Lew Rockwell – by Paul Craig Roberts
I often refer to how much of America has been eroded away during my lifetime, so much so that the country into which I was born no longer exists. Younger people don’t know what’s been lost as they never experienced the real America. What is normal to people is what they are born into and grow up with. The numerous infringements on individual freedom, for example, that exist today as normal and unquestioned would have been impossible in my youth.
Is your doctor in private practice or is he an employee of a HMO or a health care provider such as a hospital’s corporate empire?
Why does it matter? If he is a corporate employee, he has lost his independence and has to comply, regardless of his judgment, with protocols handed down by the likes of Tony Fauci and Big Pharma as in the restrictions placed on Covid treatment. Corporate employees were prohibited from saving lives by treating Covid patients with Ivermectin or HCQ. Those who thought the Hippocratic Oath protected them and ignored the protocols in order to save lives did so at the cost of their jobs and medical licenses. Doctors in private practice cannot be fired, but medical boards can still go after them, but it is not as easy.
Over the course of my life I have watched the gradual erosion of medical independence. It has occurred through a variety of means. Medicine in the US today is a price controlled business. Medicare and private insurance companies set the prices doctors are paid for the range of services and treatments. The prices discriminate against doctors in private practice. There is one set of prices for corporate medical practice and another set with lower prices for doctors in private practice. The intentional effect is to drive doctors out of private practice. I have watched it happen to my doctors.
A study in 2021 found that “Physician reimbursement for services performed by a doctor working for a hospital or health system is significantly higher than that paid to independent physicians for the same services, according to a recent Health Serves Research study.”
The report states: ”Medicare reimbursement for physician services would have been $114 000 higher per physician per year if a physician were integrated compared to being non-integrated. Primary care physicians faced a 78% increase, medical specialists 74%, and surgeons 224%.”
It is the same with private insurance. HMOs are reimbursed more than doctors in private practice.
Notice the use of language as well as the massive difference in payment rates. A doctor who is an employee and has lost his independence is “integrated,” while a doctor in independent practice is “non-integrated.” To me “non-integrated” sounds like someone who is positioned outside the approved way of practicing medicine and most certainly is not a profit maximizer. The onus is on him to get “integrated.”
Ask yourself what reason could there be for the massive difference in payments other than to terminate the independence of medicine by driving doctors out of private practice? It is an expensive undertaking with integrated doctors costing $114,000 more each annually, but worth it to someone.
This is Big Pharma’s agenda. Once private practice is extinguished, Big Pharma and its marketing agents–NIH, CDC, FDA, WHO–can control treatment protocols for the purpose of maximizing Big Pharma’s profits or injecting people with “vaccines” that reduce population in accordance with the agenda of WEF, global warming, and Bill Gates. Big Pharma already controls most medical research and thereby the findings as 70% of medical research is funded by Big Pharma research grants. Former editors of the two most prestigious medical journals have said that the articles published in the journals cannot be trusted because of Big Pharma’s funding.
Think back to the way that the fear that drove people to be vaccinated with an untested substance was whipped up by financial incentives given to hospitals to report every death as a Covid death. Think back to the use of the inappropriate PCR “Covid test” that produces 97% false positives. Both were orchestrations that drove people to be vaccinated. Remember also that you couldn’t use airlines to travel without being vaccinated, or go to school, or play on a sports team, or work for government, or be in the military, or be a hospital nurse, hospital doctor, or airline pilot, etc.
All of this and more was used to achieve as complete a vaccination of the population as was possible despite the known fact that you never mass vaccinate in the face of a pandemic because the result is numerous variants and the undermining of natural immunity.
In other words, already there is enough control over medical science as to effectively silence the truth. This is especially easy as the Western world does not have an independent print and TV media and as many Internet sites are funded by entities interested in controlling explanations.
I don’t yet know the full history of the organized attack on private practice. I am not speaking of “socialized medicine” as corporate medicine is private. I do know that ObamaCare caused payment differences between private practice and corporate medicine to grow larger because independent doctors and physical therapists told me of their attempts to become affiliated with corporate medicine so their billings could be sent as corporate and failing this sold their practices to HMO chains and retired on the proceeds.
In short, and without any doubt, independent medicine in the United States (in these days of Identity Politics an oxymoron) is doomed and on the way out.
The rest is here: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/01/paul-craig-roberts/in-my-lifetime-i-have-witnessed-the-death-of-independent-medicine-and-fair-trials/