Your Life is Their Toy - Emanuel Josephson |
QUACK REMEDIES A LA BISMARCK
The stresses of depression have accentuated the need for a solution of many of the problems around which the Medical and Social Service Rackets have revolved. Having gained virtual control of our government, the latter unscrupulously have thrown the entire blame for hospital and medical costs on the former. Equally unscrupulously, they are advocating Compulsory Health Insurance or State Medicine as a remedy.
This pretended remedy is a part of the original treacherous German propaganda program, dating back to the days of Bismarck, for forcing the Bismarxian "New Deal" on the United States to handicap its industries and commerce.
The propaganda has been well organized and is spread by a vast array of organizations which either have been established specially for the purpose or have been inveigled into espousing this "cause." In the front ranks of these propagandists are the multitudinous organizations of the Social Service Racket. Side by side with them are medical and the "liberal," radical, Socialist, Communist, united front, fellow traveler, labor and outright seditious organizations. Both the Democratic and Republican par Lies now have joined their ranks. Thus on March 19, 1940, Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts introduced a health insurance hill that provides forty dollars a year from Security funds for medical care and Federal funds for payment for expensive drugs. This is designed as a direct subsidy of the profits of the Drug Trust.
Linking together and pervading all of these organizations there are professional, political and social service agitatois who constitute a cabal that devote their entire lives to this and allied subversive activities. Most of them have penetrated into high rank in our governmental, university and school systems in the manner that has become the accepted form demanded by the high standards of modern propaganda and espionage.
So highly do the Communist propagandists regard Socialized Medicine that they included a special course on "the organization of medicine as a state function" in the Anglo-American section of the Summer session of the Moscow University. On the staff were Susan M. Kingsbury, Harry W. Chase, John Dewey, Hallie F. Flannagan, George S. Counts and William F. Russell, a group of American university professors.
Lurking in the background, fomenting the agitation and liberally supporting it with funds are the subsidiaries and agents of the German Dye Trust. As has been related, it expects to reap as profit, with the aid of the dictatorial, arbitrary and needlessly destructive Food and Drug Act, a monopolistic control of the highly profitable American drug trade. In the same manner it has gained control of the drug industries of more than a score of countries.
THE AGITATORS PROPOSE TO SADDLE THEMSELVES AND THEIR ALLIES ON THE GOVERNMENT PAYROLL AS ADMINISTRATORS OF THE PLAN, THERE THEY EXPECT TO BE SUPPORTED IN THE SUMPTUOUS STYLE THAT THEY DEEM SUITABLE, BY THE MONEY EXTRACTED FROM PAY ENVELOPES. THEY ALSO PROPOSE TO USE THEIR POSITIONS FOR FURTHER SUBVERSIVE PROPAGANDA.
RECENT CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATIONS HAVE REVEALED HOW THE COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA IS MADE SELF-SUPPORTING IN THE U.S. BY THE SETTINC UP OF DOMESTIC ORGANIZATIONS WHICH COLLECT FUNDS OSTENSIBLY FOR OTHER PURPOSES AND CONVERT THEM TO PROPAGANDA USES.
THE RELIEF, UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE AND SECURITY ADMINISTRATIONS, CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATIONS HAVE REVEALED, ALREADY ARE FILLED WITH ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDISTS OF ALIEN"ISMS," AND MUCH OF THE ENORMOUS VOLUME OF MONEY WHICH THE NATION IS POURING INTO THEM IS BEING DIVERTED AND CONVERTED INTO PROPAGANDA FUNDS.
COMPULSORY HEALTH INSURANCE IS REGARDED BY THESE AGITATORS AS THE RICHEST POSSIBLE SOURCE OF FUNDS FOR THEIR ACTIVITIES, WHICH EXPLAINS THE INTENSITY AND INSISTENCE OF THEIR DRIVE FOR ITS ADOPTION.
STATE GOVERNMENTS—FORUMS FOR PROPAGANDA
These agitators have been highly successful in using the Federal and State governments, which they now control, as forums for their propaganda. They have staged impressive "conferences" and "investigations" that have been crudely rigged propaganda for their plans mouthed by their henchmen. All persons or organizations that might tell the truth or expose the propagandists and their plots are barred from a hearing. They are staged in the same spirit and with the same technique as similar elements in Russia and Germany have staged their "purge" and Reichstag trials.
