.”
As the great economist and social critic Thomas Sowell
has demonstrated time and again, it is still the case that the poor in America
“are comparatively few in number.” And except for the black underclass—whose
size is generally estimated at somewhere between two and ten percent of the
black community and whose plight has thus far resisted every attempt at
alleviation over the past 50 years—it is also true that penury in the United
States is neither irremediable nor hereditary. As Sowell shows, of those who
live on the next rung of the economic ladder, more of whom are white than
black, only three percent get stuck in the bottom fifth of the income
distribution for more than eight years.
Elaborating on Sowell’s analyses, the economist Mark
Perry writes:
In the discussions on income inequality and wage
stagnation, we frequently hear about the “top 1%” or the “top 10%” or the
“bottom 99%” and the public has started to believe that those groups operate
like closed private clubs that contain the exact same people or households every
year. But the empirical evidence . . . tells a much different story of dynamic
change in the labor market—people and households move up and down the earnings
quintiles throughout their careers and lives. Many of today’s low-income
households will rise to become tomorrow’s high-income households, and some will
even eventually be in the “top 10%” or “top 1%.” And many of today’s “top 1%”
or top income quintile members are tomorrow’s middle or lower class households,
reflecting the significant upward and downward mobility in the dynamic U.S.
labor market.
No such mobility can be found in any of the member
countries of the European Union, or anywhere else for that matter. Even in the
dismal economic state our nation has fallen into today, it is still exceptional
where the degree and the distribution of prosperity are concerned. But to this,
modern liberals are willfully blind.
With all exceptions duly noted, I think it is fair to say
that what liberals mainly see when they look at America today is injustice and
oppression crying out for redress. By sharp contrast, conservatives see a
complex of traditions and institutions built upon the principles that animated
the American Revolution and that have made it possible—to say yet again what
cannot be said too often—for more freedom and more prosperity to be enjoyed by
more of its citizens than in any other society in human history. It follows
that what liberals—who concentrate their attention on the relatively little
that is wrong with America instead of the enormous good embodied within it—seek
to change or discard is precisely what conservatives are dedicated to
preserving, reinvigorating, and defending.
A similar divide separates liberals and conservatives as
to the role America has played in world affairs. Consider the many apologies
President Obama has issued for the misdeeds of which he imagines Americans have
been guilty in our relations with other countries in general and the Muslim
world in particular. Never mind that the United States has spilled blood and treasure
to liberate and protect many millions of people from the totalitarian horrors
first of Nazism and then of Communism, and that since 9/11 we have spilled yet
more blood and treasure fighting against Islamofascism,
the totalitarian successor to Nazism. And as to the Muslim world in particular,
never mind that, as the columnist Mona Charen puts
it, “of the last six wars in which the United States was involved (Kuwait,
Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya), four were undertaken to rescue
Muslims and the other two (Afghanistan and Iraq) had the side benefit of
liberating Muslims —to what end remains an open question.”
In spite of all this, the liberal community seems to
think that the rest of the world would be better off without the United States,
or at least with it following the policy of “leading from behind.” Admittedly
there are paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan and libertarians like Ron Paul
who agree on this point, but most conservatives do not believe that a radical
diminution of American power and influence would be good for us or for the
world.
Shortly before the election of 2008, then-candidate Obama
declared that his election would usher in “a fundamental transformation of
America.” The desirability of such a transformation—which would entail the
wiping away of as many more traces of American exceptionalism as it will take
to turn this country into a facsimile of the social-democratic regimes of
western Europe—is the issue at the heart of our politics today. And in the long
run, I hope and trust, Americans will reject such a transformation, and elect
instead to return to the principles that have made this nation so
exceptional—yes, exceptional—a force for good both at home and abroad.
NORMAN PODHORETZ
served as editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine from 1960-1995. He was a Pulitzer Scholar at Columbia University,
earning his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1950. He also holds bachelor’s and
master’s degrees from Cambridge University, England, where he was a Fulbright
Scholar and a Kellett Fellow. In addition, he has a
bachelor’s degree in Hebrew Literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary. He
has written for most major American periodicals and is the author of twelve
books, including My
Love Affair With America and Why Are Jews Liberals?
