Healthcare Lies and the NYT (MassCare's Letter to the NYT Editors)
Mort Zuckerman
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Subject: Healthcare Lies and the NYT (MassCare's Letter to the NYT
Editors)
Date: Apr 13, 2009 8:48 AM
ARTICLE BELOW
============================
Lotsa unscientifically trained folks like
to talk about evidence-based medicine, not
knowing such a thing has already been
corrupted by the CDC and BigInsurance who
have FLAT-OUT stated that they were "taking
over medicine and the MD groups had better
just get used to the idea"(John J. Connolly,
former president of NYMC, later Chair of the
Kaiser-Permanente Lyme Disease Foundation:
http://www.actionlyme.org/ALDF_BOARD.htm )
An example of Kaiser Medicine:
http://www.actionlyme.org/MKLEMPNER.htm
"What was is not and what is is not and
what was not is and the sky is green and
the grass is blue."
RICO within a RICO:
Inner RICO:
http://www.actionlyme.org/CORIXARICO.htm
Outer RICO:
http://www.actionlyme.org/USDOJ_COMPLAINT_RICO.htm
CDC's Partners In Crime (Lawrence Altman is
a CDC officer):
http://www.actionlyme.org/UCONN_NO_HOSPITAL.htm
The monopoly involved Kaiser-Permanente (still) at New York Medical
College and the deal was: No one is allowed to have any illness signs
nor is treatment to be paid for, until the alleged "vaccine" is ready,
and then everyone will be notified about how serious that particular
vector borne disease is, and that they better get the "vaccine.”
Has it happened before?
Hmmm. Lemme think.
What does *this* say about neurological
adverse events:
http://www.merck.com/product/usa/pi_circulars/m/mmr_ii/mmr_ii_pi.pdf
And who held that data for the CDC?
Kaiser-Permanente.
And what does the SCIENCE say about MMR vaccines?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=DetailsSearch&Term=9639369[uid]
"Updated information on adverse events and contraindications,
particularly for persons with severe HIV infection, persons with a
history of egg allergy or gelatin allergy, persons with a history of
thrombocytopenia, and persons receiving steroid therapy."
The SCIENCE says immune incompetent children are
at risk. But what does the CDC say about brain-
damaged, unscreened children?
"It's a calculated risk."
It is a risk the CDC calculates, and they would
rather you and I and all American parents don't
know about the risks.
And *that* is yet another crime the New York
Times participates in by having a CDC officer,
Lawrence Altman, as one of their "science
writers."
CONCLUSION: Don't bother complaining to the wolves
about wolves guarding the henhouse. The CDC and
Kaiser/BigInsurance have *already* *corrupted*
the concept of "evidence based medicine." You
can't use any arguments that come from the perps.
As BigInsurance and the CDC have been shown to have
a history of effing up medicine to the grandest scale of
all - effing up HIV, Cancer, and tuberculosis by
interfering with "Lyme Disease" - they cannot
be engaged in the discussion:
http://www.actionlyme.org/PAM3CYS_IMMUNE_SUPPRESSION.htm
Oh, and the CDC only offers some public calamity
whenever they need a distraction. The latest
distraction they issued was meant to divert
attention away from the fact that there is a
CDC officer involved in the Lyme crymes - Marty
Scheiffer, who wrote a bogus article about
OspA causing arthritis, and the latest CDC-ism
where they dicked with the DC water data:
http://groups.google.com/group/scilyme2/t/ff7b677e96af7d26?hl=en
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/CDC_covered_up_high_lead_levels_0411.html
DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT engage any arguments from
the CDC or BigInsurance. Unless you have a real
scientist hanging around who can verify the
integrity of the study and of the data... well
we don't know any. 18/20 of the APA DSM panelists
are interest-conflicted. That means the other
2 were selected for their brainlessness...
We, Americans, don't know any medical scientists
with any integrity and we don't know where to get them.
We don't know where to get them.
They've all been trained by BigInsurance and BigPharma
and the whistleblowers are attacked.
Kathleen M. Dickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
===========================================
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/12-2
Published on Sunday, April 12, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Why Has the Press Failed Us In Reporting on Health Care Reform?
An Open Letter to Bill Keller, Executive Editor, New York Times, and
Clark Hoyt, Public Editor, New York Times
by Benjamin Day
Dear Bill Keller and Clark Hoyt,
For the first time in the span of a generation, national health care
reform is back on the horizon, and I'm writing to you to step back for
a moment into the history of the Times's reporting on health care
reform. Last year I began a research project with two researchers
from Harvard Medical School, Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie
Woolhandler, to look at the history of major state health reforms such
as TennCare, the Oregon Health Plan, MinnesotaCare, and many others. A
sweeping health reform bill had been passed into law in Massachusetts
in 2006 that was being hailed as a unique, first-of-its-kind
bipartisan strategy to achieve universal or near-universal health
coverage without raising taxes or adding new regulations on the health
care industry. We initially set out to find how unique the
Massachusetts health reform law really was compared to previous state
efforts, and to see if by analyzing the outcomes of those earlier
reform efforts we could learn some lessons about what to expect in
Massachusetts.
