Un-Socialized Scraps of American Healthcare Falsely Blamed for U.S. “Vulnerability” to Covid-19

If “fake news” is rampant, What Made U.S. Health Care So Vulnerable to Covid-19, written by Bloomberg’s Danielle Parnass and Adam Schank, is prosecution exhibit #1. Take a look at the first question and answer:

1. How is U.S. health care different?

Government involvement in health care goes against the libertarian streak that distinguishes the U.S. from, say, the U.K. and Canada, whose state-funded health systems guaranteeing care for all are derided by some Americans as “socialized medicine.” Only about 36% of Americans, mainly the elderly and poor, receive health-care coverage through the government, via the Medicare and Medicaid programs. More than half of Americans have health insurance as a benefit through work (and can lose coverage if laid off). The 2010 Affordable Care Act, more commonly called Obamacare, has helped about 20 million Americans get health coverage by expanding access to Medicaid and subsidizing purchases of individual plans. Still, as of 2018, about 9% of the population, or 28.3 million people, had no health insurance.

It’s amazing how many falsehoods and misrepresentations can be crammed into one paragraph.

What “libertarian streak” remains in American healthcare? 90% of healthcare spending comes from government or heavily government regulated “private” health insurance companies which are essentially extensions of government bureaucracies. 

“State-funded health systems [like] the U.K. and Canada guaranteeing care for all” [?], Parnass and Schank say, “are derided by some Americans as ‘socialized medicine.’” Well, they are socialized medicine—individuals are forced into the government program with little or no choice to fulfill some collective goal; subordination of the individual to the group is socialism. Healthcare provided by government central planners through taxation, spending, and regulation is the very definition of socialized medicine. Not calling them socialized medicine will not make it not socialized medicine. In fact, government funding doesn’t guarantee healthcare. It guarantees payment. Payment and access are not the same thing.

And why do “More than half of Americans have health insurance as a benefit through work (and can lose coverage if laid off)?” Because of government policies. The same policies don’t apply to other types of insurance, such as homeowners, auto, and life, so you don’t lose coverage if you’re laid off. The individual, not the employer, owns these other types of insurance policies.

But all of that is in large part irrelevant. From the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, governments everywhere took control of the response, and the United states was, and is, no different. The differing levels of success to managing the response to the pandemic relates to government policies, not the respective healthcare systems. And in America, governments at all levels took complete control, right up to and including forcing crippling economic lockdowns and supplying personal protective equipment, and botched up massively. States of Emergence were declared, and President Donald Trump activated the Defense Production Act for added power over the economy. 

The private sector was the bright spot, even though stymied by regulations--many of which state and federal governments had to rescind or abolish policies to allow private producers to proceed. Parness and Schank indirectly acknowledge that, saying “the U.S. [is] a leader in many aspects of medicine, [has] long been at the forefront of research and . . . has access to state-of-the-art procedures.” That research leadership is the great benefactor of all of the socialized systems of the world. The American healthcare system, led by the still relatively free private business sector, has once again lived up to that billing.

Statists can’t wait for any excuse, no matter how outlandish, to blame the remnants of individual liberty for every problem caused by the government. Shame on Danielle Parnass and Adam Schank, and Bloomberg, for this piece of distortion and evasion.

Related Reading:

The Pandemic Is a Reminder That Many Regulations Are Both Costly and Unnecessary by PETER SUDERMAN  for Reason

It took a crisis for policymakers to see that hundreds of rules were not worth the burdens they imposed.

Does New Jersey’s New Contact Tracing Initiative Expose Catastrophic Failure of Government?

We Can Protect Liberty While Combating Pandemics by  BEN BAYER  for The Orange County Register and New Ideal

America can do better, but only if we understand what it means for the ideal of freedom to serve as a beacon guiding government’s actions. It does not mean trivializing the threat of infectious disease or inaction in the face of it.

Why Sweden Succeeded in “Flattening the Curve” and New York Failed by Jon Miltimore for FEE

The reason New York failed to "flatten the curve" and Sweden succeeded probably has little to do with lockdowns.

For Better Health, Find a Cure for Government by J.D. TUCCILLE for Reason

In a time of health crisis, government has proven to be a crippling underlying condition.