Most prominent among these forums were the National Health Conference held in Washington in the summer of 1939, and the December 1938 hearings of the New York State Temporary Commission to Formulate a Health Program. Appropriations for both were provided by bills introduced respectively by Senator Robert F. Wagner and Assemblyman Robert F. Wagner, Jr. In both forums the same organizations were represented by the same group of propagandists and agitators. They presented stereotyped false data and statistics that have been standardized by them during years of use. Their falseness is obvious from an analysis of their ideas, stripped of the camouflage of verbiage, which are as follows:
They wish us to believe that the health of the nation will benefit in spite of the lack of food, clothing and shelter which the deducted money represents, vicariously by the fattening and battening thereon of the agitators, propagandists and social service bureaucracy; and by filling with cheap medicine victims who lack the necessities of life. Their arguments are as obviously absurd as their motives are specious and false.
THE "MEDICINE SHOW"
The absurdity of the representations of the propagandists is made most clear by the "Medicine Show," a recent production in the "living newspaper"\ W.P.A. Communist propaganda program. This liturgical mystery play of the Communist Church made it quite clear that the underlying cause of misery and disease is poverty and not the lack of medical care.
It presents no solution of the problem. Instead it absurdly intimated that Compulsory Health Insurance, especially in the form of the Wagner Bill, that proposes to deduct insurance payments from the workers' payrolls, will solve the problem. The maudlin audiences were overcome by their own wishful thoughts on the topic and by a quasi-religious fervor aroused by the sloppy emotionalism of the acting and the seething hatred depicted, and applauded loudly and long.
Few of the audience showed enough good sense to stop and consider that wage deductions for insurance premium payments will intensify poverty and its consequences; that the only real and complete solution of the problem of health and medical care for the needy is the solution of the problem of poverty.
THE "HEALTH INSURANCE" FRAUD
The Health Insurance and State Medicine campaigns which are now being waged in the press by social service and by government agencies is characterized by gross misrepresentation, deceit and fraud on the American public.
The public is being led to believe that the object of the proposed measures is to reduce for it the cost of medical care. The reverse is the truth.
ALL THE "HEALTH INSURANCE" PLANS WHICH HAVE BEEN ADVANCED WILL COMPEL THE PUBLIC TO PAY HIGHLY FOR MEDICAL SERVICES WHICH IT NOW RECEIVES FREE OF ALL DIRECT CHARGE.
When Mr. Jones becomes ill, today, he can go to a municipal or county hospital and may claim the medical services available free of charge. To do so is his right as a resident of the community, whether he be rich or poor. In relatively few sections of the country are such facilities entirely lacking.
But with the adoption of any of the forms of State Medicine which have been proposed, Mr. Jones will no longer have this right to medical care unless he pays into the insurance fund a high percent of his wage. These contributions and levies are the essence of the "insurance."
The estimated cost of this health insurance to Mr. Jones ranges from five to fifteen percent of his wages. The total cost of all the "health," "security," and "welfare" measures, adopted and contemplated, will range from fifteen to twenty percent of his wages.
If Mr. Jones' present wage is scarcely sufficient to purchase food, clothing and shelter, can one fail to realize how soon the costly "welfare" program will reduce him to misery, starvation, disease and possibly worse?
The campaign to secure the passage of "health insurance" legislation is being waged very astutely by its advocates. They not only misrepresent their program to the public, but they also misrepresent the source of the demand for it as coming from the public. They ride human gullibility hard when they seek to create the impression that the public demands to pay for something WHICH IT NOW RECEIVES FOR NOTHING.
There is little reason to believe that these astute propagandists will not succeed in their swindle and fraud on the American public if their censorship and their corruption of the Press cannot be penetrated by the truth. With their present set-up they could even manage to make the legislators believe that the public wants to pay more taxes, that it desires to have its rent increased and that it insists on an increase of the cost of living and a drop in wages.
POLITICIANS AND "SOCIALIZED" MEDICINE
Only politicians pretend to be deceived by the sham that the demand for Socialized Medicine arises from the public. The political demagogue seeks the highest advantage to himself that is compatible with holding the vote at the next election. In this he is more restrained than the social service crew who even need not keep an eye on the vote but seek their own advantage only.
