Dr. Keith Smith: "Big medicine is in big trouble"

As an eternal optimist, I would say that big medicine is in big trouble.  The system is dysfunctional, but people are waking up.  There are alternatives out there that are free market, and people are becoming aware that they exist, that they work.  With this awareness, it becomes real tough for the big monsters—that is, the cartel that controls the strings with their pal, Uncle Sam—to continue driving the getaway car in this heist.

~ G. Keith Smith, MD, co-founder of Surgery Center of Oklahoma, "The Free Market Medical Revolution," The Austrian, July-August 2022

Yuri Maltsev on Stalin's infatuation with penicillin

The country is flooded with penicillin, however.  In 1946, Stalin was impressed with how effective it was at fighting disease and ordered that the Soviet Union have the same amount the West does.  The "plan" has never been altered, but 89% of citizens have built-up a resistance to penicillin's effects.  But it is still prescribed because there is nothing else.

~ Yuri N. Maltsev, "The Soviet Medical Nightmare," The Free Market, August 1990

Jeff Scott on crises and the expansion of "public health"

Crises are like drugs for those in office, offering Governors the option to retain powers over the public. Does the Governor have authority to prolong an emergency declaration motivated by virus eradication? The series of absurd reasons for containment permits him to bypass state law and federal Constitutional rights. [North Carolina Governor] Cooper, like other Democratic governors who are being challenged in Ohio and Michigan, conveniently expanded his privilege to keep people under virtual house arrest with no legal consequences to himself. He threw North Carolinians under the bus. When will “non-essential” business owners, their employees and their customers get a chance to speak up? 

[...]

If we don’t challenge the Governor’s decision, whether he is still in office or out, the tyranny of COVID-19 can be applied to a wide array of “public health” issues. That includes obesity, drugs, racism, guns and rights of association and protest. Not only that, but “public health” indoctrination and propaganda include gag orders, censorship and tight media control. The Federal Center for Disease Control (CDC) even stopped evictions on the grounds of “public health”. This is just the tip of the iceberg when one stops to consider a Federal takeover of public health.

~ Jeff Scott, candidate for North Caroline Senate District 37, Facebook post, October 5, 2020

Jon Rappaport on Trump's experimental treatments at Walter Reed Medical Center

The combined effects of these two medicines [Remdesivir and Regeneron] have never been studied in depth. Nevertheless, the Walter Reed doctors treated the president of the United States with both of them. Their hypothesis seemed to be: if a little bit of medicine is good, a lot will be better. Needless to say, this approach has never been backed by science at any time. It is reckless in the extreme. And now we learn about a third drug, dexamethasone. 

[...]

And now, since the Walter Reed doctors are treating Trump with three drugs, they are ignoring the fact that the combined effects of these three have never been studied in depth. More reckless experimentation. Naturally, any decline in the president’s health will be attributed to “COVID-19,” not the drugs.  

[...]

[D]octors have violated the most basic principles of the healing profession. They are endangering the president’s health and life. People who view “leading doctors” as unshakable symbols of good science, and avid Trump supporters who believe the president is far too brilliant to submit himself to these dangerous drugs…need to rethink their positions. If they dare.

~ Jon Rappaport, "Trump Still in Danger: Doctors Added Third to His Reckless Experimental Treatment," LewRockwell.com, October 6, 2020

Joe Biden on health care

Health care is a right — not a privilege.

~ Joe Biden, tweet, September 25, 2020

Jeff Harris on scientific consensus

Maybe you’ve heard of Ignaz Semmelweis, an Austrian-Hungarian obstetrician with a prickly personality. If not, you will quickly recognize his contribution to the medical profession with the three words he made famous:

“Wash your hands.”

This was way back in 1847.

Dr. Semmelweis provided hard data clearly demonstrating that once he and his staff began washing their hands and disinfecting equipment between patients the number of infections and deaths dropped dramatically. Unfortunately, the scientific “consensus” at the time held that there was no benefit to these measures and his advice was almost completely ignored by the learned medical community. In fact, many of his medical peers were incensed with his suggestion that they could be responsible for transmitting illness and disease!

At the time doctors took pride in their soiled gowns as a mark of their industrious work! It was commonplace for doctors who had just completed an autopsy to go to the maternity ward and deliver babies without ever washing up! After all it was the “consensus” and with so many doctors in agreement how could they be wrong?