FB Cancer Conspiracy Nonsense

Recently, an acquaintance shared article on Facebook, Cancer industry not looking for a cure; they’re too busy making money. It’s classic conspiracy theory nonsense. The points presented—no points are actually made—are so far-fetched that they’re not even worth commenting on. One example:

There is no real incentive to cure something that generates so much employment and profit; just imagine all of the cancer treatment specialists and their staff members who would be out of a job if this disease was ever cured.

As if cancer is some one single disease with one simplistic cure that eliminates all cancer from the entire human race! That’s the illusion created by Nixon’s “War on Cancer."

Of course, cancers do get cured. Some get managed to extend lives. Some cancers are not cured. Some don’t yet have effective treatments. But there is no one disease called “cancer.” It is many, many diseases that require many, many paths of research. But plenty of progress has been made against cancer, nonetheless. It’s a long and torturous progress; but progress nonetheless.

Anyway, I left this Facebook comment:

There's no such thing as a "cancer industry." There are companies that make money creating products that reduce suffering and extend life. That's what "making money" means--to make stuff people value and willingly pay for. Someone close to me was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease at age 11. If not for the medicines created by profit-seeking pharmaceutical/biotech companies, this person wouldn't have grown into the thriving young adult he is today. There wouldn't be millions saved by organ transplants if not for the medical device and pharma industries. Cancer treatments have steadily advanced over my lifetime. I know plenty of cancer survivors among friends and family members. People and companies don't profit from cancer. They profit from extending lives. What a noble way to make money. This article would have us believe in some grand conspiracy involving tens of thousands of people, hundreds of companies, and who knows how many doctors. But that's all it is--dangerous conspiracy-theory quackery. It's sad to think of how many people might forgo valuable treatment because of this line of thinking.

These anti-science, anti-profit conspiracy theory peddlers are not just fringe nut cases. They do real damage by discouraging people from getting treatment that can help them. They consition people from getting not only cancer treatment, but vaccines as well. They are dangerous frauds.

Related Reading:

Promising trends and advances in the fight against cancer

Basic Cancer Research Funding: Don’t Forget Pharma

NJ Researchers Achieve Cancer Breakthrough

Gene Therapy Scientists Play God, Attack Cancer, Win by me for The Objective Standard

Heroic Scientists Achieve Major Advancement in Battle Against Cancer by me for The Objective Standard

Reason Delivers Again by Craig Biddle for The Objective Standard

Yes, Considering Race in Covid Treatment Rationing is Racist

An Associated Press article by Todd Richmond takes aim at opposition to new health guidelines that allow doctors to consider race in treating Covid patients. The reason given is that Covid treatments are in short supply. In New conservative target: Race as factor in COVID treatment

Richmond writes:

Medical experts say the opposition is misleading. Health officials have long said there is a strong case for considering race as one of many risk factors in treatment decisions.

It’s true that race can be a legitimate factor. After all, a person's race -- i.e., genetic makeup -- can affect how or if a particular disease can affect people. So it makes sense in the medical context to consider race when diagnosing and treating certain illnesses. But is that how race is being used to determine covid treatment options?

JP Leider, a senior fellow in the Division of Health Policy and Management at the University of Minnesota who helped develop that state’s allocation criteria, noted that prioritization has been going on for some time because there aren’t enough treatments to go around.

“You have to pick who comes first,” Leider said. “The problem is we have extremely conclusive evidence that (minorities) across the United States are having worse COVID outcomes compared to white folks. ... Sometimes it’s acceptable to consider things like race and ethnicity when making decisions about when resources get allocated at a societal level.”

Leaving aside the issue of why treatments are in short supply and whether governments should be involved in allocating treatments, Leider seems to be saying that minorities’ covid effects are more severe. Severity, of course, can and should be a factor in deciding which people get the treatment. If a doctor has two patients and only enough medicine to treat one, she has to decide. It makes sense, on the individual level, to give it to the sickest patient, other things being equal. But it should make no difference, statistically, whether one group has more severe covid outcomes than another, on average. That would be racist. Groups don’t get covid. But is this what Leider is actually saying?