Copyright ©
2012 Hillsdale College. The opinions expressed in Imprimis are not
necessarily the views of Hillsdale College. Permission to reprint in whole or
in part is hereby granted, provided the following credit line is used:
“Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a
publication of Hillsdale College.” SUBSCRIPTION FREE UPON REQUEST. ISSN
0277-8432. Imprimis trademark registered in U.S. Patent and
Trade Office #1563325.
Read the
entire adapted speech . . .
Feedback
. . .
Subscribe MedicalTuesday .
. .
Subscribe HealthPlanUSA .
. .
What is the Tax, Spend, & Enslave your Children Party Saying?
* * * * *
8. Innovations in Healthcare: Are Innovations in Healthcare
coming to an end in America?
Europeans come here for front-line cancer
therapy. Where will they go after ObamaCare?
A Parable of Health-Care Rationing
Louvain-la-Neuve,
Belgium
Imagine you're a Belgian industrialist with an idea for a
device that treats certain cancers. You're convinced it would be a huge
improvement over the existing standard. But it would also be hideously
expensive, at least initially, and your specialized contraption will put your
country's public-health accountants in a cold sweat. How to convince investors
you're not insane?
"The American dream," says a grinning Olivier
Legrain, the CEO of Belgian medical-device firm Ion Beam Applications, which
was founded in 1986. "It is probably easier to sell innovative ideas in
the U.S. than in the rest of the world."
Ion Beam Applications is now the world’s leading purveyor
of equipment for proton therapy, a form of particle radiation designed to treat
tumors aggressively while sparing more healthy tissue than in other forms of
radiation. The U.S. has 11 such centers in operation—more than any other
country. Eight of them were designed, built and installed by IBA.
But Mr. Legrain’s American dream is in doubt,
particularly as it relates to high-cost medical innovation. Before meeting him
for breakfast last week, I called his biggest customer, a private,
Indiana-based firm that runs several proton-treatment centers in the U.S. Asked
how the 2010 health-care reform law might affect the market, ProCure CEO Hadley
Ford was candid: “My general view is that it’s 900 pages of unintended
consequences.” . . .
When the author put that to Mr. Legrain, he shrugged and
doubled down. “If you have a good idea, if you have energy, you can make it
happen in the States.”
The good idea is zapping localized tumors with charged
protons, which scatter less radiation than gamma or x-rays, was born in postwar
laboratories of Harvard and Berkeley. The technology was refined by IBA’s
engineers, making the technology feasible for market –driven players which made
it affordable beyond large research centers. Mr. Ford’s ProCure now runs
facilities in Oklahoma, new Jersey and Illinois with another planned for
Washington state. IBS also treats patients in Japan, Korea and France. One
country notably absent from its client list? Belgium. . .
The result is that the Belgian government ships patients
abroad for proton therapy. Most of them go to Massachusetts since the centers
in Germany and Switzerland are fully loaded with waiting lists. . .
When ObamaCare takes effect in January, IBA will face a
fresh challenge: a 2.3% tax on medical device sales. . .
“I sleep well at night knowing protons are fundamentally
better to treat cancer than X-rays,” said Mr. Ford . . .
As for whether America will remain the first destination
for medical advances in the age of ObamaCare, Mr Ford cautions: “Anything that
moves toward one of anything, you’re going to have less innovation—one
provider, one payer, one manufacturer.”
But Mr. Legrain’s faith in the American market seems
unshakable. “Even though they’re moving toward a more social system,” he says,
“the entrepreneurial spirit—it’s almost, to me, part of the DNA of America.”
Miss Jolis is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe.
Feedback
. . .
Subscribe MedicalTuesday .
. .
Subscribe HealthPlanUSA .
. .
* * * * *
9. The Health Plan for the USA:
This section is temporarily deferred to the Book.
Feedback
. . .
Subscribe MedicalTuesday .
. .
Subscribe HealthPlanUSA .
. .
* * * * *
10. Restoring
Accountability in Medical Practice by Non Participation in Government Programs and
Understanding the Devastating Force of Government
·
Medicine and Liberty - Network of Liberty Oriented Doctors, www.MedLib.ch/, Alphonse Crespo, MD, Executive
Director and Founder
Medicine & Liberty
(MedLib) is an independent physician network founded in 2007, dedicated to the
study and advocacy of liberty, ethics & market in medical services.