Compulsory Health Insurance makes of medicine a political tool that can be used to hold votes and to create numerous jobs for ward-heelers; and is an issue that can readily be popularized by misrepresentation. It is the ideal weapon of the demagogue as well as of treacherous propagandists. It is not surprising that the "leaders" of all political parties are adopting the issue of Compulsory Health Insurance as the basis of their political platforms. If they did not they would be statesmen, not demagogues.
MEDICAL SERFS FAVOR COMPULSORY INSURANCE
Medical serfs, the rank and file of the medical profession, favor Compulsory Health Insurance. Contrary to the impression which is being given the public by the press, they have joined the ranks of the propagandists. Their motives are frankly and openly mercenary, and consequently their support of the measure is being kept carefully from public notice. They want Compulsory Health Insurance because under its terms the public will be forced to pay for the services that are now rendered by them free of charge in clinics and hospitals. Part of the money which the public will pay under the proposed plans would be given to the doctors for charitable services, the entire burden of which they are now carrying.
Likewise a group of public health officers who have been placed in office by the propagandists favor Compulsory Health Insurance because they are ordered to do so and because it means bigger and better jobs for them. In some communities they are building up health departments and other government services with an eye to converting them to the use of a Compulsory Health Insurance plan.
MEDICAL BOSSES WANT STATE MEDICINE
The medical leaders, merchants and bosses, however, are all opposed to Compulsory Health Insurance because it would reduce their incomes. But they do favor an extension of the same type of State Medicine the development of which they have fostered during the past four decades, because it serves their aggrandizement and advertises their businesses.
The American Medical Association, since the earliest days of its renaissance under "Doc" Simmons, has fostered the idea of concentration of control of the Government's medical services into the hands of a Secretary of Health, a proposed member of the President's Cabinet who will be appointed from among its bosses. This indeed would lend the force of governmental sanction to the rackets of organized medicine.
Drs. Morris Fishbein and Charles Gordon Heyd, ex-president and officer of the A.M.A. and A.C.S. have both made such suggestions public late in 1941. The A.M.A. made its ancient aspiration the backbone of its counter-proposal to the Wagner Act, with the added proviso that the Government pay the cost of charitable medical care and hospitalization. Thus the two rackets, medical and social service, are jockeying for the chance to rifle the public purse. The compromise Hospital Bill that was proposed by Roosevelt and introduced by Wagner was a bribe for medical merchants and an entering wedge for the propagandists.
SOCIAL SERVICES FAVOR STATE MEDICINE
For many decades the social service cliques and their insurance allies have cast invidious eyes on the billions of dollars that are spent by the public for medical care, hospitalization and nursing. Compulsory Health Insurance bills introduced in New York State Legislature in 1919 and 1920 by the social service gang were vigorously fought by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company which sought the profitable domain of health insurance for itself. Then these former enemies joined forces for no good purpose.
To throw dust into the eyes of the public, they conducted bogus health campaigns and demonstrations, and misleading and falsified surveys on "The High Cost of Medical Care." But public suspicion should be aroused because in spite of all the statistics which the social service cliques hurl at the public, they never issue any on the cost of their own activities to the nation. They have never undertaken to reveal to the public the exorbitant cost of their own meddling, and the conversion to their own uses of charitable and trust funds intended by donors for relief and medical care of the poor. The history of their activities makes it clear that the purpose of their deception is the desire to profit from the control of medicine and to gain for themselves more and better jobs and higher wages.
To be sure there are also agitators and propagandists who worship at foreign shrines and serve other lands. They whisper among themselves that the staggering burden of taxation which their plans imply will paralyze industry and commerce in the U.S. as it has in other lands where their subversive activity has succeeded. Some whisper that this will benefit the Vaterland. Others whisper that the tax burden will precipitate "the Revolution." They are rats who "bore from within" for personal profit and baser motives, under the guise of high ideals.
What the public can expect from the social service gentry and the remedies which they offer can be judged in two manners. Some premonition can be had from the maladministration of the Workmen's Compensation Act, one of their proud creations. A brilliant picture of the Compulsory Health Insurance remedy which they are now brewing for this country can be had from a study of its operation in other lands that have adopted it as a result of their propaganda. Finally, the present corrupt and deplorable state of public health administration in this country demonstrates how dangerous is existent State or "Socialized" Medicine and dictates it abolition rather than its extension.