Since the pandemic began, health care systems and states have been grappling with how to best distribute treatments. The problem has only grown worse as the omicron variant has packed hospitals with COVID-19 patients.

Considerable evidence suggests that COVID-19 has hit certain racial and ethnic groups harder than whites. Research shows that people of color are at a higher risk of severe illness, are more likely to be hospitalized and are dying from COVID-19 at younger ages.

There you have it. Group statistics, rather than individual evaluation, is what is meant by allowing doctors to consider race one of the factors in allocating scarce covid treatments. “Medical experts,” Richmond reports, “say the opposition [to race factoring] is misleading.” No, it’s not. Conservatives are right. It is discriminatory. It is racist. Only real live individual human beings get sick. It makes no difference to a sick individual whether, statistically, his racial group is statistically more or less likely to be severely infected. He is infected, not some group abstraction. 

If a black person, a white person, and an hispanic person are sitting in a doctor’s office, and the doctor cannot administer, say, antibody treatments to them all, it would be grossly unethical for the doctors to consult statistical disparities of each racial group. Individuals are not groups. They are not “disparities.” They are real people, created morally equal. Only medically relevant information, such as how severe the symptoms are or how other personal risk factors, such as age or asthma, come into play, should be considered. Racism has no place in the doctors’ evaluation.

This debate exposes the evil of collectivism -- judging the group over the individual as the real unit and standard of moral relevance and evaluation. Racism is collectivism, writ large. The fact that race as a factor in COVID treatment is even debatable shows that, with all of the progress humankind has made from savagery to civilization, the progress still has a way to go. Let me state this clearly: Collectivism is a philosophy of savages, not civilized people. The rise up from savagery to civilization is progress up from collectivism to individualism. *

I am not claiming that statistical analysis of groups has no place. Group disparities can point to legitimate problems—including, but not necessarily, racial discrimination or prejudice—that should be addressed. But you can’t address wrongs with other wrongs. You don’t correct wrongs, if it is found that statistical disparities are rooted in wrongs, by engaging in racism and injustice. Many people still haven’t learned that the individual is the only real human entity—the only relevant human entity that actually exists. The fact that such highly educated people, such as medical experts, don’t get it -- or, won’t acknowledge it -- shows just how far humankind has to go to achieve, and to save, the highest levels of a civilized co-existence.

* [Do not confuse collectivism with voluntary associations of a number of self-interested individuals cooperating toward the pursuit of some common goal or value, such as a business corporation, labor union, political party, bowling league, or trade or professional organization. Such associations are based on individualism, not collectivism.] 

Related Reading:

Individualism vs. Collectivism and the Neglected False Moral Dichotomy

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’

Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell

AMERICA: A RACIST NATION? BY ANDREW BERNSTEIN

Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice—Craig Biddle

Related Viewing:

 

John McWhorter: America Has Never Been Less Racist -- Reason interview

 

Individualism vs Collectivism - Dr. Yaron Brook

Menendez Caves

 Previously, I highlighted New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez’s seemingly strong opposition to his party’s bill to grant Medicare the power to negotiate prescription drug prices. Menendez said:

“My goal, which I have not seen in any proposal so far, is to ensure that the consumer at the counter gets relief and not just simply the government,” Menendez told NJ Advance Media.

“Otherwise, we will have done all of this, we will have taken billions from an industry that’s important to the nation, as we just saw with COVID, that’s important to New Jersey, but we still won’t have dealt with the cost of prescription drugs over the counter.”

Apparently, Menendez’s strong statements against Medicare drug price controls, masquerading as “negotiation,” were hollow. In N.J.’s Menendez backs deal to lower drug prices after opposing earlier proposals, Jonathan D. Salant reports: 

U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, who had opposed House legislation designed to lower the prices of prescription drugs, endorsed a compromise proposal on Tuesday that would allow Medicare to negotiate on some drugs and cap seniors’ out of pocket expenses.

Menendez said he had insisted that any drug pricing legislation would make sure “New Jerseyans and Americans all across the country finally see a meaningful reduction in the rising cost of drug prescriptions while protecting innovation on life-saving treatments.”

Medicare’s negotiating authority would be limited, under this “compromise.” 

