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COVID-19, Culture & Society, Current Events, Featured, Health Policy, Medical Ethics, Op-eds, What's New

“Reimagining” Mice and Men

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While everyone is preoccupied with mask-shaming and vaccine-cheerleading, scientists are engaged in critical research with a more lasting effect on our lives. For 100 years scientists have dreamed of creating and developing life outside of a womb. In March 2021 that dream came true. Scientists grew naturally conceived mouse embryos in tiny beakers for six days—the equivalent of the full first trimester of gestation. At this point the embryos had an identifiable body shape and organs. This miracle of modern science, posted in a YouTube video, garnered a mere 9,400 views.

In 2016, scientists developed the “right cocktail of growth factors and nourishment” and were able to incubate human embryos in a dish. The embryos attached to the dish “as if it were a uterus, sprouting a few placental cells.” The researchers halted the experiment due to the 4,000-member International Society for Stem Cell Research’s (ISSCR) 14-day rule. The ISSCR arrived at this limit based on the point in time at which the nervous system begins to develop.

Two separate research groups have now created their versions of synthetic embryos, called “human blastoids” from embryonic stem cells and “iblastoids” using reprogrammed adult skin stem cells. A real blastocyst is a human embryo around five or six days after fertilization that is growing. Normally, a blastocyst would implant in the wall of the uterus at around 7 or 8 days and the placenta would start to form. These advances prompted the ISSCR to rewrite its own yet to be revealed new guidelines allowing synthetic embryos to develop beyond the current 14-day limit.

As Dr. Frankensteinian as this sounds, researchers explain that the stem cell-produced embryos can be used to study congenital conditions, and the effects of drugs, toxins, and viruses on early development without using human embryos and perhaps create organs for transplants. Kind of like the good that would come from Dr. Fauci’s unethical “gain of function” research on coronaviruses (making them more deadly and transmissible). Look where that got us. 

We have truly entered the brave new world, grappling with the morality of life and death in the age of medical technology. Devaluing life is now commonplace. Abortion on demand is available on the day of birth. Freshly obtained aborted fetal tissue is being used to create “humanized mice” (on the taxpayers’ dime, no less). Not surprisingly, COVID-19 is the justification. Moreover, there is evidence that upstanding organizations and suppliers are making profits from the illegal sale of human fetuses.

In the United States, thousands of children are trafficked every year for sex or labor. This doesn’t make front page news or leave a lasting imprint on our consciousness—unlike the ever present COVID-19 statistics. 

On the other end of life’s spectrum, government COVID-19 policies regarding nursing home residents cemented what victims already knew: our society treats elders like jetsam—the debris that is thrown overboard to lighten a ship’s load. Former Obama advisor and member of Biden’s COVID-19 team, Ezekiel Emanuel, is on board. His “Complete Lives System” posits that medical care should be rationed based on one’s “instrumental value” to society. Babies, those over 60 years of age, and the disabled are out of luck. “When the worst-off can benefit only slightly while the better-off people could benefit greatly, allocating to the better-off is often justifiable.” One more nail in the coffin of our humanity. With doctors like this who needs the Grim Reaper. 

However, the unwanted cast-offs may be more difficult to replace with better models. Our reproductive abilities appear to be on the decline. The global fertility rate, sperm counts, and the quality of sperm are declining and reported miscarriages increased at about 1 percent per year from 1970 to 2000.

Enter the robobabies. We could eliminate the need for mothers. We could ensure that only the right kind of embryos develop. Newspeak paves the way. The United Nations’ European Union and U.S. delegationshave neutered mother and father to “parents” and declared that “various forms of family exist.” 

Crazy? Social Justice Warriors are “reimagining” the evolution of our society. Why not reimagine humans?

Who would have imagined a pediatrician governor supporting infanticide? Who would have imagined that social media in America, the bastion of free speech, would crush politically unpopular speech and diversity of thought? Who would have imagined that physicians who offered early treatment of COVID-19 would be treated like drug dealers? Who would have imagined that the media-government complex would silence the reasoned opinions of renowned epidemiologists, virologists, and clinicians who raised questions about the response to COVID-19? Who would have imagined that 1984 would cease being fiction?