"INSURED" GERMAN HEALTH CARE IS DEPLORABLE
The effects of the "welfare" measures of Bismarck's "New Deal" on Germany are notorious. How futile is Compulsory Insurance in preserving the health of a nation is apparent from Germany's record. Some mention has also been made of the results that ensued when German propaganda secured the adoption of the same measures in France and England. Regarding its results in Communist Russia an honest evaluation is not possible because the breakdown is so complete and the information available is biased and unreliable propaganda. Only one seemingly reliable bit of information regarding "Socialized" Medicine in Russia seems to have emerged—the death of Maxim Gorki. This was the statements, no doubt extorted, by two doctors to the effect that they had been compelled for political reasons to put Gorki to death with drugs—a likely use of this type of medical care.
COMPULSORY INSURANCE IN ENGLAND A FAILURE
Complete and reliable information on the operation of Compulsory Health Insurance in England is available since 1915 in the annual reports of the Ministry of Health. Since these reports cannot be regarded as biased except in favor of Compulsory Health Insurance, their study yields a picture of the operation of the plan which should stand above all suspicion. The prosperity years 1925 to 1928 were selected as a fairer basis for discussion because they show up more favorably for the plan than later years of depression.
Study of disease incidence and mortality in England reveals that Compulsory Health Insurance has been a wretched failure. It has failed miserably to reduce the incidence of preventable diseases, which have increased steadily
Smallpox had been almost entirely eliminated in England under the private practice of medicine. After more than a decade of State Medicine, the incidence of smallpox and other preventable contagious and infectious diseases in England was higher than ever, as indicated in the tabulation below.
| INCIDENCE OF INFECTIOUS DISEASE IN ENGLAND | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1925 | 1926 | 1927 | 1928 | |
| Smallpox Cases | 535 | 10141 | 14787 | 12420 |
| Deaths | 6 | 11 | 36 | 5 |
| Diphtheria Cases | 47720 | 51069 | 52011 | 61134 |
| Deaths | 2774 | 2994 | 2732 | 3191 |
| Enteric fever | 779 | 2739 | 255 | 3495 |
| Deaths | 388 | 367 | 367 | 438 |
Of special interest is the influence of State Medicine on the incidence of syphilis and venereal disease, in view of the current campaign in this country. Syphilis claimed 22,010 new victims in England in 1924, and 22,761 in 1928, an increase of 3%. Gonorrhea claimed 29,477 in 1922, and 42,032 in 1928; the latter figure was the highest number of new cases recorded since the inception of State Medicine in England. The total of venereal diseases rose steadily from 56,347 in 1922, to 65,931 in 1928.
STATE MEDICINE CREATES CONTEMPT
The rising incidence of smallpox represented an index of the loss of prestige and authority of the doctor in the role of the hireling of the community. This growing contempt for the doctor expressed itself in the terms of a drop in the percentage of infants vaccinated from 48.7% in 1923, to 40.0% in 1930, with a corresponding rise in the incidence of smallpox.
The effect of State Medicine, in all the different forms in which it has been tried, upon the character of the public and the attitude of the patients to their medical advisers has been distinctly deleterious. Folks are inclined to value a commodity or service according to the charge placed upon it. Also, they esteem a man in proportion to the amount of authority which he exercises over them; and value his opinions and ideas accordingly. When they find that their physician is a low-paid hireling whose tenure of position is insecure and subject to their whims, they scorn him and his advice. This psychologic reaction has resulted, under Compulsory Health Insurance and State Medicine plans, in public disregard and contempt for the preventive health measures recommended by the medical profession, and in a consequent deterioration of health.
THE PANEL SYSTEM
The British Panel System, like other forms of Compulsory Health Insurance and State Medicine, is a system of medical "mass production." Its evils are intensified by politics and by social service control. The cost of administration and red tape has mounted steadily. After administrative costs and benefits have been paid, there is little left of the money collected from the public for defraying the costs of medical and other services.
The panel doctor receives a very small sum per patient each month. In order to make a scant living he must enlist as large a number of patients as possible. These he must make a hurried pretense of examining and treating, for no one may be kept waiting or turned away. This rush means careless negligence that often spells disability and death.
TREATMENT "STANDARDIZED"
Standardized methods of treatment are imposed upon the doctors by a controlling committee and bureaucracy. As a consequence, medical treatment, which is at best largely empiric and inadequate, loses flexibility and adaptability that often help to save or prolong life. But in self-defense, the doctors must obey the orders of the swivel-chair squad and adhere to the standardized treatments. For in case of investigation of cause of death, the Ministry merely seeks to confirm that the treatments that were followed by death were the "accepted" methods.
