Fighting the Obesity Paradox With A New Obesity Creed

In Part I of this important and insightful meditation, we saw the many reasons why it is so critically important for anyone who supports Obamacare to stand foursquare behind the demonization of the obese.

But unfortunately, the vitally important anti-obesity platform of Obamacare is under assault. The fat-is-bad firmament – created by the concentrated exertions of the American College of Cardiology, the American Heart Association, the National Institutes of Health, the fashion and beauty industries, sundry weight-loss conglomerates, the popular media, and countless other engines of public opinion – is threatened by a growing body of evidence, created by a few misguided scientists, which suggests that obesity may not be quite as bad a thing as we are all led to believe. Like an expanding pool of molten rock hidden just beneath an apparently placid landscape, this expanding evidence poses a threat to the anti-obesity movement, and therefore to Obamacare. It must be dealt with.

And we need to deal with this threat now, while it is still relatively hidden, and before it bursts through to the surface where it would do much damage. Fortunately – in contrast to an actual volcano – we have the tools to tamp the threat down before it becomes manifest.

Before DrRich explains how this can be accomplished, let us take a brief look at some of that counterproductive evidence itself, to illustrate the seriousness of the problem. The evidence that not all obesity is bad for the health, when one begins to look for it, is disturbingly broad and consistent. DrRich will not attempt a comprehensive review of that evidence here, but instead will offer a brief and selective survey, just enough to impart a sense of the threat we are dealing with:

1) We must begin by noting that a substantial part of the “obesity epidemic” that has become manifest over the past decade can be accounted for by a change in the definition of obesity. When the CDC changed that definition in 1997, as many as 30 million Americans who had been of normal weight suddenly found themselves to be obese, or at least overweight, and all without gaining a pound. Enemies of the anti-obesity movement will not be above exploiting this inconvenient truth to their own ends.

2) In 2002, a report in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology examined almost 10,000 consecutive patients who had angioplasty and/or stenting for coronary artery disease, and found that those who were overweight or obese had fewer complications and a lower 1-year mortality than those who were thin or of normal weight. Several more recent studies claim to have shown the same thing.

3) A 2007 report in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that overweight people who were physically fit had a lower risk of death than normal-weight people who were sedentary.

4) A 2007 report by the National Bureau of Economic Research noted that while Americans were growing fatter, other changes in health behavior (such as reduced smoking and better management of cholesterol and hypertension) more than offset any increase in health risk posed by the population’s increase in obesity.

5) In 2009, a meta-analysis in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology concluded that while obesity itself increases the risk of heart disease, obese people who develop that heart disease have significantly better survival than thin or normal-weight people who develop the same kind of heart disease.

Some cardiologists have already termed this growing line of evidence, i.e., the general observation that at least in some situations obese cardiac patients fare better than thin ones, as “The Obesity Paradox.” Anyone who understands the importance of the anti-obesity movement to Obamacare should be alarmed.

Just on the face of it, we can see that while such evidence could easily be painted by our enemies as “a little fat is OK,” the opposite is actually true. As we all know, the chief aim of healthcare reform (despite all the palaver about providing universal access and improving quality) is to reduce costs. So what could be worse than a condition like obesity, which a) increases the incidence of heart disease, but b) once heart disease develops, prevents an early (and relatively inexpensive) demise. The actual incidence of a disease, of course, is pretty neutral to our goal of reducing healthcare costs. What is important is the expense and duration of the disease once it develops. (Indeed, to reduce long-term healthcare costs, a very prevalent disease that kills very quickly would be just about ideal.) Since few medical conditions are more expensive to manage chronically than heart disease, the best thing for our healthcare system and our society would be for those who develop heart disease to just go ahead and make a rapid departure from the scene. So in this light, what this recent evidence shows is that obesity – because it increases the incidence of non-fatal (i.e., chronic) heart disease – is much worse than we believed.

Beyond these obvious cost implications of the “Obesity Paradox” (the general idea that obesity may not be as dangerous as we have thought), is the much deeper problem that any new science that undermines the anti-obesity movement threatens to undermine a major pillar of Obamacare. DrRich described this important aspect of the anti-obesity movement at length in his prior post, but to summarize: Successful anathematization of the obese will establish an important precedent that is needed by our central authorities as they set out to restrict, control and tax the human behaviors they decide may cause an increase in healthcare expenditures (which is to say, nearly all other human behaviors). While establishing this precedent would certainly be possible with some group other than the obese, so much effort and time has been invested in dehumanizing fat people that it would be more than a shame to have to abandon that huge investment, and start all over to demonize some other subset of our population.

Thus, what is needed is a means of suppressing a more general awareness of the Obesity Paradox. It is fortunate, therefore, that we have at hand a very serviceable model for achieving this end.

That model, as DrRich has pointed out, is Man-Made Global Warming. By the simple expediency of issuing a formal declaration that Man-Made Global Warming is real and is too important to argue about, all further debate over global warming (whether it is occurring, and more importantly, whether it is man-made) has been cut off; those who persist in challenging it have been decreed as outliers, heretics and kooks. To so effectively stifle further scientific scrutiny, a great council of hand-picked environmental scientists was assembled to review the body of admitted evidence on global warming, and to formally divide that evidence into orthodoxy and heresy, and to declare the era of scientific revelation on the matter to be ended, and the science settled.  And while the extensive document that council produced itself contains much that would make one question the actual magnitude of global warming, and especially whether it is actually man-made, the Executive Summary (a sort of catechism produced for general consumption by the Global Warming hierarchy) nicely provides us with what we really need to know, and accordingly is the only part of the document that is ever reported or discussed publicly or in polite company. In this manner, and with the full cooperation of the media, Man-Made Global Warming has been rendered a done deal.

DrRich merely points out that if further scientific exposition and debate of global warming can be officially cut off, apparently (and remarkably) with the blessing of the scientists themselves, then the same can certainly be accomplished with obesity.

It would be a simple matter to assemble another great, Council-of-Nicaea-like body of respected and unassailable experts on obesity and preventive medicine – from government, academia, sympathetic consumer groups, and the numerous industries whose success depends on the existence of lots of fat people desperately wanting to lose weight – to ruminate over all the evidence, and produce their own sacred document declaring, once and for all, that obesity is very, very bad (and so is anyone who says otherwise); and further, that it is morally wrong to waste any more time or money studying whether obesity is a health hazard, and hereafter the only permissible research will be aimed at studying how to prevent and treat it.

That should do it.

Selling such an Obesity Creed should be even easier than selling global warming. Fat people, unlike the ostensibly rising seas and melting ice caps, are all around us, and are readily visible to everyone. Many times each day our encounters with them will induce real and visceral reactions – our pity over their personal health plights, our disgust over their manifest inability to exhibit any self control whatsoever, and our indignation that their obvious gluttony and sloth is costing us so much money. Obesity as a threat to humanity will be a much more concrete, much less abstract, tool for focusing a general righteous anger than global warming can ever be.

So how to combat the growing problem of the Obesity Paradox is not the issue – we can combat it by promulgating an Obesity Creed. The issue is to recognize that there is indeed a threat to the anti-obesity movement, that the threat comes in the form of an expanding body of scientific evidence, and that time is of the essence. If we are to have the Obamacare our leaders visualize for us, we need to recognize the threat and deal with it now, while it is still in its early stages, and before it enters the general public consciousness.

DrRich is very pleased to have been able to assist in this matter, and at this critical juncture, to help eliminate a grave threat to Obamacare. But heck, that’s what DrRich is here for.