Under the provision, Medicare will be able negotiate prices for up to 10 high-cost prescription drugs in 2023, with the new lower prices available beginning in 2025. The number of drugs subject to negotiation eventually will increase to 20.

But the door to price controls is cracked open. Does anyone really believe it won’t be swung wide open, eventually? The pharmaceutical Industry’s trade association explained the practical problem:

The drug industry’s trade group, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said the new proposal had all the problems of the old one.

“Under the guise of ‘negotiation,’ it gives the government the power to dictate how much a medicine is worth and leaves many patients facing a future with less access to medicines and fewer new treatments,” said Stephen J. Ubl, president and chief executive.

It’s also deceptive for labeling it “negotiation” and immoral for denying drug companies any real choice in pricing the medicines they create. Hopefully, other Democrats—it’ll only take one in the Senate—will see the danger and block the bill.

Related Reading:

NJ Senator Menendez Applies the Brakes to the Dem’s Push for Drug Price Controls

The Star-Ledger’s Medicare/Prescription Drug Misinformation Campaign

Pharma Can’t ‘Bargain’ With a Medicare Monopsony

Merck- Villain or Victim?

Huber on the Personalized Medicine Revolution—and the Government Roadblocks

How the FDA Violates Rights and Hinders Health—Stella Daily Zawistowski

NJ Senator Menendez Applies the Brakes to the Dem’s Push for Drug Price Controls

From Menendez opposes fellow N.J. Democrat [Rep. Frank] Pallone’s plan to lower drug prices by Jonathan D. Salant for NJ.com and the 10/21/21 New Jersey Star-Ledger:

U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez says he doesn’t like the way the House wants to lower prescription drug prices, and will not support its proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate with drug companies in President Joe Biden’s proposed spending plan.

“My goal, which I have not seen in any proposal so far, is to ensure that the consumer at the counter gets relief and not just simply the government,” Menendez told NJ Advance Media.

“Otherwise, we will have done all of this, we will have taken billions from a industry that’s important to the nation, as we just saw with COVID, that’s important to New Jersey, but we still won’t have dealt with the cost of prescription drugs over the counter.”

Menendez seems to get it. Medicare is a monopsony. "Negotiations" between Medicare and private drug companies would be a sham. It's nothing more than price controls by another name. High drug prices have deep causes related to the FDA and other regulations, as well as the cost of cutting edge drug development. Simply forcing end prices down for the government would violate the rights of drug companies to set prices for their products and, as Menendez says, will cause great harm to this important industry, and to our health long term. 

It remains to be seen how Menendez would meet his goal of lowering drug prices. He simply states “The cost of prescription drugs and lowering it is definitely something that should be proposed. It needs to be looked at in the context of what can pass and most importantly, what can guarantee that the consumer at the counter gets lower costs.”

But just the fact that Menendez is not a knee-jerk price cutter, and recognizes that the wrong policies can be bad for everyone, including the companies, their employees, and their customers, seems to ensure that whatever steps get taken will be at least less bad than Pallone’s scheme. 

It’s not often that I get to praise a Democrat. Kudos to Menendez on this issue. 

Related Reading:

The Star-Ledger’s Medicare/Prescription Drug Misinformation Campaign

Pharma Can’t ‘Bargain’ With a Medicare Monopsony

Merck- Villain or Victim?

Huber on the Personalized Medicine Revolution—and the Government Roadblocks

How the FDA Violates Rights and Hinders Health—Stella Daily Zawistowski

Vaccine Mandates: What they Are, What They and Are Not, and Why Vaccines Should Not Be Mandated

The data is in: Vaccine mandates work, opines the New Jersey Star-Ledger Editorial Board (SLEB):

The numbers are in, and we hold this truth to be self-evident: COVID vaccine mandates work.

Or, if you prefer its prickly corollary: Where judgment and logic fail, employer mandates succeed, because the specter of job loss and financial hardship is apparently more persuasive than the threat of death.

This is the case in and around New Jersey, where data from health care and education sectors in our region is irrefutable: This tool works, and Gov. Murphy should use it to strengthen existing mandates and impose a passport system for public gatherings like the one used in New York City – because where persuasion fails, pressure works.