As in all bureaucratic forms of medicine, there is barred play to the ingenuity and perseverance of a physician in fighting death, that alone may turn the tide; for that often means deviation from "accepted" methods. As a result England's death-rate has risen steadily. It was so high in 1938 that an effort was made to suppress its publication,
REPORTS MAKE CLERKS OF DOCTORS
Much of the hard-pressed panel doctor's time must be spent in keeping records, making reports, complying with red-tape, undergoing investigation and issuing disability certificates. He is reduced to the role of a clerk and pawn of a "mass production" machine of which the principal output is malpractice.
Most important, in the Panel System, is the issuance of certificates for "sickness disability payments." They present to the doctors a grave problem. The doctor who issues more certificates than the bureaucrats think justified lays himself open to investigation, censure and penalty. But the doctor who issues fewer disability certificates than his patients demand soon finds his panel deserted; for the drones seek to avoid work by malingering sickness and prolonging disability. The doctors are helpless to avert the pressure of their employer-patients and are forced to falsely attest to disabilities in order to retain their practices and make a living.
PRICE LIMITS MEDICINES USED
A large section of the Ministry's report is filled by the question of drugs and their cost. The amount of money left for the purchase of drugs under these plans is very small. A list of cheap drugs, known as "economic pharmacopoeia," limits the range of prescribing by physicians. Other drugs that are more expensive may not be used, no matter how required they may be, except in case of threatening death. These lists bar the use of many essential drugs such as the hormones, which are costly, except at the expense of the patient. In ordering medication for his patient, the panel doctor faces another thorny dilemma. He may use only those remedies which are approved by the State as being sufficiently cheap for panel use; and he must be sparing even in his use of those. The bureaucrats and chair* warmers of the Ministry safe* guard their salaries by fixing a maximum expense per patient for drugs. If the doctor finds it necessary to prescribe more costly medicines, or a larger volume of the inexpensive medicines, than his superiors allow, he finds himself brought up on charges of extravagant or needless prescribing. The cost of the medication is then charged to his salary, and he is fined.
USE OF NEEDED MEDICINES IS PENALIZED
The report of His Majesty's Ministry of Health for the year 1928 relates as follows:
"Excessive prescribing is ordering or supplying drugs or appliances in such a way as to throw upon the funds available for the provision of medical benefit a charge in excess of what is reasonably necessary for the adequate treatment of patients.
"It remains, as it always has been, the business of the doctor, after examining the patient, to prescribe or supply whatever drugs, in his professional judgment, are reasonably necessary for adequate treatment.
"The right to exercise his discretion in this way carries with it the duty to justify in the first instance to his professional brethren, the manner in which he has exercised it, if on an investigation of the orders of supplies given by him and the charges involved, it seems right to the Minister that he should be called upon to do so.
"It is further important to bear in mind, both as evidence of the manner in which the Article is administered, and as a testimony to the measure of sound discretion generally exercised by doctors in prescribing, that the cases in which money has ultimately been withheld from the doctors on account of excessive prescribing, of which there were twenty-one during 1928-29, are a very small proportion, serious as some of them have been, of the number of cases in which prescribing has been reviewed, or even of the number of cases of which the Minister has caused an investigation, in the sense of the Article, to be made.
"The regional medical officers paid over twelve hundred visits during the year to doctors who had given prescriptions in such numbers or of such kinds as to call for explanation, as to
"In 18 of the 24 cases in which the Panel Committees' findings has been intimated to the Minister before the end of the year, the Panel Committees found that an excess cost had been imposed. The amounts of excess cost (that is, the excess occasioned by doctors prescribing during the single quarterly periods under investigation) found by the Panel Committees varied from as little as about two pounds to as much as about two hundred and forty-three pounds (the latter in respect of the prescribing of two partners).
"Some (Panel Committees) have recommended to the Minister to withhold the full amounts of excess cost found by professional bodies (Panel Committees or referees) to have been occasioned by the doctors prescribing; others have submitted that only a small part of the amounts should be withheld."
One can understand that the danger of having the cost of required medication deducted from his meagre wage makes the doctor weigh the health and life of the patient against his own income and livelihood. This also makes it apparent how secondary are health and life to the items of expense, administration, red tape and politics in State Medicine.