COVID-19 watchdogs have showcased their faux humanity, incessantly preaching that it is our moral duty to wear a mask and submit our bodies to an experimental drug. As science is catching up to longstanding utopian political agendas, our real moral duty is to reflect on playing God with life and death.

COVID-19, Current Events, Featured, Health Policy, Medical Ethics, Op-eds, What's New

COVID-19: Black Americans Need Action, Not Navel-gazing

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On Martin Luther King, Jr.’s holiday, I’m reminded that Rev. King was not only a thinker but a man of action. 

While today’s social justice omphaloskeptics are pondering white privilege, Marxist critical race theory, and “the intersectionality of health equity,” COVID-19 is busy killing black and brown Americans.

Black Americans continue to get infected and die from COVID-19 at rates more than 1.5 times their share of the population. Hispanic and Native Americans face similar disparities. Black Americans are twice as likely to be hospitalized as whites. Moreover, when admitted to the hospital, people from racial and ethnic minority groups were in worse shape than their white counterparts. Consequently, they were more likely to die. 

No need to worry, President-elect Biden has promised a racial disparities task force in response to COVID. Gee, 35 years ago, the Health and Human Services’ seminal Heckler Report on health disparities found that minorities had a lower life expectancy and a higher death rate from heart disease and diabetes, among other things. Just what we need: another task force to ruminate about disparities.

It is well known that black Americans have persistently higher rates of hypertension compared to whites. Indeed, 75 percent of black people in the United States develop high blood pressure by the age 55 compared to 55 percent of white men and 40 percent of white women. To make matters worse, fewer black than white Americans have their blood pressure controlled. Additionally, black American adults are 60 percent more likely than non-Hispanic white adults to have diabetes as well as more complications, such as amputations and kidney failure. 

Early in the COVID journey, clinicians found that hypertension and obesity were key predictors of COVID mortality. Not surprisingly, black patients hospitalized with COVID-19 were more likely to have high blood pressure and diabetes compared with all other racial and ethnic groups combined. And the obesehospitalized patients were more likely to die. Further, people with darker skin—63 percent of Hispanic people and 82 percent of black people have low vitamin D levels. And vitamin D may lessen the severity of COVID disease.

In one study, compared with other racial groups, black people were less likely to have been tested for COVID prior to being seen at the hospital. The researchers noted that the key advantage to earlier diagnosis is the decrease in community spread. The study fails to acknowledge that early diagnosis would lead to early treatment. Why? The party line is that there is no early treatment. Not true. Early treatment works.

Given the severity of the COVID illness in black Americans, one gets the feeling that withholding treatment is a familiar tune. In the disgraceful 40-year Tuskegee experiment, treatment was withheld from black men so scientists could learn the natural history of the disease. The control group continued to receive placebos, despite the fact that penicillin became the recommended treatment for syphilis several years into the experiment. Praise the Lord for randomized controlled studies.

Do Dr. Fauci and his pharma cronies care about black folks? (He didn’t seem to care about the AIDS patients). He exhorts about the need for controlled studies and dismisses vast clinical experience. But as Tom Frieden, former director of the CDC noted, “waiting for more data is often an implicit decision not to act, or to act on the basis of past practice rather than on the best available evidence.” 

Nations with plenty of black and brown folks, such as Cuba, India, Algeria, and Costa Rica are achieving lower overall death rates with early treatment with hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug with an over 50-year safety record. Other countries are using ivermectin, a safe antiparasitic used to treat scabies. Perhaps because these drugs are inexpensive as compared to the new expensive potential wonder drugs and the cost of ICU care, poorer countries were eager to try something that worked, rather than wait for a piece of pie in the sky. 

Repurposing of FDA-approved drugs that have been used safely on millions of patients is not new. Amazingly, a combination of an antibiotic (doxycycline), a diabetes drug (metformin), a treatment for intestinal worms (mebendazole), and the cholesterol-lowering statin, Lipitor was found to extend the survival of people with glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer! The authors of the innovative study noted that “it is well recognized that high-cost randomized controlled trials may not be an economically viable option for studying patent-expired off-label drugs. In some cases, randomized trials could also be considered as ethically controversial.” Money talks, helping patients walks.

