In my lifetime I have witnessed the death of independent medicine and fair trials
By victort // 2023-01-19
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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. (Article republished from PaulCraigRoberts.org) 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.”  https://revcycleintelligence.com/news/major-physician-reimbursement-gap-for-independent-vs-hospital-docs   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%.” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1475-6773.13613  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. What does it mean for us?  It means that in place of the Hippocratic Oath there will be Big Pharma’s profit-serving or the elite’s population control agendas. If the points I am making have been made before, I have not seen any sign of them. And I don’t expect this article to get the attention of any investigative journalist in the print and TV media.  We are silently losing the ability to get medical care and are slated to be used for private agendas. But this must be illegal you say!  So what?  Don’t expect any action by the legal system.  US Senator Ron Johnson held hearings on the alleged pandemic and the adverse effects of the mRNA “vaccines.”  But he was smeared, and the hearings were ignored. The House Republicans have promised an investigation, but it is unlikely to happen.  The presstitutes will label them “conspiracy theorists” and Big Pharma will target them with political campaign contributions to their election opponents. In my book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions (2000) I showed that Justice is a thing of the past.  It has been a long time since trials were held to determine innocence or guilt.  Today innocence or guilt is resolved with plea bargains.  According to US Department of Justice (sic) statistics, 97% of felonies are settled by plea bargains. A plea bargain, not a trial defense, is the work of defense attorney’s today.  The defendant faces a charge, and his lawyer works with the prosecutor’s office to reduce the charge to a less severe one in exchange for not contesting the charge.  This provides the prosecutor with a conviction which builds his effectiveness and chances of running for public office, while freeing his time and the trial judge’s from trial use.  A week or longer of time is saved in an hour or two of negotiation. The defendant even if innocent submits to incriminating himself, a Constitutional prohibition, because his attorney tells him that if he goes to trail, exculpatory evidence can be withheld, prosecutors can bribe people to give evidence against him, that the judge will tolerate all this, and that the system exists to produce convictions, not innocence or guilt.  The defendant’s attorney tells him from experience that the longer he holds out on a plea deal the greater the chance that the charges will increase in order to pressure him and the harder to negotiate a light sentence. The result of plea bargain deals is that police evidence and the prosecutor’s case are seldom tested.  As they are seldom tested before jurors, we have no idea of the justice of any conviction. As I have previously informed readers, when I was young a defendant who experienced conviction in the media, as did Derek Chauvin, would have had the case against him dropped by the judge on the grounds that it was impossible to swear in an objective jury. But this protection of defendants against the media has also been discarded.   I am confident that many of those who submit to plea bargains are innocent.  I am also confident that those who are guilty are not guilty of the negotiated crimes to which they confessed as these “crimes” were invented in negotiation to take the place of the original charges.  In this sense, everyone imprisoned, unless convicted by an objective jury with all evidence both for and against considered, is innocent. So to conclude this essay, in my lifetime we have made a mockery of the Hippocratic Oath and Justice.  Not long ago I read an article by a Harvard professor, perhaps from the Medical School, perhaps underwritten by a Big Pharma grant, that the Hippocratic Oath was a fiction, that the oath doesn’t say what it is represented to say.  If there never was a Hippocratic Oath, it doesn’t matter that Big Pharma and Corporate Medicine are taking it away. What can be done?  I do not know.  Thomas Jefferson, a discarded Founding Father, said 200 years was as long as freedom could live without being refreshed with revolution against the tyranny that again shows us its head. Read more at: PaulCraigRoberts.org
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