Why Demonizing Obesity Is So Important

As regular readers will know, DrRich thinks President Obama’s healthcare reform is very bad for America, and in particular, that it threatens the Great American Experiment. At the same time, DrRich is fundamentally an optimist, and finds in Obamacare a thin thread by which some good might result. That thread goes like this:

In practice, Obamacare will become a government-run system of covert healthcare rationing. And DrRich is reasonably confident that in the government’s hands the covert rationing will become so amazingly ham-fisted and inept that even us Americans, distracted as we are by Lady GaGa, performance-enhancing drugs in baseball players, and Shark Week, will finally be forced to notice that there’s actually a whole lot of healthcare rationing going on. And once we are all forced to acknowledge the rationing, perhaps we will insist on trying to figure out how to do it as fairly, efficiently, and effectively as possible. In other words, DrRich clings to the hope that the Obamacare might end up being the cataclysm that precipitates a public discussion of healthcare rationing. And a public discussion of healthcare rationing is critical, since continuing to conduct the rationing covertly will destroy us.

It’s a slim thread, to be sure. But, especially in a new era of hope, one must embrace what hope one can.

Accordingly, DrRich feels obligated to do his part in supporting some of the main pillars of Obamacare (as odious as Obamacare itself may be), whenever they come under attack. And one of those pillars is the proposition that obesity is a scourge on our civilization, and for the good of the whole, those who are guilty of it must be reformed or stamped out.

Obesity, we are assured, is a main cause of heart disease, hypertension, stroke, arthritis, diabetes, (and even, some insist, cancer), and so is largely responsible for the runaway cost of our healthcare. This simple fact alone allows us to – indeed, demands that we – use every public and private intervention at our disposal to fight this great scourge.

The fact of publicly funded healthcare permits us to say to the obese: “Your unsightly obesity is no longer a matter of your individual choice; rather, it is now placed squarely within the realm of legitimate public concern. Since everyone else has to pay for your heart attacks and knee replacements, all those donuts and double cheeseburgers you insist on shoveling into your mouth are no longer your business. All your protestations to the effect that you can’t help it are revealed by simple math (i.e., calories gained = calories consumed minus calories burned) to be sad prevarications. Indeed that same simple formula reveals the true cause of obesity – gluttony and sloth. Like other heretics of an earlier time, you deserve no sympathy nor special considerations, but only a firm – though ultimately compassionate – hand to push you toward the right path, or alternately, toward the just punishment you have brought upon yourselves.”

So clearly, the obese are now become fair game for whatever manipulations our government can devise to cause them to either lose weight, or pay for their sins. The authorities can begin with simple maneuvers – taxing soft drinks and Twinkies, and whatever other foodstuffs they (in their wisdom) deem to be illegitimate sources of calories – but the sky’s the limit. For instance, under the undeniable proposition that it costs more energy to move a fat person from point A to point B, whatever the mode of transportation, the obese could be subjected to a special carbon tax, based on their BMI. The periodic mandatory “weigh-ins” such a tax would require would serve the useful purpose of public humiliation, an important incentive to weight loss.

Further humiliations could be visited upon the fat by designating special isolated areas in the workplace (ideally, an area fully exposed to the elements) for fat people to consume their calories. This latter strategy, of course, is derived from the same restrictions placed on smokers, and can be legitimized by the same sort of logic. That is, the authorities can invoke the prospect of second-hand obesity to induce fear and loathing of the fat, and cause them to become socially isolated. (The “scientific” conclusion that obesity is contagious, i.e., that those who associate with the obese are more likely to become obese themselves, has been proffered by academics employing the same kind of statistical legerdemain used to blame global warming on fat people. It appears to DrRich that obesity has now become so toxic that any paper submitted to medical journals offering a new reason to despise the fat – no matter how absurd – will be cheerfully accepted by the editors, and published with fanfare. These editors, one can only presume, must also be great supporters of Obamacare.) And finally, it goes without saying that the ultimate censure would be simply to withhold healthcare services for medical problems which can be associated with having allowed oneself to become too fat – a strategy that has already been employed by the British healthcare system, which we are urged by Dr. Berwick to employ as a model.

Demonizing the obese and subjecting them to such restrictions, of course, carries with it implications that go far beyond merely inducing the obese to lose weight or causing them to pay more in taxes. It sets an important precedent that will finally allow our central authorities to restrict, control and tax virtually any human behavior they can claim may lead to an increased risk of healthcare expenditures. Such behaviors may include (in addition to obvious things like smoking and alcohol consumption), one’s choice of occupation, participation in sports, hobbies, hours spent or miles traveled on the highways, etc. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of any choice one makes in daily living that does not, in some manner, impact on one’s likelihood of requiring medical services.

Furthermore, successfully demonizing the obese will establish that our society may, whenever it needs to, discriminate against the lower economic classes – which will prove a useful tool when setting future behavioral standards to reduce healthcare spending. (Obesity, rather than starvation, is the chief nutritional problem of the poor in America. This is the the direct result of plentiful and cheap foods that are often loaded with empty calories. Making such foods more expensive – by imposing punitive taxes on them – will disproportionately affect the poor, who still won’t be able to afford the highly nutritious stuff, especially since the price of that good stuff will go much higher as a result. Rendering it permissible to inflict such pain on the poor, in the name of the greater good, will be an immeasurably important precedent to establish.)

In terms of providing strategies for controlling healthcare costs, it is clear that our response to obesity is key. Fighting obesity is a vital pillar of Obamacare.

Accordingly, DrRich is very sorry to report that this anti-obesity pillar may not be nearly as robust as we might hope. Certain clueless medical researchers – ones who have apparently not received the official memo – have been reporting that obesity might not be quite as bad a thing as we have all been saying. So, in the spirit of advancing Obamacare, DrRich will address in his next post some of this counterproductive new research on obesity, and will show how it can be marginalized.

DrRich has pointed out several times that it is very important to our new healthcare system, as a matter of principle, to be able to discriminate against the obese.

The obese are being carefully groomed as a prototype, as a group whose characteristics (ostensibly, their lack of self-discipline, or their sloth, or their selfishness, or whatever other characteristics we can attribute to them to explain how their unsightly enormity differentiates them from us), will justify “special treatment” in order to serve the overriding good of the whole.

The obese are a useful target for two reasons. First, their sins against humanity are painfully obvious just by looking at them, so it is impossible for them to escape public scorn by blending in to the population, unlike some less obvious sinners such as (say) closet smokers, or pedophiles. And second, since true morbid obesity almost always has a strong genetic component, successfully demonizing the obese eventually will open the door to the demonization of individuals with any one of a host of other genetically mediated medical conditions.

Readers who wonder why this is a big deal need to go back and study the original Progressives, for whom some form of genetic purification was an indispensable step toward achieving societal perfection. This was true not only for notorious eugenicists such as Woodrow Wilson, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Margaret Sanger, but also for the kinder, gentler Progressives we generally revere even today, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and even Mohandas Gandhi.

This sort of thinking fell out of vogue, for obvious reasons, after World War II. So it is no longer cool to talk openly about genetic cleansing.

But discriminating against people who have genetic health disorders (in the name of achieving an optimally efficient healthcare system for the purpose of cost saving) would be a start. And the obese have been selected as the most acceptable prototype for such treatment.