Dr. Semmelweis died in an insane asylum in 1865 knowing that untold numbers of patients had needlessly suffered and died because the medical community refused to accept his findings and instead chose to follow the "consensus."

~ Jeff Harris, The Ron Paul Institute for Peace &scie Prosperity, "Science Is Not About Consensus," ZeroHedge.com, August 27, 2020

Bill Sardi on the coronavirus and politicization of modern medicine

Scrap any idea modern medicine exists outside politics.  Most of the COVID-19-related deaths emanate from States of the same political party.  With an upcoming Presidential election, the excessive number of reported deaths in Democrat-controlled States is disconcerting.  There are 24 Democrat governors and 26 Republican.  Two-thirds of the cases are on the BLUE Democrat side.  Six BLUE states have half the cases but only a third of the population.

U.S. politicians are bragging about the volume of tests performed but saying nothing about the failure to use these tests to target treatment and prevention towards high-risk groups and thus unlock the rest of the population and the economy from very destructive confinement.

~ Bill Sardi, "The Big Coronavirus Testing Con Job," LewRockwell.com, July 14, 2020

Doug Casey on the health care bureaucracy

[S]ince [the government's] now involved in absolutely everything, you need “experts” to decide what’s to be done.

We see this today with people like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who’s nothing more than a lifelong bureaucrat. He’s lived in the swamp his entire life, and he’s a typical technocrat. He believes he knows what’s best for you.

People like Fauci have assumed tremendous power over other people and the way society works. He’s a clever politician and has been effective at backslapping and backstabbing. And wheedling his way into a high bureaucratic position. The government is full of people like him.

~ Doug Casey, "Doug Casey on How Fake Science is Used as Propaganda," LewRockwell.com, June 18, 2020

Alexander Salter on the incompetence of government experts

Experts in the supposedly scientific fields of public health and economics have made a mess of things.  Their failures would be comedic, were the consequences not so tragic.  Instead of capable service for the public’s welfare, the American people have been made to suffer incompetence and malfeasance.  Unless we critically examine the failure of experts, we invite similar blunders in the future.

~ Alexander W. Salter, "Incompetent Experts and Bad Government," AIER.org, May 3, 2020

William Anderson: "There is no better way to make the masses vulnerable to disease than to impoverish them"

What we are seeing is how many people want governments to respond to a situation characterized by uncertainty.  In such circumstances, they demand “solutions” that only can make things worse, and there is no better way to make the masses vulnerable to disease than to impoverish them.

~ William L. Anderson, "The Costs Are Mounting in the Government-Imposed Economic Collapse," Mises.org, March 24, 2020

Eric Boehm on how Trump's tariffs reduced imports of medical products from China

Hand sanitizer, patient monitors, thermometers, oxygen concentrators, medical protective clothing, sterile gloves, and more were targeted with tariffs in three phases since July 2018. Those tariffs were imposed despite repeated warnings from medical professionals that they would disrupt supply chains and erode the health care industry's ability to respond to a crisis.

Unsurprisingly, American imports of those Chinese-made medical products fell by 16 percent between 2017 (the last full year before Trump's tariffs) and 2019.

~ Eric Boehm, "Trump's Top Trade Official Says China Tariffs Didn't Harm Coronavirus Preparedness. Don't Buy His Spin.," Reason.com, March 24, 2020

Regeneron CEO on the economics of developing a Covid-19 treatment

There are some people who suggest we’re sitting around rubbing our hands together trying to figure out how to profit from the misfortune of this virus. This couldn’t be further from the truth. You have people who are risking their health, and that of their families, by coming to work in the labs and manufacturing facilities to do all that stuff with only one goal in mind: How fast can Regeneron produce this and deliver it to the public? It’s very frustrating for people to have any misimpression that this is easy work, at a time when many of us, including myself, are socially distancing. I’m sitting talking to you from home because I don’t have to be in the lab, while so many dedicated people still have to come to work. They’re heroes and heroines.

~ Leonard Schleifer, "Regeneron's CEO Says We Could Have a Covid-19 Treatment 'Quickly'," Barron's, March 21, 2020

Dennis Pratt on the health care system

The really impressive feat of the government-controlled marketplace is to convince you that the inflated prices you see, which are due entirely to government hinderance of the free market, is actually a function of the free market itself, and that only more government could ever reduce prices.