DOCTORS' EARNINGS MEAGRE
The average earnings of a doctor under the panel system in England is about eighteen hundred dollars a year; and in Wales about nine hundred dollars. On such earnings a doctor can scarcely exist. And it is certainly impossible for him, because of limitations of income, to maintain his competence as a physician by keeping abreast of medical advance. This involves the purchase of expensive medical books and journals, and visits to centers of medical learning to become acquainted with innovations. The peace of mind, the time and the leisure, as well as the means required for this purpose are out of question for the panel doctor. One can realize that only doctors that are driven by urgent necessity, or those of a low ethical and mental caliber would consent to practice medicine under these circumstances. The situation is well portrayed in Cronin's "Citadel."
"IDEALS" OF PANEL PRACTICE
A clearer picture of the physician who practices under Compulsory Health Insurance, and the type of medical care which he gives his clientele under the English system is drawn by Francis Brett Young in "The Young Physician":
. . . Edwin, quickly recovering his sense of humor, pulled out Edmondson's letter and handed it to the doctor.
"Well, now, why didn't you say so at first," said Dr. Harris, scratching a bristly grey chin. "Yes ... I did mention to their manager that I was in want of someone to do a bit of rough dispensing and keep this place tidy. You see I don't live here. It's what we call a lock-up, and the work's so pressing that I've really no time to do my own dispensing.
"You look very young. Final year . . Then his eyes brightened. "Have you done your midwifery yet?"
"No, I shall do that later in the year."
"That's a pity ... a pity. You could have been very useful to me in that way, keeping cases going, you know, so that I could be in at the finish. I could do twice the amount of midwifery that I do now if I had some one to keep an eye on them. Before the General Medical Council did away with unqualified assistants, I used to keep three of them; paid me well, too. Now I've got to do everything myself. It's a dog's life, but there's money in it, I don't mind telling you.
"You can learn a lot of useful things about general practice here," said Dr. Harris. "It should be extremely useful to you; you sec, I've been at this game for thirty years. It's a great chance for you." He took up a handful of silver from the open drawer and started to jingle it. "Look here, you're wasting time."
He led Edwin behind the green baize curtain at the back of his desk, disclosing a set of shelves and a counter stained with the rings of bottles and measuring glasses. At the end of the counter was a sink into which a tap with a tapered nozzle dripped dismally. One drawer held labels, another corks, a third a selection of eight-ounce, four-ounce, and two-ounce bottles. At the back of the counter stood a row of Winchester Quarts, of indefinite contents, labelled with the Roman numerals from one to nine. Dr. Harris swabbed the swimming counter with a rag that was already saturated with medicine.
"You can learn all you want in five minutes," he said, "There's no time for refinements in this sort of practice. These big bottles are all stock mixtures, and whatever they teach you in your universities, I can tell you that these nine mixtures will carry you through life. There you are . . . Number One: White Mixture. Number Two: Soda and Rhubarb. Number Three: Bismuth's expensive. Number Four: Febrifuge . , . Liquor Ammon, Acet. and that. Number Five: Iron and Mag. Sulph. And so on. . . Number Nine: Mercury and Pot. Iodine . . . you know what that's for," with a laugh.
"We use a lot of that here. Now you've one ounce of each stock mixture to an eight-ounce bottle, and a two-tablespoonful dose. I used to put them up in six-ounce bottles; but if you give them eight ounces they think they're getting more for the money: they don't realize they're getting eight doses instead of twelve, and that's their lookout. Isn't it? Same proportions for children and infants, only you use the tour and two-ounce bottles instead, with dessert-spoon and teaspoonful doses. Simple, isn't it? But you want to simplify if you're going to make money in these days. Now, is that quite clear?"
"Quite clear "
"Well, then, when a patient comes in I have a look at him—with my experience you can tell in a moment— and I give you a slip of paper behind the curtain. Like this. 'Mrs. Jones. No. 5. T.D.S Mrs. means an eight-ounce bottle. One ounce of Number Five stock mixture. One tablespoonful three times a day. Then, if I put '4 tps hour' instead of 'T.D.S.' it means a tablespoonful every four hours; but I only do that when I see they can afford to get through the bottle more quickly. You'll find powders in that drawer. Antifebrin—it's cheaper than phenacetin and caffeine. And calomel for children. Then, as I was saying, while I have a look at the patient and ask him one or two questions, you make up the medicine."