While hand-wringing over the tragic COVID patient deaths, the “chosen ones” silence discussion about preventive and early treatment. Senate hearings on the subject were ignored, even mocked. There’s no need for early treatment with safe medications because the (experimental) vaccine has arrived.Meanwhile people continue to needlessly die.

Let’s not repeat Tuskegee. When there is a low risk and reasonable likelihood of helping, let the patient and doctor choose between doing nothing or actively treating. Positive clinical results and the morality of life and death matter more than crowing about scientific purity.

COVID-19, Current Events, Featured, Medical Ethics, Medicine, Op-eds, What's New

COVID Chaos: A Prison Without Bars

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The COVID-19 lockdown has its benefits: a chapter a day of the unabridged version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a study in fear and redefined “normal” values, among many other lessons.

Lately I’ve seen face coverings stenciled with “I can’t breathe.” The beauty of the statement is its dual meaning. It can be a nod to George Floyd, an arrestee who apparently suffocated at the hands of a rogue law enforcement officer or it can be a statement of the wearer’s condition behind the mask. More generally, it can be a statement about the suffocation of society as a whole.

Free speech is the bedrock of our politics, but media manipulation is now rampant. Under the guise of fact-checking, our modern day newspapers—YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter—have become the arbiters of what constitutes a worthy opinion or fact in contrast to “misinformation.” Scientists were certain that something heavier than air could not maintain flight. The misinformed Wright brothers proved them wrong.

Vladimir Lenin recognized that the media are propagandists and their information presented should be “easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive.” With COVID-19, the media create irrational fear with daily charts of deaths and case numbers without corresponding recoveries. They fail to mention that many deaths were of patients with serious underlying conditions or who were already in hospice and had weeks to live and coincidentally tested positive. The raw numbers are unaccompanied by the CDC’s instruction to classify a death as COVID-19 even if merely suspected or, in some cases, with a negative test. There is no corresponding warning with blinking lights that the tests have false positives or that the daily report of “increases” includes old tests that were not previously reported.

As Lenin noted, “ideas are much more fatal than guns.” Thus, where propaganda and media bias do not succeed, censorship will. Currently, a vocal physician is being silenced and investigated for questioning the motives and possible over-reporting of COVID-19 as the cause of death. Censorship is our polite version of “disappearing” dissidents. We are not Communist China and cannot allow the treatment of Dr. Li Wenliang, a Wuhan ophthalmologist to be the “new normal.” In December 2019, he courageously warned his colleagues on social media about the new SARS-like pneumonia cases but knew that he “would probably be punished.” Indeed, Chinese officials forced him to sign a letter accusing him of “making false comments” that had “severely disturbed the social order.” Fortunately for scientific advancement of our relentless search for COVID-19 treatments and mitigation, many questioned the official story about the novel coronavirus coming from a pangolin at a Wuhan wet market.

Censorship, corrupt scientific inquiry, and media bias have no place in medicine. It is not clear that lockdowns are scientifically sound. Curiously, social justice protests are allowed despite lockdowns. One epidemiological analysis concluded lockdowns in Western Europe had no effect on COVID-19 deaths. Additionally, studies show severe psychological effects of quarantines. The 5 states with the most COVID-19 deaths from March through April showed a 35 to 400 percent increase in deaths from various non-respiratory underlying causes, including diabetes, heart diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, and cerebrovascular diseases. Some 80,000 diagnoses of five common cancers may be missed or delayed by early June because of disruptions to medical care caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Most reviews conclude that masks do not slow down the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (that causes COVID-19). Studies show non-medical masks do not stop aerosolized droplets less than 2.5 microns. A group of 239 scientists from multiple disciplines from 32 countries have recently agreed that SARS-CoV-2 is spread by such small droplets. They recommend improving indoor ventilation infection controls as the key protective measure. Handwashing and social distancing—but not masks—were advised. The CDC recommends masks.

Faced with a global pandemic, physicians were exploring hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), which had been favorably studied during the 2003 SARS epidemic, as a prophylactic or an early treatment. Numerous reports of HCQ’s efficacy on thousands of patients continue to mount. Once the media labelled it “Trump’s drug,” the fix was in. The long-awaited randomized clinical trial showing no benefit was gleefully reported by the media. However, the media were silent when the study was found to be so corrupt that it had to be retracted. Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital’s large 3-month observational study that showed a significant reduction in mortality in hospitalized patients with HCQ and validated HCQ’s over 60-year record of safety garnered little media attention.