What “works” and what restrictions on our freedom are morally justified are two entirely different things. The statist stops at what works, measured by how many people comply. The statist isn’t concerned with the consequences to all other areas of citizens’ lives and rights. The Enlightened American starts with individual rights and considers all facts and weighs the long term consequences of diminished liberties the precedent sets before granting the state the power to mandate anything.

But next, we need to untangle the confusion about vaccine mandates embedded in this editorial. 

Mirriam-Webster defines mandate as an act “to officially require (something) : make (something) mandatory.” As Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine explains, there is a difference between a government order to get something and the “employer mandates” that the SLEB speaks of. An “employer mandate” is not a mandate at all. It’s a job requirement. As Mulshine points out, 

If the government ordered all citizens to get vaccinated, that would indeed be a mandate. That happened in 1905 when the city of Cambridge, Mass, ordered all residents to get vaccinated or face a $5 fine. A few went to court to block the law, but the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the city.

Whatever you think of that law, it clearly qualifies as a mandate.

It’s different with workers. If an airline tells its employees that they have to get vaccinated against COVID, as United Airlines recently did, that’s not a mandate. It’s just one of many job requirements.

 

And as Mulshine also points out, “if for some reason . . .  workers want to remain unvaccinated, that’s their right. But keeping their jobs isn’t.”

 

So, employers, whether private or government, have a valid right to require vaccines. But the Star-Ledger goes further. It urges the Governor to order all employers, public and private, to require vaccines via “a passport system” which would extend to all public gatherings. As SLEB editorial page editor Tom Moran reports elsewhere, the passport would apply to customers also and include all “restaurants and theaters and museums” regardless of the establishment's wishes. 

That would indeed be a mandate. (As of this writing, NJ Governor Phil Murphy is resisting the pressure to mandate vaccines, perhaps because of the pending gubernatorial election.)

Which leads us to the question of whether such a mandate justifies the freedom restrictions that results from such a violation of individual rights. 

My belief is no, it does not.

A vaccine protects the individual from contracting the disease, or if a breakthrough occurs, from a serious case of the illness. If the vaccinated is protected from the illness, he is by definition protected from the unvaccinated. So why mandate the vaccine? The unvaccinated are willingly taking the risk, but are not an inordinate threat to the vaccinated. 

The SLEB is wrong in its terminology. It is correct to support employers’ right to voluntarily require vaccines as a condition of employment. It is wrong to call on the state to force such a requirement on unwilling employers. That is an unjustified restriction of our liberty, and liberty considerations -- the protection of individual rights -- comes first in any country that considers itself a free society.

Related Reading:

COVID vaccinations: They’re not a mandate; they’re a choice by Paul Mulshine

NJ’s School/Vaccine Battle Need Not Pit Public Health Against Individual Rights

Moral Rights and Political Freedom—Tara Smith

On Mandatory Vaccinations, Protect Everyone’s Right to Object, Not Just Religionists’ Rights

Vaccine Exemption Bill Violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments, Fairness

Related Viewing:

Vaccine False Alternatives: Bribes vs. Mandates, by Elan Journo and Onkar Ghate, New Ideal Live

As an FYI, here is the text of Ayn Rand's statement about mandatory vaccination and quarantines:

"Now, requiring inoculation against disease: should this be a job for the government? Most definitely not and there is a very simple answer for it. If it is medically proved that a certain inoculation is in fact practical and desirable, those who want it will take that inoculation. Now if some people do not see it that way—do not agree or don’t want to take it, only they will be in danger since all the other people will be inoculated. Those who do not go along, if they are wrong in this case, will merely catch the disease. They will not be a danger to anyone else and nobody has the right to force them to do anything for their own good against their own judgement. They will merely be ill then, but they could not infect others.

“The next question in regard to quarantine is somewhat different, because in the state of, sense of a quarantine, if someone has a contagious disease, against which there is no inoculation, then the government will have the right to require quarantine. What is the principle here? It’s to protect those people who are not ill, to protect the people who, to prevent the people who are ill from passing on their illness to others. Here you are dealing with a demonstrable physical damage. Remember that in all issues of protecting someone from physical damage, before a government can properly act, there has to be a scientific, objective demonstration of an actual physical danger. If it is demonstrated, then the government can act to protect those who are not yet ill from contacting the disease, in other words to quarantine the people who are ill is not an interference with their rights, it is merely preventing them from doing physical damage to others.”

