The “expert class” – the knowledgeable elites who are appointed by the Central Authority to establish the rules under which all of us in the great unwashed masses are to live our lives – will always (as a general proposition) tend to do great harm. Nowhere is this result more evident than in the policies promulgated in recent decades by the public health experts.

In each of the following three articles, DrRich deconstructs one of the major initiatives with which public health experts have assaulted the general public in recent years.  Each of these three initiatives was launched with great fanfare, displaying all the arrogant certainty exuded by any religious zealot, but sadly, was based on what to any objective observer was clearly insufficient data.  So the recent crusades against dietary fat, cholesterol, and salt each amounted to a great uncontrolled medical experiment, conducted on the entire population, in which each one of us was enrolled as an unsuspecting and involuntary research subject. The results of these massive experiments are just now coming to light.

Public health experts: stop them before they kill again!
Public Health Experts and The War Against Dietary Fat

Public Health Experts and The War Against Cholesterol

Public Health Experts and The War Against Salt

Death panels? We don’t need no stinkin’ death panels.

As President and sole member of Glorious Old Farts of America (GOFA), DrRich is acutely aware of the many ways our healthcare reformers – even prior to the birth throes of Obamacare – have subtly laid the groundwork for ushering us old timers to Our Great Reward in an efficient and cost-effective manner. Whether or not Obamacare has death panels, if you are an old fart you’d better pay attention to what our compassionate leaders have in store for us.

Can Advance Directives be Salvaged?

How To Sell Assisted Suicide

Ethicist-Assisted Suicide

On Killing the Elderly

Why People Think Obamacare Has Death Panels

The implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), an incredible feat of visionary medical science blended with cutting edge engineering, a device responsible for saving thousands of lives a year, has gone from being a prototypical American success story to a symbol of healthcare excess. Today the ICD is widely castigated by the press, the public, the insurers, the government, and even most doctors as the poster child for expensive and wasteful medical technology. Consequently, the ICD and the doctors who implant them have become fair game for whatever the Central Authority wishes to throw at them. DrRich has explored this fascinating phenomenon in this series of articles;

How ICD Implantation Guidelines Are Being Abused

The DOJ Investigation of ICD Implanters, and What It Means

How the ICD Became an Abomination

In early 2010, The Covert Rationing Blog and the ACP Advocate Blog were named finalists in the 2009 Medical Weblog Award Competition, in the category of Best Health Policy/Ethics Blog. DrRich, who has been a vocal critic of the “New Ethics” espoused by the ACP (and other professional organizations), took the opportunity to challenge the ACP to a public debate on medical ethics.

The ACP initially accepted the challenge, but quickly withdrew from the field. Nonetheless, several entertaining posts resulted. If nothing else, the following posts clearly outline the glaring deficiencies of the medical professions’ “New Ethics.”

Part 1 – DrRich Issues A Challenge To the ACP: Since the Weblog Awards have seen fit to throw us together in a formal “contest” about medical ethics, let’s take this opportunity (for the sake of the voters) to debate the following proposition: The New Ethics promoted by the ACP is harmful to patients, and destroys the ethical underpinning of the medical profession.

Part 2 – DrRich Renews the Challenge: While the ACP cogitated on whether their new Weblog Awards finalist status obligated them,  the mighty ACP, to respond to DrRich (best known as some guy in the blogosphere), DrRich revealed for them the Right Way to think about medical ethics.

Part 3 – The ACP Issues a Formal Response, and DrRich Rebuts: The Chair of the ACP Ethics, Professionalism and Human Rights Committee responds, and informs DrRich that he makes much ado about nothing. DrRich offers a devastating rebuttal that, in the end, proves to be dispositive.

Part 4 – Further Goading By DrRich: Attempting to entice the ACP to respond to his rebuttal, DrRich becomes just a touch less polite, by offering a commentary on the ACP’s astounding exhortation that physicians practice “parsimonious care.”

Part 5 – Advice to Primary Care Physicians Who Labor Under the “New Ethics:” Having demonstrated the fundamental bankruptcy of the New Ethics, and the inability (or unwillingness) of their professional organization to respond to a reasoned challenge, DrRich offers some advice to the very physicians who are expected to work under these untenable ethical precepts.

Part 6 – Taking the Loss Philosophically: While considering himself to have won the Great Medical Ethics Smack Down (by default, if nothing else), DrRich graciously congratulates the ACP for their astounding, stroke-of-midnight victory in the Weblog Awards.

It is easy to be puzzled by Progressives. They tend to be so kind, compassionate and well-meaning, and they try so assiduously to make everything turn out so well for everyone – and yet their works turn out to be so destructive. What’s up with that?  And why do Progressives so revere Diversity? And why is the utterance of certain words unforgivable, when there is no absolute good or evil? Why is religion anathema, and politics sacred? Why does individual liberty (and therefore the Great American Experiment) have to go? And why does the idea of eugenics keep popping up, like a lock of unruly hair?