In this light, a recent article in the Public Library of Science Medicine Journal has created something of a problem for the anti-obesity movement. This article compared the lifetime cost of healthcare (beginning at age 20) for obese individuals and for smokers to the lifetime cost for non-smokers who maintained a healthy weight. Naturally, the study concludes that the healthy individuals can expect to live longer than the obese and the smokers (84 years vs. 80 and 77 years, respectively). However, the healthy young people will consume $400,000 in lifetime healthcare costs, vs. only $365,000 for fat people and $321,000 for smokers. (The cost savings in the obese and the smokers arise from their relatively premature deaths.) Therefore, healthy people, over their lifetime, are a bigger drain on the healthcare system than the obese and the smokers.

The reason this study presents a problem  is that it appears to contradict a central axiom of our present program. Specifically, it places in some peril our deeply held conviction that the obesity epidemic is one of the major threats to the stability of our healthcare system.

The added costs which the obesity epidemic poses to our healthcare system has become a touchstone, to the extent that it has become acceptable even in polite circles to openly discriminate against, if not overtly disdain and humiliate, the obese. Mississippi is considering legislation to prevent the obese from eating in restaurants. And in Britain, whose healthcare system has been held up as a model for Americans, doctors themselves are saying that obese patients should be barred from receiving medical services. (Though, in defense of his physician colleagues, DrRich wishes to point out that these same medical humanitarians are also calling for the withholding of medical care from the elderly and smokers – so perhaps they are not being unusually unkind to the fat.)

In light of this, what are we to do with this new study which says that obesity saves money for the healthcare system? Do we reverse course, and embrace this “obesity dividend?” Do we encourage supersizing, and, far from refusing to serve them, offer the overweight free second portions? Do we give them deeply discounted heavy-duty suspensions? Better yet, do we give away free Marlboro starter packs to the fat? (Just think how much money we’d save with obese smokers.)

Thankfully, no.

DrRich has pointed out innumerable times the absurdities we find ourselves promoting when the chief purpose of the healthcare system becomes avoiding costs rather than maximizing health, that is, when its chief job is covert rationing. It is therefore gratifying to say that this is one of those cases where we don’t have to engage in such absurdities. Let’s be plain about it: We don’t need to reevaluate our current vilification of obesity (and smoking) just because people who have these conditions may save us money in the long term.

The reason? We don’t care about the long term.

Who cares that, in 50 or 60 years, today’s healthy 20-year-olds are going to cost us a lot of money? They’re likely to be entirely free to our healthcare system for at least several decades. In contrast, today’s obese and today’s smokers, what with their chronic diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, joint replacements, strokes, lung disease, &c., are costing us a lot of money right now.

If we actually cared about the long term, we’d be doing something about the Social Security and Medicare entitlements we’ve already signed up for, which in a little more than 20 years will require confiscating more than 50% of each American paycheck, just in payroll deductions. (Never mind income tax.) Heck, just looking at their pay stubs will probably cause most of today’s healthy 20-year-olds to die of apoplexy by the time they’re 40. In any case, the entitlements we’re obligated to provide will threaten societal disintegration long before today’s healthy young adults ever need elder care. Consoling yourself with the idea of projected long-term savings when you’re facing such a fiscal catastrophe is like consoling yourself with the idea of beautiful spring alpine flowers when you’re directly in the path of an onrushing avalanche. Projected long-term savings are completely irrelevant.

The obesity dividend is just smoke, and can be safely ignored. For the greater good of our social welfare, we’re far better off doing what we’re doing today – castigating and humiliating the obese into right actions, and if that fails, then (following the example provided by the British healthcare system which Dr. Berwick and others urge us to use as a model) discriminating against them when they need healthcare. Once we’ve established this useful prototype, we can apply it to whatever additional groups we can identify as targets of our collective indignation.

Whatever it takes to avoid confronting the rationing issue head on.

When DrRich was a little tyke, he always loved it when Uncle Harry came to visit. Uncle Harry was a large, rotund man with a ready smile and a jolly laugh, who was genuinely delighted to spend hours entertaining little DrRich and all the other children with his jokes, stories, magic tricks, and samples from the large stash of candies he always kept in his coat pockets. We all loved Uncle Harry.

But we were deceived.

Little did DrRich know, in his youthful innocence, that far from being the cheerful and beloved amateur prestidigitator delighting us with his his egg trick, Uncle Harry was actually a menace. For Uncle Harry was obese.

We now know, of course, that obese people, through their gluttony, sloth and lack of self-control, are causing untold harm to our society. They are unpleasant to sit next to on buses and airplanes. They use more than their rightful share of healthcare resources. They snore. They cause excessive tire wear (and if they sit in the same seat all the time, the tire wear will be asymmetrical, probably leading to an increase in automobile accidents).

And now, thanks to a recently published academic article, we know that the obese are largely responsible for global warming.

That global warming is taking place, and that it is being produced by mankind, of course, is a settled issue. DrRich is led to understand that a great council of hand-picked environmental scientists, taking a lesson from the Council of Nicaea, has met and has decreed it to be so. The entire body of scientific evidence has been formally considered, and like the Holy Scripture has been carefully locked down into its final form, and has been divided into orthodoxy (the study of which is holy) and heresy (the study of which leads to perdition). And having accomplished this task, the scientific community will hereafter countenance no dissension on the matter, and will admit no further debate or even any further data (unless it is corroborative data). For this is how science is supposed to work, at least for matters as critically important as global warming.

DrRich calls it Environmental Scholasticism, and believes it is about time we returned to a system of thought that was good enough for some pretty important Saints. The notion that scientific viewpoints should never be considered “closed,” and should always be open to challenge as new evidence and new ideas come to light, is a relatively recent invention initiated by the likes of Galileo and Newton, and has led to nothing but trouble (such as, for instance, global warming).

In any case, now that we know once and for all that global warming is man-made, it behooves us to figure out which men (and women) are causing it. And now, according to two eminent scholars at the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, we know that among the chief culprits are the fat. That is, fat people, through the office of their obesity itself, are responsible for a significant degree of the carbon emissions that are unarguably (and officially) destroying our planet.

This fact, heralded by radio and newspaper reports proclaiming, “Fatties Cause Global Warming,” was revealed in a “scientific” paper written by Professors Edwards and Roberts and published by the prestigious Oxford Press in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

The paper really ought to be perused directly to appreciate the elevated level of scholasticism employed by the authors, which would make even Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus themselves sit up and take notice. For this paper, which indicts a whole class of individuals with the supreme crime of global warming, a crime whose disastrous effect on our planet eventually will make the atrocities perpetrated by even Hitler and Stalin seem mere trifles in comparison, reaches its conclusions without ever offering even one tiny glimmer of actual data or evidence.

Rather, the authors rely (as true scholastics must) on the approved body of scientific work, choosing from that body an array of assumptions based on bits of sanctified data from physiology here (e.g., Basal Metabolic Rate = 11.5 X body weight in KG + 873kcal), and behavioral science there (e.g., that the average daily activities of humans consists of 7 hours sleeping, 7 hours of office work, 4 hours of light home activities, 4 hours sitting, 1 hour standing, 30 min of driving and 30 min of walking at 5 km/h), then applying these bits to an incredible chain of assumptions and estimations, to demonstrate that the negative impact of the obese on our society goes far beyond what we currently think. Indeed, through such machinations it can be concluded that the obese are melting the ice caps, killing polar bears, flooding the seacoasts, and turning our farmland, forests and fields into hot, dry, desert.

Anyone with a cheap telescope can conclude from all this that Martians, when they existed, must have been really fat.

