PRESS RELEASE
Illinois Physician: 'Money and Math'
Are Destroying U.S. Health Care;
Statistical Medicine Is Genocide
Nov. 16, 2013 (EIRNS)—This release was issued today by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee.
Dr. Cathy Helgason, a Chicago physician, stressed today on The LaRouche Show (the weekly web-radio program on www.larouchepub.com/radio) that the priority given to "money and math" are destroying the U.S. health care system. She discussed this with Steve Douglas, LaRouche PAC collaborator of Pennsylvania physician Dr. Mark Shelley, who issued a call Oct. 24, for "Doctors Against Murderous Obamacare." Douglas described the surge of support in the state, and elsewhere, for Shelley's initiative, as a medic, to speak out for impeaching Obama, and for presenting the leadership to insist on reinstating Glass-Steagall, to re-start economic activity and health care.
Helgason reported on several of the specific ways that money and cuts to funding for medical care—such as the new Obama Administration rules on hospital admissions, which restrict Medicare reimbursements to hospitals for giving observation treatment (the infamous "two midnight" rule), and other rules restricting tests—are all done to "save money" at the expense of peoples' lives, and to penalize doctors, nurses, and hospitals for trying to give care to their patients.
Dr. Helgason, a neurologist and stroke specialist, presented a walk-through of this admissions nightmare, for a hypothetical stroke case. In fact, because of the outcry against the new outrageous CMS ruling (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services), which went into effect Oct. 1, the CMS announced earlier this month, that it will delay auditing and penalizing hospitals which "over-treat" and "over-admit," for a few months. But the "two-midnights" and many other life-cutting measures under Obamacare remain in effect, with even more to come. They can't be pushed back on an "issue by issue" basis. Only a top-down approach—a revolution—will work, as emphasized by Steve Douglas.
The question why have doctors gone along with the subversion of medicine, was addressed by Helgason, who is a backer of Dr. Shelley's "Doctors Against Murderous Obamacare" initiative. She said that in recent years, physicians have been intimidated and brainwashed into going along with "probability-based statistics" on how to analyze and treat the sick, instead of relying on thought and proceeding from causation. As a physician, you are under fierce pressure to just use the results of statistical studies, on what remedy has the best "chance" of succeeding for "most" patients, instead of starting with the specifics of your individual case. She denounced "gambling with the future of the patient," by just relying on "math" instead of cognition. Helgason has written biting exposures of the imposition of "evidence-based" medicine. (See, for example, "How Statistics Fail Medicine: The Strange Case of Aspirin," in 21st Century Science & Technology/Spring-Summer 2006).
Douglas raised the warnings sounded by Dr. Leo Alexander, the American physician who was the Chief of Counsel for War Crimes at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, from November 1945 to October 1946, in an article in th July 1949 New England Journal of Medicine, entitled "Medical Science Under Dictatorship." Alexander said that the Nazi death camps, "started from small beginnings ... with the acceptance of the attitude, basic in the euthanasia movement, that there is such a thing as a life not worthy to be lived...."
Today, the elderly (Medicare), the poor (Medicaid and uninsured), the cases that are not "clear cut," nor fall into an "approved" category of statistics or regulations, are considered unworthy of the expenditure of limited resources. This is "genocide by statistics," Helgason said.