Government cannot reduce price. The way laws and regulations are written inevitably favor some companies and disfavor others. Politicians are too wedded to their cronies, who keep them in power. To pay back their crony, the amount of money taken from you and then given to the crony must rise.

The biggest scam they will do, though, is to hide the ever-increasing prices from you. They’ll hide it by paying it through taxes — which are taken from you. And even the “taxes on the corporations” are taken from you via higher prices on products, lower quality products, fewer jobs, lower wages, etc. And the politicians will borrow money to pay their cronies, so your kids will get the bill. And they’ll inflate your money to pay, so that the value of your money disappears even as it sits in your wallet. And the inevitable government-induced shortages will be handled by waits and you’ll move up because others will die.

But they’ll have their government teachers “teach” your children in their government schools that their government healthcare is free and abundant and customer oriented and innovative and of the highest quality. And how lucky you are to have your rulers looking out for your health needs.

Not like that free market health care, which only cares about making money!

~ Dennis Pratt, Quora answer, September 5, 2019

Nancy Pelosi on the entrepreneurial spirit of the healthcare reform bill of 2010

We see it as an entrepreneurial bill, a bill that says to someone, if you want to be creative and be a musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent, your skill, your passion, your aspirations because you will have health care.

~Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, 110th US Congress, remarks from a speech given to the Asian American and Pacific Islanders Summit, May 14th, 2010

Walter Williams on government lies about Medicare costs

At its start, in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee, along with President Johnson, estimated that Medicare would cost an inflation-adjusted $12 billion by 1990. In 1990, Medicare topped $107 billion. That's nine times Congress' prediction. Today's Medicare tab comes to $420 billion with no signs of leveling off. How much confidence can we have in any cost estimates by the White House or Congress?

~ Walter Williams, "Washington's Lies," Townhall.com, September 2, 2009

John Mackay: Is health care a "right?"

Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care—to equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals. While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?

Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That's because there isn't any. This "right" has never existed in America.

~ John Mackay, co-founder and CEO, Whole Foods Market Inc., "The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare," The Wall Street Journal, August 11, 2009

Health care reader

• “The Right to Health," Thomas Szasz, The Georgetown Law Journal, March 1969
• "The Trouble with Licensure," Murray Rothbard, The Free Market, August 1990
• "A Freer Market Can Cut Costs of Health Care," Larry Elder, Investor's Business Daily, November 26, 2007
• "Socialized Healthcare vs. The Laws of Economics," Thomas DiLorenzo, mises.org, July 28, 2009
• "Obama's Health-Care Snake Oil," Sheldon Richman, The Future of Freedom Foundation Commentaries, August 5, 2009
• "The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare," John Mackay, The Wall Street Journal, August 11, 2009
• "Washington's Lies," Walter Williams, Townhall.com, September 2, 2009
• "Health Care 'Reformers' Duck the Hard Questions," Sheldon Richman, The Future of Freedom Foundation Commentaries, September 4, 2009
• "Medical Tourism Takes Flight," Leslie P. Norton, Barron's, September 7, 2009
• "A Modest Health-Care Proposal," Sheldon Richman, The Future of Freedom Foundation Commentaries, September 16, 2009
• "Obama, I Got Your Health Savings Right Here," James Foye, LewRockwell.com, September 19, 2009
• "Fable For Adults; Obama is Living in a Fantasy Land," Thomas Sowell, Washington Times, September 19, 2009

Larry Elder on government interference in health care

The reason health care isn't accessible to so many people is because of government interference. For example, a medic in Iraq who attends to fallen soldiers — but is not an M.D. — could not return stateside and open a practice. My aunt worked for over 30 years in a maternity ward. She told me that many times the new interns would say, 'Nurse Maggie, what drug should I use, and what kind of dosage?' Yet laws would prevent my aunt from opening up a pharmacy.

~ Larry Elder, "A Freer Market Can Cut Costs of Health Care," Investor's Business Daily, November 26, 2007

Szasz on government's role in health care

The State can protect and promote the interests of its sick, or potentially sick, citizens in one of two ways only: either by coercing physicians, and other medical and paramedical personnel, to serve patients — as State-owned slaves in the last analysis, or be creating economic, moral, and political circumstances favorable to a plentiful supply of competent physicians and effective drugs.

~ Thomas Szasz, “The Right to Health," The Georgetown Law Journal, March 1969