(The latest Episode of Rappoport Podcasts -- Episode 8 -- "My Early Years in Journalism: Finding my voice and a future; the strange trip and the heroes" -- is up. To listen, click here. To learn more about This Episode of Rappoport Podcasts, click here.)
~~~
I wrote this article in 2010. It’s truer now than it was then:
DECEMBER
5, 2010. About ten years ago, I decided that the medical cartel could
become the most dangerous of all power groups on the planet. I have not
changed my mind.
My decision is based on looking up the road 40 or 50 years and inferring what the picture will look like then.
It's
clear to me that drug companies, as they carve up markets and create
new markets, are eagerly anticipating the day when every human, from
cradle to grave—actually from inside the womb—has the status of Patient.
A
person is born a patient and dies a patient. And in between, he
receives 40 or 50 key diagnoses of physical and mental
diseases/disorders and takes prescribed drug and surgery treatments.
More
than that, though, he is stamped with the label, Patient, and he learns
that everyone is in the same boat. “We're all patients, this is a
medical world, and it's normal to be disabled in some way.”
People
become proud, yes, proud to be victims. They wear their diagnoses as
badges of honor. If you can't see this trend, you're not looking.
And universal health care insurance guarantees continuous treatment all the way along the line.
Every medical diagnosis becomes an excuse not to perform, not to excel, not to pursue big goals with large ambition.
Nowhere
in the search to gain recognition as a victim do circumstances conspire
so well as in the medical arena. It's perfect. There's no argument. The
doctor told you you have X disease. That's that. It's not
political. It's not agenda-driven. It's science. The proof is laid out
on a silver platter. You ARE a victim.
In the coming future, every move a person makes, every step he takes will come under the umbrella of the doctor.
And, again, the main supporter of this system will be the patient himself. That's how beautiful the marketing is.
In
case you've been living in a cave for the last 30 years, drug companies
and their researchers can invent any vague disease label they want
to—and then they can invent five or six sub-categories of the label—and
they can set out rules on how to diagnose each sliver of the label—and
of course the doctors will make these diagnoses and prescribe
drugs. It's marketing and “healing” at the same time.
Parents
who don't have a clue will submit their children to this
system—especially if the government pays for it—and the children will
grow up trained to think of themselves as patients/victims...and the
only contest will be: who has the most drastic diagnoses and
treatments? Who can most proudly wear the badge of honor as Patient?
“Last month, they had to remove my head for five minutes while they fixed my brain.”
“Wow. Well, they put me in a body cast for three months and I couldn't move, except for my left thumb.”
Cradle to grave.
If
you go back and read Huxley's Brave New World again, you'll notice the
factor of “patient pride.” It isn't just that the society is controlled,
the citizens are idealistic about it.
That's where the victim industry is heading.
Against it, we have, what?
A
little thing called individual freedom. Which includes the right to
refuse medical treatment, no matter who prescribes it under what
regulations.
People imagine that this right is some arcane matter best debated in medical-ethics journals. It's an obscure curio.
They couldn't be more wrong.
As
I've been writing, the ObamaCare plan contains the seeds of a future in
which, by law, the citizen will have less freedom to determine his own
medical fate. The walls will gradually close in.
The
Founders knew what they were talking about when they warned of the
incursion of government and the loss of freedom. At every crossroad,
since then, the issue of freedom has resurfaced as the unavoidable key
factor.
Well, we're at one of those crossroads again.
~~~
(The link to this article posted on my blog is here.)
(Follow me on Substack, Twitter, and Gab at @jonrappoport)
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