These (purposefully) chaotic times are an opportunity for a movement toward government control and the suppression of individuality. Lockdowns keep us apart and stifle the free exchange of ideas and social communion. As Eric Hoffer explained in True Believer, a mass movement deliberately makes the present “mean and miserable. . . . People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and self-confident.” Becoming a psychological cripple is not an option.

Is this chaos a new form of plastic surgery? When the bandages (masks) are removed will you be a changed person?

COVID-19, Culture & Society, Featured, Media & Press, Medical Ethics, Medicine, Op-eds, Politics, What's New

COVID-19 and the Universal Health Scare

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Politicians are a strange lot. Not content with merely being Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi is moonlighting as Surgeon General, opining on what medications the President should be taking. Service to the public is a distant memory. The new charge is to invent catchy phrases, like the “new normal,” to quietly coax us into obeying dictates, while ignoring facts and science.

It is not normal to base lifting the lockdowns on the trend in positive novel coronavirus (aka SARS-CoV-2) tests. Predictably, positive tests (with many folks never becoming symptomatic) will continue to increase as more tests are done. Given that the stated goal of lockdowns was to lessen the strain on hospital resources, using hospitalization trends makes more sense.

It is not normal for New York and Minnesota governors to insist that COVID-19 patients be admitted to nursing homes, even after it became clear that nursing homes were a hotspot for infections and up to 81% of COVID-19 deaths.

It is not normal for healthy people to walk around wearing masks—particularly when it is not recommended by the sainted World Health Organization.

It is not normal to never see your parents, children, or grandparents. Older folks suffer from loneliness in the best of times.

It is not normal for children to stay home from school indefinitely. When children do go back to school, it is not normal to tell them they have to wear masks and might not be able to play or eat with one another. Meanwhile, the CDC’s latest report tells us that the infection fatality rate for those aged 0-49 years is 0.05%. The CDC’s latest numbers are what Stanford researchers predicted in April.

It is not normal to have cellphone apps that track your movements. I suppose helicopter parents and stalkers would make good use of them.

It is not normal to propose “immunity passes” enabling the holders to move about society unimpeded. Immunity passes make no scientific sense given that the serology tests are unreliable, the length of immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is unknown, and invites social stigmatization.

The real “new normal” is politicians being blatant with their old games. It is normal for California’s Governor Newsom to make a secret $1 billion deal with BYD, a Chinese-based electric bus maker, to manufacture N95 masks at $3.30 a piece. Kudos to his fellow Democrat legislators for seeking transparency about his pandemic spending spree. To his credit, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti purchased 24 million “Made in America” masks from Honeywell at 79 cents a mask.

COVID-19 is a handy justification for Congress to promote a political ideology rather than propose targeted measures to assist those struggling with the consequences of the virus. The HEROES Act, the fourth stimulus bill, presents a path to universal basic income by paying some workers more to stay home than they would receive by returning to work. The CARES Act suspended student loan payments, but the HEROES Act paves the way for free college tuition for all by forgiving up to $10,000 of student loans for every borrower.

Moreover, the HEROES Act contains a multitude of other agenda-driven programs like access to financial services and the marketplace for minority-owned cannabis-related businesses, diversity in banking, a Post Office bail-out, $50 million to the Environmental Protection Agency for environmental justice grants, economic impact payments to illegal immigrants, permanent voting by mail, and the clearly relevant requirement that the President inform Congress of the reasons for not filling a vacancy for an Inspector General position.

The proposed Medicare Crisis Program Act of 2020 would provide health insurance for those who lost their health insurance due to the COVID-19 lockdown and its consequences. We want to help those who lost their jobs, but why use a newly-minted premium-free Medicare program as the vehicle? Is it to get people accustomed to Medicare covering all age groups?

The CONTACT initiative requires the CDC to work with states to implement a national system for testing, contact tracing, surveillance, containment and mitigation of COVID-19. (Have we done this for the infectious and deadly flu?). The CDC regulations, instruct authorities to use the “least restrictive means” in implementing public health measures. However, “when an individual is identified as a threat to the health and welfare of others, such as refusing medical treatment at a healthcare facility and refusing to self-quarantine, the government may take the individual into custody.”