"Suppose, when you've had a talk to him, you change your mind about the treatment?"
"I never change my mind. There's no time for that," said Dr. Harris. "And if I did we could change the medicine next time. But you needn't worry about the treatment; that's part of the business. Why"—and the little man expanded—"I shouldn't wonder if we got through as many as a hundred patients in a couple of hours, the two of us together. Now, are you ready?"
He left Edwin behind the curtain and rang his bell. A patient entered, and as soon as the doctor had said good-evening to her the prescription was passed behind the curtain and Edwin proceeded to fill a bottle from one of the Winchester Quarts. This business went on monotonously for another hour. Edwin dispensed mechanically in a kind of dream. He never saw a single patient; but little scraps of conversation showed him that most of them were suffering from the evils of poor housing and a sedentary life. It consoled him to think that most of the mixtures that he dispensed were relatively harmless. Sometimes, by an access of solicitude and deference in the doctor's voice, he could gather that the patient was of a higher social degree, and he smiled to find, in these cases, that the mixture was invariably prescribed in four-hourly doses.
All the men, it appeared, were judged to be in need of White Mixture or Rhubarb; all the women demanded Iron and Mag. Sulph; all the children were treated with a treacly cough mixture or calomel powders. In the space of an hour he must have dispensed at least forty bottles of medicine, and towards the end of the evening he noticed that Dr. Harris became even more perfunctory in his examinations—If such a word were ever justified—and that signs of irritation began to show themselves in his voice. At last the waiting-room bell rang twice, and no patient appeared.
"A good average day," he said. "Three pounds ten." He shoveled the silver from the drawer into a leather bag that weighted down his coat pocket. "That takes a lot of making at a shilling a time. Well how do you like it?"
ENGLISH PUBLIC'S VERDICT ON PANEL SYSTEM
At the annual meeting of the National Federation of Employees' Approved Societies, held in London on March 5, 1929, the following picture was drawn of State Medicine in England.
"Since the second valuation (1922-23) sickness experience has been steadily increasing. . . . State Insurance is now essentially a part of our industrial system, but as long as the whole burden of responsibility for the prevention and cure of industrial sickness is left to insurance practitioners under conditions existing today, it is not likely that much progress would be made towards removing the serious menace to industrial efficiency.
"A good deal was heard at the conference in criticism of insurance service, one speaker declaring that AFTER SIXTEEN YEARS OF THE PANEL THERE WAS TODAY MORE SICKNESS THAN BEFORE."
England has good reasons to be dissatisfied with its Compulsory Health Insurance program. Social service cliques had promised that it would result in an improvement in national health, exactly as they are promising it to us. The falseness of their promises might have been sensed a priori. But even this scarcely would have anticipated the extent of the failure of State Medicine in England. Its effects are manifest in current history.
The best commentary on State Medicine in England is the fact that some of the keenest minds in the British medical profession—Brett Young, Somerset Maughan and Cronin, for instance— have deserted medicine for literature,
DIALECTICS OF THE PROPAGANDISTS
Some of our propagandists of Compulsory Health Insurance insist that any damaging picture of the English panel system is "false and reprehensible propaganda," They apply these terms to all facts with which they disagree or which do not serve their purposes. But the extent of their own bias and falsification is revealed by the facts. The mortality rate in England in 1938 was one of the highest in the civilized world. At the same time the state of health of the citizenry, especially the youth, was so alarming that a health campaign was instituted to remedy the situation. In February 1940, the Burden Mental Research Trust, of Bristol, reported that the level of intelligence of Britain is now declining more rapidly than ever before. This has occurred despite, or more correctly because of, the "welfare" and "socialized" medicine program. Compulsory Health Insurance has failed as completely in England as it has in Germany and in every other country where it has been tried.
Other propagandists, who better realize the futility of tampering with the truth, acknowledge the failure of the British system but assert that it is due to a defect in the particular plan adopted. This is completely refuted by similar failure of different plans adopted in other lands. Twenty or more diverse plans of Compulsory Health Insurance with all conceivable varieties of variations have been adopted in as many lands and they have all failed equally ignominiously. These failures the agitators brush aside with the same apologies. But they can point to no country where the program has succeeded.
COMPULSORY HEALTH INSURANCE MENACE
It requires little intelligence or thought to realize that the basic ideas that underlie Compulsory Health Insurance are vicious and false. Any plans or organizations based on those ideas are equally vicious, are certain to injure the interests of the public and are doomed to failure.