This information, of course, will come in very handy when we are forced at last to reduce our healthcare costs, and we find we need somebody to blame. We can already discriminate against smokers with a clear conscience. And now discriminating against the obese can be accomplished not only with a clear conscience, but with a sense of duty. For, far from merely costing the healthcare system a lot of money, they are killing us all and ruining our planet.

Indeed, DrRich himself was sharpening his pitchfork, when a thought occurred to him.

The paper in the International Journal of Epidemiology comports to the classical scholastic practice of “lectio,” whereby a learned person expounds on a certain interpretation of the approved texts, and allows no dissension or questioning. But scholasticism also offers a process for “disputatio,” whereby alternative interpretations of the approved texts are permitted to be offered, and the two viewpoints are then subjected to logical analysis through which the truth is determined. (Though in classical scholasticism, the “truth” is ultimately determined by the scholar who delivered the original lectio, and the disputant is put in his/her place.*)

So in the spirit of Environmental Scholasticism (but for the ultimate purpose of discovering whether the healthcare system ought to cure, ignore or euthanize the obese), DrRich would like to propose an alternative interpretation of the argument that the obese are causing global warming. That is, he will offer a disputation.

The logic of the two eminent scholars Edwards and Roberts, once you wade through the incredible morass of scientific-sounding language they have produced, essentially rests on two arguments. First, that the obese require more food energy for their basal metabolic requirements, and second, that because they are so fat they travel in cars (and very big cars at that) much more than normal people do. For these two reasons the obese produce way more carbon emissions than they are supposed to. The authors go on to calculate the excess carbon emissions produced by the obese via the aforesaid impressive chain of assumptions and estimations, and the magnitude of that excess shows us plainly that the fat are largely to blame for global warming.

This is when it occurred to DrRich that both of the basic arguments of Professors Edwards and Roberts can be easily countered, well within the bounds of the scholastic arts, using only the approved texts and without introducing any new (which is to say, heretical) data.

So, to their lectio, DrRich advances this disputation:

First, DrRich asserts that while the basal metabolic rates of the fat are indeed higher than those of the thin, one reason the thin are thin is that their non-basal metabolism is high. That is, often they habitually engage in exercise, even running marathons and triathalons, which burns many calories and produces much CO2. Scientific studies have shown that the obese tend to be still, serene, relatively inanimate. On the other hand thin people are fidgety, they pace about, wave their hands, bounce their legs, and excrete much CO2 through largely habitual and non-useful activity. Perhaps we should punish the calorie-burning thin rather than the fat. At least when the obese burn calories they are generally doing something useful.

Second, while thin people do ambulate more than the obese (indeed, this is DrRich’s first point), the assumption that the obese must make up that mileage by driving cars is entirely ridiculous. The thin actually drive far more than the obese, because they have places to go and things to do, and they’re in a hurry to get there and do it. In contrast the obese are efficient in their movements, they preserve their energy. Thus, they do not drive to the grocery for a pint of milk on a whim. They plan their trips carefully, and shop for the entire week with one trip. There is no evidence that the obese require more support from internal combustion engines than do the thin, and simple observation in fact suggests the opposite.

DrRich could, with some effort, produce a paper just as scientific-sounding as that of the Professors to “prove” his points, but will not do so here. Instead, he will just state his points as bald assertions – which (despite all the fancy math they attached to it) is just what his opponents have done.

DrRich maintains that his two assertions – which entirely counterbalance those of his opponents – make his argument equally compelling to theirs. So thus far we have a draw. But DrRich’s third assertion, which follows, wins the day.

To wit: The obese are unarguably sequestering carbon.

Storing fat, in fact, is simply a relatively efficient way to store carbon. The obese consume massive amounts of carbon in the form of food, and then they fail to burn it off (unlike thin people, who convert their food to CO2 immediately through their habitually wasteful activities). Instead, the obese store their carbon intake in massive reservoirs of fatty tissue, taking it out of circulation forever, and removing it from the carbon cycle which (we find) is so fatally damaging to the earth. Indeed (at least according to the zero-sum crowd for whom redistribution is invariably the answer to all problems), the more food consumed by the obese, the less food remains available for the thin people who would just go ahead and metabolize it, with all their jogging and whatnot, excreting lots of excess CO2 in the process.

When we finally institute our cap-and-trade economy, the obese should get a tax break based on their weight.

Carbon sequestration, of course, is one of the holy grails for environmentalists. Lots of methods for sequestration have been proposed, but none seem particularly practical. One method that has been considered is called “Biomass Burial,” in which we would take some form of biomass (plants have been the main source proposed) and bury it under the earth. The carbon from the buried biomass will stay in the ground, and will not contribute to global warming, at least not for a long time. (This is how fossil fuels were formed in the first place.)

As long as we insist that fat people are buried (preferably after they die), and make cremation of the obese illegal, then putting the obese into the ground will constitute the much-sought biomass burial. When we bury deceased fat people, it is plain to see that we are removing tons and tons of carbon from the carbon cycle and thus from the atmosphere, and instead sequestering it in the ground. It brings a tear to DrRich’s eye to imagine that his king-sized Uncle Harry, gone now for the better part of three decades, by virtue of all that carbon he took with him under the earth continues to make the world a better place for all us former kids he used to delight with his card tricks and his stupid jokes.

And finally, this happy conclusion at which we have arrived – that the obese actually reduce global warming – at last informs those of us who are interested in healthcare how we ought to behave toward the obese. As long as fat people are maintaining (or better yet adding to) their weight – that is, as long as they continue to remove large amounts of carbon from circulation – we should encourage their continued good health. If, however, they start exercising or in some other fashion begin to burn off their large carbon deposits, then of course we might logically withhold medical care from them, or even encourage euthanasia.

But please, for the love of our precious planet and for the sake of our polar bear citizens, let us not discriminate against the obese, or discourage them from their important work.

*This, of course is where Martin Luther went wrong. The 95 Theses he nailed to the church door at Wittenberg was essentially an offer to engage in a classical scholastic “disputatio.” He was merely inviting a debate, like any other scholastic debate, and nothing more. The clergy, however, proved a bit too easily offended, and Luther proved a bit too tetchy, and the intended academic exercise turned into 300-years of bloodshed. DrRich sincerely hopes to avoid such a result here.

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Now, read the whole story.

DrRich explains it all in, Fixing American Healthcare – Wonkonians, Gekkonians and the Grand Unification Theory of Healthcare.

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This week, the Archives of Internal Medicine published four (four!) articles assaulting the legitimacy and the importance of the JUPITER trial, a landmark clinical study published in 2008, which showed that certain apparently healthy patients with normal cholesterol levels had markedly improved cardiovascular outcomes when taking a statin drug.

Superficially, at least, the JUPITER study appears to have been pretty straightforward. Nearly 18,000 men and women from 26 countries who had “normal” cholesterol levels but elevated C-reactive protein (CRP) levels were randomized to receive either the statin drug Crestor, or a placebo. CRP is a non-specific marker of inflammation, and an increased CRP blood level is thought to represent inflammation within the blood vessels, and is a known risk factor for heart attack and stroke. The study was stopped after a little less than two years, when the study’s independent Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) determined that it would be unethical to continue. For, at that point, individuals taking the statin had a 20% reduction in overall mortality, a dramatic reduction in heart attacks, a 50% reduction in stroke, and a 40% reduction in venous thrombosis and pulmonary embolism. All these findings were highly statistically significant.