What we found surprised us, and a summary write up of our findings was
published in the International Journal of Health Services. We found
that, aside from the "individual mandate" in Massachusetts requiring
many of the uninsured to purchase their own private health plan or
face tax penalties, many reforms in other states - indeed, even in our
own state in the recent past - were almost identical to the Mass plan
in their goals and structure. They also all failed to achieve their
stated goals of reducing the uninsured population in their respective
states and/or of controlling rising health care costs. The most
ambitious of these, TennCare in 1994 and a large Medicaid expansion in
Massachusetts also in the mid-1990s, were able to reduce the uninsured
in their respective states for a period of several years. However, the
financing of these plans all proved unsustainable over time,
enrollment was often capped or benefits eroded, and a few short years
after passage every state found itself back where it started: with
high and rising health care costs and a large and growing uninsured
population. We titled our article "State Health Reform Flatlines.
What we found even more surprising than this history of failed reform
efforts, though, was media coverage of the legislation. Articles by
our most respected news organizations hailed state reform after state
reform as pioneering, likely to serve as models for the nation, and
designed to control costs and extend health coverage to the uninsured.
No reasonable reader of the news available at the time these laws were
passed would expect that they might fail entirely to reduce the
uninsured over time, or that they might not succeed in controlling
costs at all.
Florida in April 1993 launched the first of what would be many
"managed competition" plans for controlling costs and extending health
coverage, a scheme that would serve as virtually the only cost control
component of Bill Clinton's proposed health reform bill of 1994. The
New York Times wrote "The Florida Legislature approved a sweeping
overhaul of the state's overburdened health-care system early today,
making Florida the first state in the nation to combine free market
competition and government regulation in a way similar to the Clinton
Administration's plans for controlling soaring medical costs...
Florida's plan, which will try to cover most people eventually and at
the same time to control health costs, is taking place on a larger
scale than anything seen elsewhere." Managed competition did not
control costs in Florida or anywhere else, nor was the uninsured
population reduced.
Exactly one year previous in April of 1992 Minnesota passed its
"HealthRight" plan - later renamed "MinnesotaCare." USA Today wrote of
it: "Minnesota is about to embark on a plan to solve the health-
insurance crisis that could hold lessons for other states and the
nation... HealthRight... will begin signing up families with children
in the fall and will be fully open to Minnesota's estimated 370,000
eligible uninsured by 1994." The Associated Press wire coverage of the
law repeated state estimates that almost 40 percent of those uninsured
should be covered by 1997, and quoted the head of the National
Conference of State Legislatures calling the bill "the first complete
reform proposal in the United States." MinnesotaCare did not reduce
the percentage of uninsured in Minnesota even in the short-term.
A few other quotes should be enough to convey the sense that there is
a recurring problem in the news we receive on health reform in
America. A Vermont bill also passed in 1992 elicited this opening
description in the New York Times: "Gov. Howard Dean, the only
governor who is a physician, signed a law Monday in Bennington that
sets in motion a plan to give Vermont universal health care by 1995."
The Oregon Health Plan of 1992, which attempted to reduce benefits for
Medicaid beneficiaries in order to expand coverage to the uninsured,
was described in a Washington Post article as "The most far-reaching
health care reform in the nation." The New York Times began its
coverage by stating that "The Clinton Administration today approved
Oregon's proposal to guarantee health services for poor people by
rationing care." Neither Vermont's reform nor Oregon's reduced the
percentage of uninsured in the state, and the poor in Oregon were not
covered.
These are selective quotes: the broader coverage has often provided
good descriptions of what the laws are intended to accomplish.
Moreover, they have included extremely effective reporting on the
politics of the health reform process - particularly when the process
is contentious, or where well-organized groups have mobilized
opposition. However, in the United States we have a long history of
reforms that have survived the political process only to fail
economically, and it is clear in retrospect that the media sources -
both local and national - with large market share have not done their
due-diligence in reporting on the economic viability of health reform
efforts. I believe this would be borne out by analyzing coverage of
many other significant reforms in Washington, Tennessee,
Massachusetts, Hawaii, Maine, California, Utah, and nationally.