More significant than the failure of the plan itself is its implied violation of the basic principles of our government. It implies extreme regimentation of the populace, with the government in the role of paternalist autocrat. Human beings would become mere registration numbers from the viewpoint of the government. The mislaying, mixup or loss of office records would mean temporary or permanent "liquidation" of the individual involved and confiscation of his contributions. This could be fashioned into an excellent political weapon for forcing party regularity.
That this is not a theoretic consideration is made obvious by the millions of records now lost in or from the files of the U.S. Security regime. The Administration has announced that as a result of the loss of these records many of the persons involved will lose permanently all their rights under the law. This is an invariable consequence of regimentation, centralization and bureaucratization of a large and populous land.
There are also phases of Compulsory Health Insurance that violate privacy and sense of decency. Under the system one's ailments and the most intimate phases of one's life are made matters of public record which any one who cares to make the special effort might inspect. In this manner one's innermost weaknesses would be betrayed to fiance, to prospective employer or to dangerous enemies.
The effect of the Workmen's Compensation Act in excluding from employment workers over the age of forty indicates what such a system might mean to employability. The utterly unwarranted suicides which have been caused by the mixups under the premarital blood test and venereal certificate laws, one of which has recently drawn the comment of Walter Winchell, give some insight into the tragedies which inevitably result from such devices.
In connection with the same campaign, the director of the Bureau of Social Hygiene of the New York City Health Department announced before the greater New York Safety Council on April 18, 1940, that many employers dismiss or refuse employment to persons who have had syphilis or who are merely suspected of it because they have positive Wassermann reactions. The public clinics for the treatment make public records of the private affairs and ailments of their patients that influential employers can gain access to. It is a natural consequence of any State Medical system that will inevitably bar many workers from employment.
The power of life and death which Compulsory Health Insurance laws place in bureaucracy must not be forgotten. The death of Maxim Gorki at the hands of the servants of Russia's "Socialized Medicine/ 1 which has been mentioned, is one of many instances. In the earlier years of the Nazi regime, the sterilization laws originally passed to prevent the breeding of hereditary defects were used against the enemies and victims of the government. It is not difficult to realize how Compulsory Health Insurance and universal State Medicine could be used by governments, in the heat of partisanship, to destroy their opponents. One can readily conceive that the intensity of animosity which the "New Deal" displays toward its opponents might take the expression, under such laws, of sterilization of their opponents or of euthanasia, their destruction by medical devices "in the interest of public weal." A change of government might result in the sterilizers being sterilized, and in the complete undoing of the nation.
A situation of this character was reported from wartime Poland. The Germans resorted to sterilizing Polish boys by x-ray. It remains to be seen what the Polish will do with the Germans. This mode of warfare may be a real solution of the European problem. The medical situation in this country is bad enough as it stands, without further aggravation. The country would do well to heed the warning offered by the miscarriage of Compulsory Health Insurance and State Medical plans, and to destroy Social Service Rackets and their schemes.
THE NEW DEAL AND SOCIALIZED MEDICINE
President F.D. Roosevelt hedged on the subject of Socialized Medicine, which has been one of the avowed objectives of the New Deal, in a speech at Bcthseda, Maryland, in the course of his 1940 campaign, saying: "Neither the American people nor their government intend to socialize medical practice, any more than they plan to socialize industry."
By some optimistic folks this statement was regarded as a realistic attitude that disposes of Socialized Medicine as a New Deal issue* They overlook the ambiguity of the last clause; for socialization of industry was one of the express objectives of the New Deal. This campaign promise was more cleverly worded than most
MEDICAL REORGANIZATION IS NECESSARY
The interests of both the public and of the rank and file of the medical profession require a reorganization of medicine for the provision of superior medical care at a minimal cost compatible with quality. The majority of the medical profession clamor for such a plan.
Properly reorganized medicine would give the public medical service superior to the best available today, higher in caliber and involving a real interest of the physician in the well-being of his patient. All this should be made available to the public at a cost that is minimal while insuring maximal earnings to the physicians. This can only be attained by eliminating all middlemen, such as politicians and social workers, and by reducing costs of administration to an absolute minimum. All forms of Compulsory Health Insurance that ever have been adopted or proposed do exactly the reverse*