This study is noteworthy because it is the first large randomized trial to show that taking a statin can markedly reduce the incidence of some very nasty cardiovascular outcomes in people who are considered to have “normal” cholesterol levels. (Notably, typical LDL cholesterol levels among primitive hunting/gathering cultures is around 50 mg/dL, instead of the 100 – 120 mg/dL we consider to be normal. These primitive folks have an extremely low incidence of cardiovascular disease, so maybe humans’ optimal cholesterol level is much lower than we now think. On the other hand, the low risk of cardiovascular disease among hunters/gatherers may instead be related to the fact that many of them are consumed by various species of carnivores before they’re 30.)

To be sure, the JUPITER trial was far from perfect. Because of its design, it could not (and did not) tell us whether the beneficial outcome is specific to Crestor, or is a class effect of all statins (which seems very likely). It did not tell us whether reducing CRP levels is itself beneficial, or even whether using CRP as a screening tool is actually helpful. (The people enrolled in this trial tended to have several other risk factors, such as being overweight, having metabolic syndrome, and smoking, and it is not clear how much additional risk elevated CRP levels really added in this population.) And this trial did not tell us the risks of lifelong, or even very long-term, Crestor therapy.

But JUPITER did tell us something that is very useful to know, and with a very high degree of statistical surety: Giving Crestor to patients similar to the ones enrolled in this study can be expected to result in significantly and substantially improved cardiovascular outcomes, and in a relatively short period of time.

If medicine were practiced the way it ought to be – where the doctor takes the available evidence, as imperfect as it always is, and applies it to each of her individual patients – then the incompleteness of answers from the JUPITER trial would present no special problems. After all, doctors never have all the answers when they help patients make decisions. So, in this case the doctor would discuss the pros and cons of statin therapy – the risks, the potential benefits, and all the quite important unknowns – and place the decision in the perspective of what might be gained if the patient instead took pains to control their weight, exercise, diet, smoking, etc. At the end of the day, some patients would insist on avoiding drug therapy at all costs; others would insist on Crestor and nothing else; yet others would choose to try a much cheaper generic statin; and some would even opt (believe it or not) for a trial of lifestyle changes before deciding on statin therapy. In other words, there is a range of reasonable options given the limitations of our knowledge, as there often is in clinical medicine. As time goes by, more scientific evidence is often brought to bear and clinical decisions can become more informed. But whatever the state of the evidence, doctors and patients can generally get by without violating too severely any ethical or medical precepts that would cause objective and neutral observers to complain very much.

But in recent years, and especially now, as we bravely embark on our new healthcare system, this is not how doctors will practice medicine. Instead, they will practice medicine by guidelines. These guidelines (which, in modern medical parlance, is a euphemism for “directives”) are to be handed down from panels of experts, identified and assembled by members of the executive branch of the federal government.

And this makes the stakes very high when it comes to a clinical trial like JUPITER. For guidelines do not permit a range of actions tailored to fit individual patients (consistent with the uncertainties inherent in the results of any clinical trial). Instead, guidelines will seek to take one of two possible positions. That is, under a paradigm of medicine-by-guidelines, the results of clinical trials generally cannot be permitted to remain imperfect or nuanced or subject to individual application, but must be resolved by a central panel of government-issue experts into a binary system – yes (do it) or no (don’t do it). In the case of JUPITER, the guidelines must decide whether or not to recommend Crestor to patients like the ones enrolled in the study, at a potential cost of several billion dollars a year. It should be obvious that the answer which would be more pleasant to the ends of the central authority, and  by a large margin, would be: No, don’t adopt the JUPITER results into clinical practice.

However, the expert panels which are called for by our new healthcare legislation have not been formulated yet, and we are still operating under the “old” rules. So, still subject to all the duress which is created by unfortunately-resolved clinical trials like this one, the FDA, somewhat reluctantly, approved the use of Crestor for JUPITER-like patients in late 2009. That approval, of course, is subject to review by the new expert panels, whenever they are assembled.

This, DrRich submits for your consideration, is likely what instigated the almost violently anti-JUPITER issue of the Archives this week. DrRich theorizes that what we’ve got here is a bunch of wannabe federally-sanctioned experts, auditioning for positions on the expert panels. What better way to get the Fed’s attention than to let them know that you are of the appropriate frame of mind to assiduously seek out scientific-sounding arguments to discount the straightforward and compelling, but fiscally unfortunate, results of a well-known clinical trial?

Of the four papers appearing in this week’s Archives, three are more-or-less legitimate academic articles that make reasonable points, but do no harm to the main result of JUPITER. The fourth is a straightforward polemic, which has no place in a peer-reviewed medical journal, and whose very presence, DrRich believes, very strongly suggests that the editors of the Archives themselves must be auditioning for the Fed’s expert panel.

So as not to bore his readers any more than necessary, DrRich will make short work of the three reasonably legitimate articles in this issue. One pointed out that JUPITER did not tease out the real importance of CRP levels, or whether lowering those levels is useful. This is true, but that fact does not touch the main conclusion of JUPITER. Another article was a meta-analysis which incorporated several other primary prevention trials using statins, and concluded that there is no overall benefit to statins in primary prevention patients. Aside from the usual problems inherent in meta-analyses, a) the JUPITER study looked at a specific population of primary prevention patients not addressed by these other studies, and b) since JUPITER is the first study to show a benefit in using statins for primary prevention, it is a foregone conclusion that if you assemble enough of the previous, negative studies and lump them together with JUPITER in a meta-analysis, you will be able to dilute the results of JUPITER sufficiently to achieve an overall negative result. Actually doing such a meta-analysis, then, is merely an exercise in math, not in revelation.

The third article criticized the JUPITER DSMB for stopping the trial earlier than originally planned. The DSMB, however, had no real choice in the matter – ethically or legally – given the striking statistical significance of the benefit seen with Crestor. When a patient signs an informed consent agreement to participate in a clinical trial, part of that “contract,” a part required by law, is the statement to the effect that if information comes to light during the course of the study that might impact a patient’s willingness to continue participating, that information must be made available. The fact that the Crestor branch of the study was found to have markedly improved survival, fewer strokes and heart attacks, etc., than the placebo branch, clearly constitutes such information. Stopping the study when they did was not “premature;” continuing the study would have been illegitimate. This is why independent DSMBs exist in the first place – to protect the rights and welfare of the research subjects under the fiduciary agreement that comprises informed consent.

The fourth article is more striking (and more fun) than the other three. Interestingly, it is categorized by the Archives as an “Original Investigation,” despite the fact that it describes no investigation of any kind whatsoever – original or derivative. It merely revisits the data from JUPITER (in a spectacularly biased manner), and offers a spate of ad hominem attacks, alleging bias to the point of corruption, without any supporting evidence, against JUPITER’s sponsor, its investigators, and most astoundingly, the chair of the DSMB (who is a well known and highly respected figure, especially known and revered for his complete objectivity and lack of bias). If such an article has any place at all in a peer-reviewed medical journal – which DrRich doubts – it ought to be clearly labeled as an opinion piece, and not as a piece of original research. Whatever it may be, it’s not that.