-
We support professional autonomy for doctors and liberty of choice for patients
- We uphold the Hippocratic covenant
that forbids action harmful to the patient
- We defend responsible medical
practice and access to therapeutic innovation free from
bureaucratic obstruction
- We work towards a deeper
understanding of the role and importance of liberty & market in
medical services
MedLib is part of a wide movement of ideas that
defends
- the self-ownership principle &
the property rights of individuals on the products of their
physical and intellectual work
- free markets, free enterprise and
strict limits to the role of the State
·
Authentic Medicine - Douglas Farrago MD, Editor, Creator
& Founder
SPEAKING
HONESTLY AND OPENLY ABOUT OUR BROKEN HEALTHCARE SYSTEM
The mission of Authentic Medicine is to
rediscover how much the art of medicine means and allow us to reconnect to our
roots once again. It is about fighting back against those things that are
taking us away from the direct care of patients while still pointing out the
lunacy and hypocrisy of this job. Be part of the movement that will take back
the healthcare system from the idiots who are ruining it.
Why we are moving to an
era of Industrialized Medicine
The
Quality Movement and why it is a scam
The
ever expanding Medical Axis of Evil
Medical
Dogma and the Alphabet Soup (JC, HIPAA,etc)
Bureaucratic
Drag and the distractions from treating patients
Burnout
and depression amongst healthcare professionals
Humor in caring for the patient and the caretaker
·
Reason Foundation: http://reason.com/about:
Reason and Reason Online are editorially independent
publications of the Reason Foundation, a national, non-profit research and
educational organization.
Reason is the monthly print magazine
of "free minds and free markets." It covers politics, culture, and ideas
through a provocative mix of news, analysis, commentary, and reviews. Reason
provides a refreshing alternative to right-wing and left-wing opinion magazines
by making a principled case for liberty and individual choice in all areas of
human activity.
Reason Online is updated daily with articles and columns on
current development in politics and culture. . It also contains the full text of past issues of the print edition of
Reason. Reason Online is entirely free.
·
Entrepreneur-Country. Julie Meyer, CEO of Ariadne
Capital, (Sorry about the nepotism,
but her message is important) recently launched Entrepreneur
Country. Read their manifesto for information: 3. The
bigger the State grows, the weaker the people become - big government creates
dependency . . . 5. No real, sustainable
wealth creation through entrepreneurship ever owed its success to government .
. . 11. The triple play of the internet,
entrepreneurship, and individual capitalism is an unstoppable force around the
world, and that Individual Capitalism is the force that will shape the 21st
Century . . . Read
the entire manifest . . .
·
Americans for Tax Reform, www.atr.org/, Grover Norquist,
President, keeps us apprised of the Cost of Government Day® Report, Calendar Year 2008. Cost of
Government Day (COGD) is the date of the calendar year on which the average
American worker has earned enough gross income to pay off his or her share of
spending and regulatory burdens imposed by government on the federal, state and
local levels. Cost of Government Day for 2008 was July 16th, a
four-day increase above last year's revised date of July 10th. With
July 16th as the COGD, working people must toil on average 197 days
out of the year just to meet all the costs imposed by government. In other words,
the cost of government consumes 53.9 percent of national income. If we were to
put health care into the public trough, the additional 18 percent would allow
the government to control 70 percent or nearly three-fourths of our
productivity and destroy our health care in the process. We would have almost
no discretionary income.
·
National Taxpayer's Union, www.ntu.org/main/, Duane Parde,
President, keeps us apprised of all the taxation challenges our elected
officials are trying to foist on us throughout the United States. To find the
organization in your state that's trying to keep sanity in our taxation system,
click on your state at www.ntu.org/main/groups.php.
August 13 you can working for yourself. It takes nearly 8 months of hard work
for every American to pay for the cost of government.
·
Evolving Excellence—Lean Enterprise Leadership. Kevin Meyer, CEO of Superfactory,
has a newsletter which impacts health care in many aspects. Join his evolving excellence blog . . . Excellence is every physician’s middle name
and thus a natural affiliation for all of us.