The government has been known to abuse its power—whether through cultivating fear, regulatory force, or by individual miscreants. Frederick Douglass warned, “Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.” We cannot let a declaration of a public health emergency become the new gauge of what it takes to break our spirit of liberty.

Culture & Society, Current Events, Medical Ethics, Op-eds, What's New

Gone Too Far: Drag Queen Lunacy and Child Abuse

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In today’s brave new world, imagine receiving a letter from the school principal about your only child: Your son will not be home tonight but your daughter will be home in a few days.

Science deniers are teaching and molding our children. Regardless of scientific data about genetics and biology, some folks—including our august politicians—contend that people can change genders. Science lesson: there are 2 genders. The X chromosomes and Y chromosomes determine sex. With rare exceptions of random abnormalities, female is XX and male is XY. People who undergo sex reassignment procedures do not become the opposite sex; they merely change their outward appearance.

For several years, California law has allowed students to participate in sex-segregated school programs, activities, and facilities, including bathrooms, locker rooms, and athletic teams, consistent with their gender identity, regardless of the gender listed on the student’s records. Privacy alert: when in gym class locker rooms, most high school girls don’t want to undress in front of boys who identify as girls. With regard to safety and competitive fairness, biological males retain their natural advantages over female athletes despite testosterone hormone suppression. Ignoring reality, the House of Representatives passed the “Equality Act” which requires schools to allow biological males who identify as girls to compete in female sports, ironically disadvantaging women.

Parents are left out of the equation, as the government usurps their right and duty to raise their children. In Wisconsin, the “Guidance and Policies to Support Transgender, Non-binary & Gender-Expansive Students” mandates that children of any age can transition to a different gender identity at school, by changing their name and pronouns, without parental notice or consent.

Going three steps farther, California permits children to receive contraceptive hormones and abortions without parental consent based on the student’s right to privacy. Now the California Teachers Association wants to extend student privacy to the provision of hormones to students who want to change their gender. Such a decision should not be within the purview of teachers, particularly when trading heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, and infertility for what could be a phase or manifestation of an unrelated emotional problem in a developing brain is at stake.

A number of studies found that 85 percent of children experiencing gender nonconformity or gender dysphoria before the age of 10 years did not assume that gender role in adolescence. Because of our “limited ability” to predict whether gender nonconformity in a child will persist in the future, pursuing medical intervention in children was not recommended.

In adolescence, there is some question whether there is “social contagion” involved with gender issues. Some 87 percent of parents reported that along with the sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria, the child either had an increase in their social media/internet use, belonged to a friend group in which one or multiple friends became transgender-identified during a similar timeframe, or both. The study concluded that rapid onset gender dysphoria was a maladaptive coping mechanism, similar to anorexia. “‘Gender dysphoria’ may be used as a catch-all explanation for any kind of distress, psychological pain, and discomfort that an [adolescent] is feeling while transition is being promoted as a cure-all solution.”

Would ethical physicians even consider acquiescing to the demands of patients with body integrity disorder? This condition also begins in early adolescence when the patient feels the need to have a healthy limb amputated.  

Nonetheless, the age at which children are medicalized is getting younger. Puberty-blocking drugs are routinely given to prepubescent children. Girls as young as 12 are injected with testosterone, while teen boys are treated with feminizing hormones. The rate of “gender-confirming” surgeries are increasing each year and are being performed on minor children. Girls as young as 16 have had their breasts, uterus, and ovaries removed. Given the uncertainties and fluidity of childhood gender issues, invasive medical intervention crosses the line into child abuse.

How far will the “educators” go to expose children to alternative gender and “queer” life choices? Public libraries are hosting “Drag Queen Story Hours” for children aged 3 to 11. Some schools bring the drag queens into the classrooms where students are a captive audience. According to the organizers, the point of the Drag Queen Story Hour is to “give kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.” I remember a time when drag queen entertainment was reserved for night clubs. Teaching tolerance and acceptance of others is an admirable goal, but exposing children needlessly to adult fare goes too far.