But the most delicious aspect of this fourth article is that two of its authors, including its lead author, are members of a fringe medical group known as The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics (THINCS), whose stated mission is to “oppose” the notion that high cholesterol and animal fat play a role in cardiovascular disease. Members of THINCS also take an extraordinarily strong position opposing statins for any clinical use whatsoever. (One might actually assume that, since JUPITER shows that cardiovascular outcomes can be improved by statins in people with normal cholesterol levels, the THINCS would embrace the study as evidence that perhaps cholesterol is not as important as it’s cracked up to be. But apparently, this argument is completely negated by the fact that statins were the vehicle for making it. Many in the anti-statin crowd would object to statins even if they were proven to cure heart disease, cancer, baldness, and obesity AND produced fine and durable erections upon demand.)

The best part of all this is that the astounding anti-cholesterol, anti-statin bias of the authors was not disclosed in their article – whose main thrust, again, was to criticize the disclosed biases of the JUPITER investigators.

The excellent Pharmalot blog noted this irony, and contacted Rita Redberg (editor of the Archives) and Michel de Lorgeril (THINCS-master and prime author of the fourth article) to ask them why the association with THINCS was not disclosed.

Redberg:

“I’m not clear this is an undisclosed conflict. The policy mentions a personal relationship that could influence one’s work. I think that could be a big stretch. My initial impression is the group has an intellectual message, but doesn’t fit as a personal relationship that could effect the authors’ work.”

de Lorgeril:

“[While it is] very important to disclose financial [emphasis DrRich's] conflicts of interest that can influence our way of working and thinking about cholesterol and statins, there is so far no obligation to provide a CV each time we publish any thing…May I underline the fact that being a member of THINCS – not a group of terrorists, mainly a club of very kind retired scientists with whom I have interesting and open discussion – is not a conflict of interest?”

DrRich may be old fashioned, but he thinks that being a member of an “out there” group like THINCS, which appears to advance selected and distorted data on its website aimed at furthering its stated mission of “opposing” (not investigating or questioning) the cholesterol hypothesis and the use of statins, might make one prone to a bit of bias when writing a broadside critiquing a study like JUPITER, and loudly criticizing anyone associated with that study for their bias. This sort of bias (demonstrably rooted in a willingness to select/ignore/distort data in order to make a preconceived point) is likely to be as strong as any that might accompany, for instance, receiving a stipend from a statin company for participating in clinical research. Membership in THINCS may not preclude one from writing such an article, but DrRich thinks the association at least ought to be disclosed, just as financial relationships must be disclosed.

DrRich has a hard time explaining how this can happen with a prestigious medical journal like the Archives. But like Sherlock Holmes says, when you have eliminated the impossible (such as, the idea that this article deserved to be published in its current form), whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

And this is why DrRich can only conclude that several of the authors appearing in this week’s issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, along with its editor, are in the mode of ingratiating themselves to the sundry officials and czars within the Obama administration who will be assembling the expert medical panels, those panels which will be making the momentous decisions that will determine the flow of hundreds of billions of dollars, and (forgive me) of life and death.

We wish them the best of luck in their audition, and will be monitoring the memberships of the new panels with interest, to see if any of our new friends are ultimately successful.

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DrRich critiques more arguments for withholding Crestor here.

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_Sources:

_{de Lorgeril M, Salen P, Abramson J, et al. Cholesterol lowering, cardiovascular diseases, and the rosuvastatin-JUPITER controversy. A critical reappraisal. Arch Intern Med. 2010; 170:1032-1036.}

_{Kaul S, Morrissey RP, Diamond GA. By Jove! What is a clinician to make of JUPITER? Arch Intern Med. 2010; 170:1073-1077.}

_{Ray KK, Seshasai SRK, Erqou S, et al. Statins and all-cause mortality in high-risk primary prevention. A meta-analysis of 11 randomized controlled trials involving 65 229 participants. Arch Intern Med. 2010; 170:1024-1031.}

_{Green L A. Cholesterol-lowering therapy for primary prevention. Still much we don’t know. Arch Intern Med. 2010; 170:1007-1008.}

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Now, read the whole story.

DrRich explains it all in, Fixing American Healthcare – Wonkonians, Gekkonians and the Grand Unification Theory of Healthcare.

Now on Kindle!

Podcast:

The other day, President Obama gave a commencement speech in which he pointed out one of the downsides of living in a new age of electronic communication:

“Meanwhile, you’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t rank all that high on the truth meter. . . .[I]nformation becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment. All of this is not only putting new pressures on you; it is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy.”

In other words, too much information can be bad (since it can be untruthful, and places pressure on our country and democracy). Clearly implied in this statement is the idea that something ought to be done about all that extraneous information out there. Presumably, disinterested truth-tellers in our unbiased government bureaucracies ought to sort out fact from fiction, and take the necessary steps to get rid of the fiction. This is not the first time the White House has offered to monitor the utterings of wrong-thinking Americans, and to do what is needed to correct their misapprehensions. Rather, it is simply another reinforcement of a consistent theme under our current administration.

We had best take it seriously.

And so, it is with some reluctance that DrRich finds it necessary at this time to perform an intervention. He does so with the kindest of motives, namely, to protect two people he greatly admires from finding themselves on the wrong side of a Federal disinformation bust.

DrRich speaks, of course, of Dr. Roy Poses and his colleague MedInformaticsMD (who had best not rely on an easily-decoded pseudonym for protection), two of the principle authors of the excellent Health Care Renewal blog. Both of these highly respected physicians and bloggers have posted articles this week which are critical of individuals who have spoken out against obese Americans.

Dr. Poses started it, pointing out that certain high-profile executives who have made recent public statements decrying obesity, and ridiculing (and offering to discriminate against) the obese, are pontificating on an issue about which they have no professional expertise.

MedInformaticsMD upped the ante by referring to these same executives as obesity bigots, and pointing out (rather colorfully) that such a person “talks stupidly and discriminatorily out of his anal orifice about how much people put in the other end of their GI tracts.”

Now, DrRich does not know how likely it is that Federal truth-tellers will stumble across these offensive posts. Given the stuff DrRich himself has said about healthcare reform and our government, he hopes it is unlikely indeed.

But Gentlemen of the HCR blog! Whereas DrRich habitually employs enough irony in his writings that most stone-witted bureaucrats (he hopes!) will have trouble discerning what he actually thinks, your prose is uncomfortably straightforward, and leaves no room for interpretation. If they find it, you are screwed.

And so, DrRich begs you to allow him an opportunity to set you straight on American obesity, and the importance of the anti-obesity movement.

To understand this, one must understand the underlying premise: Under any soup-to-nuts universal healthcare system (which, DrRich submits, is the ultimate goal), our central authorities, in the name of controlling costs, have got to be able to restrict, control and tax virtually any human behavior they can claim may lead to an increased risk of healthcare expenditures – which, really, encompasses virtually any human behavior you can think of.

Such power on the part of our central authorities will feel “unnatural” to many if not most Americans, if not developed judiciously. And so, it makes sense to develop such power – to set precedents which, once set, will be impossible to stop – by demonizing the obese, and making it not only OK, but imperative, for the government to control their unutterably selfish behavior, and, failing that, to punish them.

It is not difficult to demonize the obese. In literature and films the obese have long been portrayed as unreasonably jolly, slovenly and lazy, or just plain evil. (Hello, Newman!) Nobody likes to sit next to them on airplanes or buses. They block the aisles at the grocery store (their favorite haunts), and they reduce miles-per-gallon (and cause excessive tire wear) when they ride in our cars. On humid days, they sweat (and thus smell) more than you and I. So, with rare exceptions (and it is unfortunate that you two Gentlemen comprise one of these), nobody complains when the obese are criticized and attacked.