This becomes particularly clear by comparing coverage of health care
reform with medical reporting in virtually any paper. The Christian
Science Monitor on April 8, for example, carried a story that is
typical of this approach to health politics reporting entitled
"Healthcare battle brewing: political groups gear up: A public
insurance alternative is likely to be the most contentious of the
reform proposals." The story states that the Obama administration
hopes to introduce a Medicare-like public buy-in plan available to
individuals and businesses as an alternative to private health
coverage. It goes on to cite the Heritage Foundation's opposition to
the plan, the support of groups such as MoveOn.Org and Democracy for
America, and public polling from Harvard Professor Robert Blendon. The
article follows a "he-said/she-said" format, with the Heritage
Foundation contending that such a plan would not allow private
insurance to compete on a level playing field, advocates urging that
it will bring down costs and hold the private insurance industry
accountable, and the CEO of Families USA urging that both sides
attempt to find a common ground.
What is missing from this narrative of contending arguments is a
discussion of evidence about the likely impacts of a public plan
option. There have been forms of public-private health insurance
competition implemented under Medicare for a number of years, and
there are many other countries that allow competition between public
and private health insurers. Peer-reviewed studies of public-private
competition are not hard to find, nor are experts with varying
opinions. Compare the CSM discussion with almost any medical news
story in the New York Times Health Section on the same day: there is a
report on a new study by two Stanford professors assessing the impact
of George W. Bush's AIDS Relief program in Africa; two studies about
the impact of light exercise for heart failure patients; three reports
on the role of "brown fat" in burning calories; and others. In short,
medical reporting and the coverage of public disagreements revolve
around evidence, there are standards for credible sources, and it is
common to read about the limitations of available evidence. Although I
am personally an advocate and an organizer coming from a single-payer
health care perspective, what strikes me most after reading hundreds
of news reports on health reform is the lack of academic perspectives,
held to academic standards, concerned with basic questions of the
economic efficacy and sustainability of health policy proposals.
At the state level this has often been exacerbated by bi-partisan
legislation. Many of the reforms that have failed to achieve or even
approach their stated goals have been passed with support from the
Democrats and Republicans holding one or both legislative houses or
the governor's office. This has a particularly chilling effect on
politics-based health reform coverage. Reporting on the Oregon Health
Plan, for example, focused almost exclusively on the attempt to ration
services for Medicaid enrollees - would this plan harm the disabled or
the poor, was it just? - while the basic question of whether the law,
even taking rationing for granted, would succeed in reducing the
uninsured in the state, went unasked. In Tennessee, similarly, the
spectacle of almost one million Medicaid enrollees being moved into
managed care plans occluded the basic question of whether the proposal
to extend coverage to another half a million uninsured residents was
economically viable, or if it would succeed in reducing the state's
uninsured over time - these latter goals being the entire point of
moving Medicaid recipients into managed care plans in the first place.
This shortcoming has also been exacerbated by the subject material.
Increasing access to health care is what makes health reform morally
compelling for most people, but financing and cost controls are what
make efforts to expand access sustainable or unsustainable. These are
topics not well-suited to personal interest stories, and they are
often bewilderingly complex. In Massachusetts alone, residents have
been promised universal health care or dramatic reductions in the
uninsured at least four times in the last twenty years. A few years
after each reform passes, the dry logic of costs and financing has
left residents back where they started, and yet when the politics of
health reform begin again we are provided with very little information
in the public sphere to sort out the snake-oil from the genuine,
sustainable reform proposals.
I write to you not because I believe the New York Times is
particularly at-fault in leaving its reading public unprepared to
determine the viability of different health reform proposals, but
because the scope of the Times's coverage has meant that it has
reported on a wide range of state and national efforts, which gives us
a good window on the history of health reform coverage in the United
States. This year, many national commentators are measuring the
ongoing process of health policy development against the failed Health
Security Act of the Clinton era. This has led many advocates to be
particularly concerned with crafting politically viable proposals. I
believe this makes the burden on reporters to effectively assess
whether the proposals are likely to achieve their stated goals
sustainably all the more important.
I would urge the Times not to report health policy disputes in a he-
said/she-said format divorced from evidence-based standards. Reporters
should challenge interviewees to source their economic claims, include
those sources in their write-ups, and not shy away from evaluating the
quality of evidence offered from different perspectives. Furthermore,
we have learned time and again that where there is political harmony,
there is not necessarily economic rationality. The burden of evidence-
based evaluation of health policy cannot stop at the borders of
political skirmishes.
I thank you for your consideration of this open letter,
Sincerely,
Benjamin Day
Executive Director
Mass-Care: The Massachusetts Campaign for Single Payer Health Care
33 Harrison Ave - 5th floor
Boston, MA 02111
Phone: 617-723-7001
Email: in...@masscare.org
====================================================
"[Real] scientists are *fiercely* independent. That's the good
news."-- NIH's Top Fool, Anthony Fauci