And No, I’m not an unwoke LGBTQaphobe. Take it from a drag queen: “I have no idea why you [mothers] want drag queens to read books to your children. What in the hell has a drag queen ever done to make you . . . admire them so much, other than put on makeup and jump on the floor and writhe around and do sexual things on stage? I have absolutely no idea why you would want that to influence your child.”

Home schooling never looked so good.

Culture & Society, Healthcare Reform, Medical Ethics, Medicare, Medicine, Op-eds

Data Mining, Artificial Intelligence, and Angels of Death

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By Marilyn M. Singleton, MD, JD

Google is universally well known as a search and advertising company. Now Google is tapping into the $3.5 trillion healthcare market. To compete with the Apple Watch, Google acquired FitBit, the wearable exercise, heart rate, and sleep tracking device. Data is king.

Voluntarily worn fitness tracking devices are one thing, but Google has entered the realm of the brave new world.A government inquiry has brought to light Google’s “Nightingale Project” that collected private medical data from Ascension Health’s 2,600 sites of care across 20 states and D.C., unbeknownst to the patients. Dozens of Google employees had access to the data which included lab results, physician diagnoses, hospitalization records, and health histories, complete with patient names and dates of birth. Google claims that the project complies with the Health Insurance Portability And Accountability Act (HIPAA) because it is a qualified business associate of Ascension Health. And unlike the ads for socks that appear on your computer a nanosecond after you purchased some tennis shoes, Google promises that the data won’t be combined with consumer data. Fat chance.

Amazon, which already knows our every thought, was not satisfied with merely creating software that can read medical records. Now they’ve created Transcribe Medical, a system that transcribes confidential patient-doctor conversations and uploads them directly into the electronic health record. Doctors would relinquish all control over “private” patient records. Google also has been working on its own automatic speech recognition “digital scribe” to upload multiple speaker conversations.

Not only is there a problem with inaccuracies that could lead to a patient receiving the wrong treatment, but we all know the ubiquitous problem of hacking—even in the Department of Defense and the federal Office of Personnel Management.

Disturbingly, certain circles oohed and aahed over the revelation that Google, using electronic health records (EHR), created an artificial intelligence program that could predict death better than doctors. Fortunately for humanity, many others found the thought of leaving doctors out of the equation horrifying. The cheerleaders crowed that it would decrease work for the doctors; they wouldn’t have to waste their time going through those pesky medical records to arrive at a conclusion. Using an artificial neural network to predict the death of a human being is a far cry from having a computer interpret an inanimate x-ray who is not a daughter, mother, sister, wife, or grandmother.

 If you put it all together, it adds up to a death panel of one. Google’s software would decide that there is not a high likelihood of walking out of the hospital, no treatment would be given. We are becoming witness to the devolution of humanity.

Moreover, the government is incentivizing workforce development in palliative care through the Palliative Care and Hospice Education and Training Act. Perhaps this is why the hospice team seems to greet the patient at the hospital door. Of note, once a person has signed on to the Medicare hospice program, Medicare will not pay for any curative treatment or medications. Medicare will not pay for an emergency room visit unless the hospice team arranged it or someone decides it is not related to the hospice diagnosis.

The number of hospice agencies participating in the Medicare program nearly doubled between 2000 and 2016, for a total of some 4,382 providers. In 2000, about 30 percent of hospice agencies were for-profit, compared to about 67 percent in 2016. In that same period, Medicare payments grew from $3 billion to $16.8 billion.

Hospice care is lucrative. The minimum Medicare payment is $196 per day regardless of the quantity or quality of services provided on that day. A July 2019 report from the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services found that more than 80 percent of end-of-life facilities in the United States had at least one deficiency, and nearly 20 percent were poor performers with serious problems that jeopardized patient health and safety. It seems the compassionate medical service to care for suffering patients has turned into a heartless cash cow.

Is this what we want for our loved ones and eventually, ourselves? Medicare for All promises every type of medical care under the sun, including long-term care. Long-term care is expensive and if done properly, labor intensive. What better way to save money than to promote a computer program that convinces doctors that the patient is going to die no matter what they do. So the hospital tells the family that treatment or home care will drain their finances. For what? I’ll tell you for what. My parents died at home only after they were tired of doctors and ready to go. They strolled into heaven. They were not shoved in with a giant government backhoe.