Given the current hypersensitivity to anything smacking of criticism of various races, ethnic groups, professions, political movements, sexual orientations, immigration status, victims of certain diseases, and scores of other categories of Americans, the obese present us with a refreshingly – and indeed the only – safe target. As the authors of the HCR blog point out, prominent and respected figures feel no compunction whatsoever against making the most offensive public statements against the obese, and when they do they receive (with rare exceptions such as provided by you HRC Gentlemen) applause rather than condemnation.

Obesity is a condition which is immediately visible to all – and from a great distance – and which immediately labels one as being selfish and lazy, and, now, as entirely unconcerned that their bad behavior is costing the rest of us our healthcare dollars, and thus, potentially our lives. Hating the obese has become nearly a patriotic imperative.

Fully government-funded and government-controlled healthcare (by whatever subterfuge we finally get there) permits – nay, demands! – that we declare to the obese that their unsightly physiques are no longer a matter of personal choice, but are now a matter of legitimate public concern. The choices they are making – that is, their gluttony, sloth and all other manner of self-indulgence – are placing unwanted and unsustainable demands on us purer, svelter, fellow-citizens, not to mention placing us in danger of not receiving the healthcare which we (in contrast) actually deserve.

It is already far too late, Gentlemen, to appeal to mere reasonableness, rationality, or, especially civility.  We are well past that stage. Observe: It has become acceptable to write, and accept for publication, “scientific” papers claiming that the obese are the chief cause of global warming. Observe again: It has become acceptable to write, and accept for publication, “scientific” papers claiming that obesity is contagious, and that – never mind associating with the obese themselves – it is risky associating with the very friends of the obese. (That is, even those who like, or tolerate, fat people are to be shunned.)

By their own selfish actions, actions which threaten the collective far more than merely themselves, the obese have become fair game for whatever manipulations our government can devise to cause them to either lose weight, or pay for their sins. Such maneuvers may begin with simple taxes on foodstuffs favored by the obese, but the sky’s the limit. A special “carbon tax” based on their BMI would be legitimate, for instance, since it will always cost a lot of energy to move a fat person from point A to point B, whatever the mode of transportation. The periodic mandatory public “weigh-ins” such a tax would justify would serve the useful purpose of public humiliation, an important incentive to weight loss. And it goes without saying that the ultimate censure – already employed in more enlightened cultures such as Great Britain – would be simply to withhold certain healthcare services if one is deemed too fat.

Demonizing the obese provides several important precedents to our central authorities. That it sets an important precedent – and establishes the mechanisms and techniques – for controlling the private behaviors of American citizens is obvious. But it also allows us to place the blame for a medical condition, which largely depends on genetic predisposition, solely on the chosen behavior of its victims. Discriminating against those who have genetically-mediated conditions thus becomes possible.

Discriminating against obesity also sets a precedent for discriminating against the lower economic classes (since obesity, rather than starvation, is the chief nutritional problem of the poor in America). This will prove a useful tool when we set future behavioral standards to reduce healthcare spending, since so much of that spending is for the economically disadvantaged.

And so, Gentlemen of the HRC blog, it ought to be painfully clear that successfully demonizing the obese is a vital pillar of our new healthcare system. And when you express the unfortunate ideas the two of you have published this week (namely, that discrimination against the obese is somehow unhelpful), you are placing a large target on yourselves, and on your otherwise excellent blog. (And by extension, you may be placing more innocent blogs, like this one,  under more official scrutiny than might be comfortable.)

DrRich sincerely hopes you will take these comments in the communal spirit in which they are intended.

In his previous post, DrRich offered some general issues to consider before one dives into black market healthcare, and reminds his readers why this will not be an endeavor for the faint-hearted. In this post, we will get into some specifics.

DrRich must first assure his readers (and any government officials who may inadvertently stumble upon this blog) that he is a law-abiding citizen, and does not condone illegal activities. So he will suggest here only activities for black market healthcare which, strictly speaking, will not be illegal under American law; though not so much by complying with the law, but by avoiding it.

DrRich trusts that his readers can think up the more illegal kinds of black market activities for themselves, and thus they do not need his help with this aspect of the endeavor. Many of these more obvious illegal forms of black market healthcare (e.g., “medical speakeasies,” located in back alleys for the proletariat, and in swanky office buildings for public officials; rolling surgical suites hidden in semi-trucks; smuggling rings for drugs and medical equipment; an “underground-railroad-style” transport system for itinerant physicians who need to ply their illicit trade while on the move; etc.), can be established by individuals, or by relatively small groups of entrepreneurs, and with relatively little up-front capital or lead time – and with no coaching from DrRich.

But the varieties of black market healthcare which DrRich has in mind – certain “less illegal” activities, which will drive the U.S government into states of apoplexy but over which it will have little legal jurisdiction – will require a much larger scale, and a significant investment in time and energy.  So anyone who is interested ought to get started with the necessary organizational activities right away.

DrRich has three such suggestions. With all three of them, DrRich envisions that implementation would be driven by a major private healthcare organization (or a consortium of them) which has a record of innovative thinking, as well as access to significant financial resources through their own holdings, or through their connections with rich benefactors from around the world. He is thinking of organizations like the Cleveland Clinic, the Mayo Clinic, or the Kaiser system.

For the sake of mankind, DrRich offers these suggestions free and clear. They may be taken up, with his blessings, by any institution or organization that wishes to employ them, with no obligations or strings attached whatsoever.

1) Floating Off-Shore Medical Centers. In this scenario, the Cleveland Clinic (say), with the help of their friends in Abu Dhabi, buys or leases a mothballed former Soviet aircraft carrier (nuclear power preferred), and refurbishes it into a floating, world-class medical center. The ship will ply the international waters off the American coasts, providing regular helicopter transport to and from major cities. There’s a lot you could do with an aircraft carrier, of course, to make it an attractive destination aside from medical care, including (for instance) establishing a world class hotel, food services, casinos and other entertainments. But the chief attraction would be that Americans will be able to buy the best healthcare services in the world, without fear of being arrested.

The fact that this floating medical center will be based on a former warship may turn out to be an advantage. Obviously, it would be useful to maintain at least some weaponry on board, if only to repel “pirates” But given the anger this ship will generate among American government officials, the Cleveland Clinic (or whoever) might be wise to remain intentionally ambiguous about just how much firepower the ship has retained. Just sayin’.

2) Native American Medical Centers. There are two things about the current state of Native American culture which make this approach to black market healthcare at least feasible, if not compelling. First is the recognized “sovereign status” of Native American reservations, the same status which has allowed various tribes across the land to open gambling casinos, even in states which otherwise do not allow such establishments. If their sovereign status justifies casinos (establishments of mere entertainment, which, in fact, encourage bad behaviors of all sorts such as alcoholism, prostitution, smoking and – gasp!- obesity), then surely the same sovereign status would justify establishing advanced institutions of healing.

Second is the deep guilt that Americans rightly feel about the treatment Native Americans have suffered over the years, much of which was arranged by the U.S. government. Note, in particular, that one of the ongoing claims which Native Americans have against the larger American culture is the chronically substandard state of the healthcare services they are provided. So, who will dare stand in the way of these oppressed peoples, when they propose to dedicate a portion of their pitiful remaining sovereign lands (with the help of, perhaps, the Mayo Clinic and its benefactors) to the development of world-class medical centers?