This is from a Q&A session during her lecture “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business” in 1963. (An edited transcript of this is found on pp. 12-13 of Ayn Rand Answers, edited by Robert Mayhew.)

The Star-Ledger’s Medicare/Prescription Drug Misinformation Campaign

The New Jersey Star-Ledger ran an editorial titled No, Andy Kim is not coming for your Medicare. 

A dark money group is running a scaremongering ad campaign against N.J. Congressman Andy Kim, suggesting that he wants to cut Medicare to pay for the $3.5 trillion Democratic spending plan.

Sign a petition to oppose this, it blares – “Lives depend on you today.”

Be aware: This is a scam. The claim is pure nonsense. The $3.5 trillion plan doesn’t cut Medicare, it enhances it by adding coverage for dental, hearing and vision. And it covers the cost of this by negotiating lower prices for prescriptions.

Political ads can be misleading. But the issue here is empowering Medicare to “negotiate” prices with pharmaceutical companies for prescription drugs the government agency buys. The Star-Ledger goes on to support that proposal. 

But the editors ignore crucial context. 

First, Medicare is not just another prescription drug buyer, like private insurance companies. Medicare has a government-enforced monopsony over the senior prescription drug market, stemming from its monopoly over most of the 65+-years-old healthcare market for seniors. 

Second, Medicare is part of an institution, the federal government, that has life-and-death control over which drugs get approved, and the companies that produce them. Theoretically, Medicare is independent from the FDA, which has that power. But what’s to stop FDA bureaucrats from communicating with Medicare officials? What’s to stop implicit threats by Medicare negotiators regarding approval of unrelated experimental drugs under FDA review from entering into negotiations with pharmaceutical companies? Then there is the IRS and the antitrust powers of the federal government.

The idea that there can be fair and just negotiations between a private company and the federal government, an institution with so much coercive powers over private business, is a joke. Such
“negotiations” would be akin to a speakeasy “negotiating” protection money fees with the Al Capone organization during Prohibition. 

There is also the double-talk about high prescription drug prices. The Star-Ledger ignores the role of the FDA itself in making drug approvals so expensive. If COVID-19 has given us lessons, there is no more consequential lesson to be learned than that the costly drug approval process can be dramatically cut. Rather than give the Medicare monopsony the power to “negotiate” drug prices -- which is really just another term for price controls -- the Star-Ledger should urge major reforms to the Food and Drug Administration.

The Star-Ledger ridicules the idea that Medicare “negotiating” power would hamper and disincentivize cutting edge drug research. But the FDA already does that. Empowering Medicare to effectively force drug prices down after the FDA forced them up to begin with would just further cripple drug development.  

The Star-Ledger writes, “because the government has no power to negotiate, it must pay whatever drug price the industry charges, a cost that gets passed down to consumers.” Well, it shouldn’t have that power. That power stems from Medicare’s monopoly power, in which government officials muscle their way in between drugmakers and their consumers. This cuts out the best regulator of drug prices, the interaction between producers and consumers. That’s fundamental economics. Free markets are missing in the senior prescription drug industry.

There are very good reasons why, more than half a century after the formation of Medicare, Medicare still can’t negotiate prices. And it’s not the Star-Ledger’s childish blaming of “Pharma fearmongering.” There are real risks to freedom and health in Rep. Kim’s scheme.

Related:

Pharma Can’t ‘Bargain’ With a Medicare Monopsony

Pharmaphobia: How the conflict of interest myth undermines American medical innovation—Thomas P. Stossel

The Cure in the Code: How 20th Century Law is Undermining 21st Century Medicine—Peter W. Huber

New NJ Reg Would Cut Doctors Off From Information and Curb Commerce

Drug Advertising: New Zealand and the USA are Right, and the Rest of the World is Wrong

Merck- Villain or Victim?

Huber on the Personalized Medicine Revolution—and the Government Roadblocks

How the FDA Violates Rights and Hinders Health—Stella Daily Zawistowski

Close the FDA’s “Loopholes” of Statism, not Freedom

On Mylan’s EpiPen Pricing Controversy