Bio: Dr. Singleton is a board-certified anesthesiologist. She is Immediate Past President of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). She graduated from Stanford and earned her MD at UCSF Medical School.  Dr. Singleton completed 2 years of Surgery residency at UCSF, then her Anesthesia residency at Harvard’s Beth Israel Hospital. While still working in the operating room, she attended UC Berkeley Law School, focusing on constitutional law and administrative law.  She interned at the National Health Law Project and practiced insurance and health law. She teaches classes in the recognition of elder abuse and constitutional law for non-lawyers. 

Healthcare Reform, Medical Ethics, Medicine, Op-eds, Politics

Halloween’s Over: Take off the Masks

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At a graduation of a family friend, out of the blue, one in our group began lamenting that progressives tended to live in cities. She proposed that progressives should move to rural areas and “purge [such areas] of those awful conservatives.” Thus spake the tolerant Left. I was stunned. Given the festive occasion, I kindly reminded her that this is America and we are lucky that we have all kinds of people. I wanted to ask her what we should do with the conservatives. Re-education camps? Death by a continuous loop of Bernie Sanders speeches?

It is unfortunate that such unreasonableness isn’t isolated within the D.C. swamp containment zone.

These pied pipers who offer free college, free food, free medical care, and free money for simply having a pulse freely admit they have no idea how to pay for it. Oh, yes: tax the “rich” and corporations who will pass the tax on to consumers and employees in the form of higher prices and lower wages. And eventually the heretofore untouchable middle class will be taxed directly. Let’s not forget that free food and housing are components of slavery.

These Einsteins are scientists when it comes to global warming and evolution but think it’s medically acceptable to permanently sterilize 7-year olds to avoid appearing like a “transgender” bigot. Science lesson: there are 2 genders. Every human has 23 pairs of chromosomes. The X chromosomes and Ychromosomes determine sex. With rare exceptions of random abnormalities, female is XX and male is XY.

These self-described health care experts try to debunk innovative medical care delivery methods like direct pay and direct primary care subscription practices by claiming these are reserved for the rich. A mere $1,500 per year ensures that you and your doctor, make your medical decisions—not the government. These “experts” are the same people who prop up the medical-insurance-government industrial complex at the expense of private physicians, writing laws that favor big-box retail clinics staffed by non-physicians. These swamp creatures equate physicians with “mid-level” practitioners with one fifth the training and education as physicians—but likely demand the chairman of the department when they themselves need medical services.

These compassionate legislators are keen on the government taking over the “social determinants of health,” including loneliness. I anxiously await an army of a government operatives coming to our homes and telling us to be happy or else. Most people just want to control their own lives, even if their life does not fit the government blueprint. If you want your life to be your own, and your body to be your own, then you cannot let the government’s foot in the door.

These forward thinkers decided it was good public policy to ban children’s fathers from the home in order for the family to receive government funds. It became normalized for the federal government to be the daddy.

These elitists castigate the middle class for not wanting homeless people sleeping and defecating in front of their houses for which they worked two jobs, saved, and sacrificed for years. Their remedy is a tent city in a middle-class neighborhood that is nowhere near theirs. These people do not want to admit that the disintegration of the family and the moral decay leading to drug use and detachment from society is the first problem that must be addressed.

And the biggest hobgoblins of them all are the peddlers of faux racism. Americans do not wake up every morning hating on each other. They ponder their family’s safety and keeping a decent job to pay their bills. Something is seriously wrong, indeed demented, when a former First Lady—unchallenged—claimed that white Americans are “still running” from minority communities when they move to another neighborhood. Perhaps they are getting away from homeless encampments (with mostly white people) or poorly run government schools in Democrat-controlled cities. Get over yourself.

Everything is not about race. Get out in the real world and sit at a local bar or cafe in central Mississippi and watch blacks and whites eating and laughing together. Who is the hatemonger?

America has had a few tragic well-publicized racially motivated incidents. Undaunted, we continue to strive for liberty for all—despite the calculated enmity and scab-picking by rich and famous black people who ran away from minorities to live on a $15 million estate on Martha’s Vineyard (and not in Oak Bluffs) and who expect us to swallow their vitriol-laced baloney.

This insanity is patently sick and sickening. It is about power at any cost and not what can help move America forward.

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