One advantage of the “Native American Strategy” for black market healthcare is that it would allow medical centers of various sizes and emphasis to be established in numerous convenient tribal locations around the U.S., as the need and logistics allow. Within a decade or two, if they play their cards right, Native American tribes may even find themselves controlling nearly 20% of the American economy – which would be justice at its finest.

3) Medical Centers Across the Mexican Border. There are several potential benefits to this suggestion. Converting Tijuana, Nogales, Laredo and Juarez from hotbeds of human and drug smuggling into hotbeds of illicit healthcare would probably be a boon to the local populations on both sides of the border. It would create tens of thousands of good jobs in Mexico, for Mexicans. The heavily-armed gangs of Mexican drug-runners along the border could be hired by the Cleveland Clinic Juarez, or the Mayo Clinic Nogales, as security guards, thus absorbing their “talents” into a more legitimate economy. (Being located so close to the border of a powerful nation which will badly want to terminate these medical centers would, one must understand, create a certain need for security.)

If nothing else, world-class medical centers just across the Mexican border would reverse the flow of illicit border crossings. Americans (and Canadians, who, bless them, would now have to travel much farther south for their healthcare) would suddenly be streaming across desert border crossings into Mexico in the dark of night – and Mexicans would be staying put. And its desperate need to get rid of black market healthcare would, at long last, give the U.S. government a compelling reason to control the borders once and for all. We would suddenly see American troops all along the Mexican border, supported by such features as a “no-man’s land” seeded with land mines, and constant surveillance by drone aircraft armed with cluster bombs.

And before long, Californians wanting to go to the Kaiser Tijuana Medical Center would have to get there by way of Cuba.

People who do not like the new healthcare system our government is establishing for us intend to formally challenge the constitutionality of one of its major provisions, namely, the “individual mandate” – the provision that all individuals must purchase health insurance.

The grounds for challenging the individual mandate, essentially, is that the Constitution does not grant the federal government the authority to compel legal residents of the U.S. to purchase a particular product, or enter into a particular contract, simply as a matter of their being legal residents. For many of those who object to the new healthcare law, the individual mandate goes to the principle reason for their objections – that the government has assumed for itself sweeping new powers that directly impinge on the liberty of individuals.

DrRich himself feels this way. If the government can make us buy a product against our will for the sake of the common good, then a firewall will have been taken down, and DrRich does not see any fundamental barrier to the government being allowed to compel us to any action it deems to be for the common good.

For instance, since your obesity, by sucking up limited healthcare resources, will impinge on DrRich’s ability to get whatever healthcare services he thinks he might desire, DrRich can now legitimately petition the government to regulate your intake of Twinkies. You fatty. And as for all you overweight middle-aged women out there, who habitually fail to perform the hour-per-day of exercise that best medical evidence insists you perform, it would be entirely appropriate for the President’s proposed army of college-age zealots – the Civilian Service Corps or whatever he’s going to call it – to show up every day to organize you and your similarly-shaped neighbors into ranks, for hour-long forced marches.

You may think DrRich exaggerates. DrRich hopes so, too. But he’s not sure.

In any case, for those among his readers who do not want any constitutional challenge of the new healthcare law to succeed, DrRich has good news. It won’t.

DrRich has come to this conclusion after reading the section of the law that deals with the individual mandate. This section, “Subtitle F – Shared Responsibility For Health Care,” is carefully designed to defeat any constitutional challenge.

The meat of Subtitle F is contained in one sentence (Section 5000A), to wit: “An applicable individual shall for each month beginning after 2013 ensure that the individual, and any dependent of the individual who is an applicable individual, is covered under minimum essential coverage for such month.” This sentence takes up about 20% of one page. Most of the remaining 42.8 pages of Subtitle F creates a protective shell against constitutional challenge. It does this in two ways.

The first protection against a constitutional challenge is the more obvious. In fact, before we ever get to the individual mandate itself, we are treated to five pages that detail the multitude of ways in which “individual responsibility” in healthcare (i.e., the mandate to buy insurance) “is commercial and economic in nature, and substantially affects interstate commerce, as a result of the effects described in paragraph (2).” In other words, the individual mandate is wrapped by a formal “finding of Congress” that this mandate is subject to the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

DrRich is not enough of a legal scholar to understand whether the five pages of justification that follow (the “paragraph 2,” referred to above) are sufficiently compelling to actually invoke the Commerce Clause. To him, it all sounds like an “ends justifies the means” argument, one that would be equally applicable if Congress decided it would benefit the general welfare to mandate that people purchase all their cars from Government Motors. But whether or not the supportive language itself proves compelling to the courts, it seems very unlikely to DrRich that the Supreme Court would overturn a formal “finding of Congress,” as regards the applicability of a provision of Congress to the Commerce Clause.

But this first protection against a constitutional challenge only covers the first five of the 43 pages of Subtitle F. Most of the remaining 38 pages establishes the second protection. This one is more subtle than the first, but, DrRich thinks, it will be the more difficult one to overcome.

That remaining portion of Subtitle F deals largely with the penalties to which individuals would be subject if they failed to comply with the mandate to buy health insurance. It describes in detail how the mandate is to be complied with, how compliance is to be documented, and how the mandate is to be enforced. This long section of Subtitle F reads like tax law, like IRS code. As well it should. For, what it establishes is that the individual mandate is actually a tax, that is treated like any other tax in its documentation, collection, and enforcement, and indeed, that the IRS will be running the whole show.

If DrRich were defending the individual mandate before the Supreme Court, here is what he would say.

“Your Honors (and you other Justices, too), even if you find that the Commerce Clause is not applicable here (a finding, I respectfully submit, which would create a Constitutional crisis, since Congress has issued its own formal finding to the contrary), you must let this provision stand for an even more compelling reason, which is: This is not really an individual mandate to purchase health insurance or any other product, as our opponents claim. It is, in fact, simply a tax, like any other tax.

It is a tax. A healthcare tax. It is a tax to support healthcare in the United States, payable to the U.S. Government on Form 1040, administered and collected entirely by the Internal Revenue Service. It is not in any way fundamentally different from the Medicare and Medicaid taxes, which also support healthcare services for our citizens, which also appear on Form 1040, and which are also administered and collected entirely by the IRS.

Your Honors, simply look at the language of Subtitle F. After a modest amount of palaver to convince Your Honors that the Commerce Clause applies (and, I remind you, it does), the last 38 pages of this Subtitle is tax law. I mean, really, just try to read it. Can any of you understand it? Neither can I. It’s IRS tax code, plain and simple.

The only difference between this tax and any other federal tax is that Congress, in its wisdom and magnanimity, gives the individual citizen the ability to opt out, to not have to pay it, simply by documenting that they have purchased health insurance. That is, if the citizen chooses to buy health insurance – which, we must all admit, would be a wise decision from that individual’s point of view, as well as a benefit to society – the IRS will forgive the new healthcare tax altogether.

Where is the mandate here? Nowhere in Subtitle F does the word “mandate” appear. Rather, Subtitle F refers to “shared responsibility.” Individuals should feel responsible to do their part for society as a whole, and this Subtitle encourages them to act on that responsibility. They can do so by paying the new healthcare tax. Or, if they choose, they can do so by making sure they and their families are covered by health insurance. To be sure, Congress’ intent was that the large majority of citizens would choose the latter. But for all that, it is in the end the individual’s choice.”

As much as DrRich wishes otherwise, the individual mandate in the new healthcare law has been written in such a way as to almost certainly turn aside any challenges based on its constitutionality.

So, ladies, form your ranks and start marching that fat off. Hep-two-three-four.