This month read his The Customer
is the Boss at FAVI “I came in the day after I became CEO, and gathered
the people. I told them tomorrow when you come to work, you do not work for me
or for a boss. You work for your customer. I don’t pay you. They do. . . . You
do what is needed for the customer.” And with that single stroke, he eliminated
the central control: personnel, product development, purchasing…all gone. Looks like something we should import into
our hospitals. I believe every RN, given the opportunity, could manage her ward
of patients or customers in similar lean and efficient fashion.
·
FIRM: Freedom
and Individual Rights in Medicine, www.westandfirm.org, Lin Zinser, JD,
Founder, researches and studies the work of scholars and policy experts in the
areas of health care, law, philosophy, and economics to inform and to foster
public debate on the causes and potential solutions of rising costs of health
care and health insurance .
· Ayn Rand, a Philosophy for Living on Earth, www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer, is a veritable storehouse of common sense economics to help us live on earth. To review the current series of Op-Ed articles, some of which you and I may disagree on, go to www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=media_opeds
* * * * *
Thank you for
joining the HealthPlanUSA network of 80,000 professionals that receive our
newsletter and visit our websites. To assure uninterrupted delivery, go to www.healthplanusa.net/newsletter.asp
and enter your email address. Stay tuned for the latest innovating thinking in
HealthCare and have your friends do the same.
Articles that appear in HPUSA may not
reflect the opinion of the editorial staff. Several sections are entirely attributable
quotes in the interest of the health care debate. We trust our valuable and
faithful readers understand the need to open the debate to alternate points of
view to give perspective to the freedom in healthcare issues. We have requested
permission and many of the sites have given us standing permission to quote
extensively from their sites and refer our readers back to their site.
Editorial comments are in brackets.
PLEASE NOTE: HealthPlanUSA receives no
government, foundation, or tax favored funds. The entire cost of the website
URLs, website posting, distribution, managing editor, email editor, and the
research and writing is solely paid for and donated by the Founding Editor (and
Friends of Freedom), while continuing his Pulmonary Practice, as a service to
his patients, his profession, and in the public interest for his country.
Contributions are welcomed but are not tax deductible since we ask for no
federal tax favors. Please see your tax advisers to see if contributions may be
a business deduction for you.
Spammator Note:
HealthPlanUSA uses many standard medical terms considered forbidden by many
spammators. We are not always able to avoid appropriate medical terminology in
the abbreviated edition sent by e-newsletter. (The Web Edition is always
complete.) As readers use new spammators with an increasing rejection rate, we
are not always able to navigate around these palace guards. If you miss some
editions of HealthPlanUSA, you may want to check your spammator settings and
make appropriate adjustments. To assure uninterrupted delivery, subscribe
directly from the website: www.HealthPlanUSA.net/newsletter.asp.
Del Meyer
Del Meyer, MD, CEO & Founder
DelMeyer@HealthPlanUSA.net
HealthPlanUSA,
LLC
www.HealthPlanUSA.net
6945 Fair Oaks Blvd, Ste A-2, Carmichael, CA 95608
Be
sure to also subscribe to our Medical Practice Newsletter: MedicalTuesday . . .
In
The Oct 2011 Issue: (No intervening issues)
1.
Featured Article: To Increase Jobs, Increase
Economic Freedom
2.
In the News: Put Doctors and Patients in charge
of Healthcare
3.
International
Healthcare: Obamacare.
Where did it originate?
4.
Government Healthcare: Most of What
You Know About American Health Care is Wrong
5.
Lean HealthCare: ObamaCare
is going in the opposite direction.
6.
Misdirection in: Hospitals taking over
doctor’s practices—150 percent increase
7.
Overheard on Capital Healthcare Hill: What do Wall Street
protesters overlook?
8.
Innovations in Healthcare: Currently
eliminated by the Government
9.
The Health Plan for the USA: Level
C: Outpatient Non-Hospital Based Medicine
10.
Restoring Accountability in Medical
Practice by Moving
from a Vertical to a Horizontal Industry
We must remember
that Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the father of socialized medicine in
Germany, recognized in 1861 that a government gained loyalty by
making its citizens dependent on the state by social insurance. Thus socialized
medicine, or any single payer initiative, was born for the benefit of the state
and of a contemptuous disregard for people’s welfare.
Thus we must also remember that ObamaCare has nothing to do with
appropriate healthcare; it was projected to gain loyalty by making citizens
depended on the government and eliminating their choice and chance in improving
their welfare or healthcare