If you are perplexed about such things, you have come to the right place. All is explained in DrRich’s Theory of Progressive Thought.

The obese, like the poor and the uninsured, will always be with us. And like the poor and the uninsured, the obese have served as a useful foil to healthcare reformers. But while their fellow foils are portrayed as sympathetic victims of hard-hearted right-wingers, the obese serve a different purpose. It it their role to illustrate for the rest of us how too much individual latitude invariably leads to bad choices (in this case, sloth, gluttony, greed and self-indulgence) which do grave harm to the collective; and which, for the good of the collective, justify (indeed, require) firmly (but kindly) applied limits on that individual freedom. In these articles, DrRich elaborates on the critical importance of demonizing the obese.

Defending the Demonization of Obesity, Part 1

Defending the Demonization of Obesity, Part 2

Don’t Sweat the Obesity Dividend

How Fat People Reduce Global Warming

Defending the Anti-Obesity Movement, Again

Contrary to common wisdom, the American health insurance industry did not oppose President Obama’s healthcare reforms. Far from it. Big health insurance was actually quite desperate for Obamacare to pass, and indeed took extraordinary steps, at critical times, to make sure that it did.

In this series of articles, DrRich reveals why the insurance industry supported Obamacare, how the industry supported Obamacare, and (most importantly) what that support means to Progressives who pine for a single-payer healthcare system, and to Conservatives who pine for the repeal of Obamacare.

Part I – Another Reason He Should Have Kept the Bust

Part II – Why the Health Insurance Industry Supported Obamacare

Part III – How the Health Insurance Industry Saved Obamacare

Part IV – What It Means That the Health Insurance Industry Saved Obamacare

Why should you still read DrRich’s book, Fixing American Healthcare, even though our leaders have just fixed American healthcare for us?

Four reasons.

First, DrRich humbly suggests, you may be insufficiently paranoid about American healthcare, whether it’s the style of healthcare we have now, or the New Style Healthcare that is rapidly coming our way thanks to healthcare reform. DrRich’s book will quickly remedy this deficiency.

DrRich, of course (wise beyond even his not-inconsiderable-years), understands that in certain cases, free-ranging paranoia may not be the healthiest of conditions. So, Fixing American Healthcare not only shows you who’s out to get you, and why, and how they propose to do it, but also shows you what you can do to protect yourself and your loved ones. For paranoia is not always so bad, so long as it’s constructively actionable.

Second, Fixing American Healthcare introduces you to the Grand Unification Theory of Healthcare (GUTH), a simple and elegant model that permits even the novice to understand the essence of any healthcare system you can imagine. The GUTH will come in very handy as our new healthcare system unfolds, rooted as it is in layer upon layer of bureaucratic obfuscation, specifically designed to keep us (the unwashed masses) from understanding what’s really going on. With the GUTH, you will understand our healthcare system even better than the ones who are supposed to be running it.

Third, when is the last time you read a book on healthcare policy that’s actually entertaining?

And fourth, Fixing American Healthcare is now available in Kindle format, and for the low price of only $4.99. So, whether you prefer receiving electronic enlightenment on your Kindle, PC, iPhone, Blackberry, Android, or iPAD, now you can read DrRich’s book in its new, pixellated format.

Save a life or two. Read Fixing American Healthcare.

Get it here.

*****

Here’s what the reviewers say about Fixing American Healthcare.

Now that President Obama’s healthcare reform has become the law of the land, it is time for us to prepare ourselves for the real fight. Namely, will individual Americans ultimately be restrained, by law or by subterfuge, from using their own resources to pay for their own medical care?  This notion is not as far-fetched as you might think. In this series of posts, DrRich explores this question, and demonstrates just how far we’ve already come in limiting the healthcare prerogatives of individuals.

Limiting Individual Prerogatives:

Part 1: The Real Fight Is Just Beginning

Part 2: Hillary Started It

Part 3: Breaking the Doctor-Patient Relationship

Part 4: Medicare Already Does It

Sure, nobody’s read the bill, and even if they had, what Nancy said is true: To find out what’s in the bill, they first had to pass it (so the bureaucrats could translate it into the hundreds of thousands of regulations that would finally determine its meaning). But there’s no need to wait for the regulators to sort it all out. DrRich can tell you what you need to know about our new healthcare system right now!

Healthcare Reform Explained – An Updated Guide For The Perplexed

PCP’s: Here’s All You Need To Know About Our New Healthcare System

Why the Health Insurers Saved the Day

The Individual Mandate Will Stand

The Audacity of Perpetuity

Some Powers of the Immutables