By Matthew Ehret-Kump

In April 2009, the LaRouche Political Action Committee, a PAC known to represent Democratic candidates for Congressional office, targeted the Health Care legislation of Barak Obama as a “Nazi useless eater program”. A Hitler moustache on Obama’s upper lip became famous soon thereafter, and a scandal unprecedented in American history, broke out. While many a right wing reactionary jumped on the bandwagon accusing the Obama administration of “socialism”, anyone studying the LaRouchePAC literature would find something much different behind the evaluation of this Nazi-resurgance with a “democratic face”.

The core of the LarouchePAC evaluation was not to be found in the “state directed” universal health care proposal so adamantly attacked by right wing simpletons, a measure Lyndon LaRouche had in fact supported for decades[1]. It was to be found, however, in the swarm of economic behaviorists that had entered into the white house as Obama’s cabinet and inner circle of advisors. This click of ideologues represented by such creeps as Cass Sunstein, Larry Summers, Daniel Ariely, Ezekiel Emmanuel and Peter Orszag had made the focus of Obama’s presidency not one of “universalizing healthcare”, but rather “balancing the budget” in tackling the looming “baby boomer timebomb”. Peter Orszag claimed that over one trillion dollars could be saved, while the 50 million uncovered Americans would receive access to care.

The thinking citizen would ask; “if more people shall receive coverage after a reform, then how will significantly less money be spent?” How could such a paradox be overcome? The dark resolution to this paradox would be apparent in the policy guideline that had been outlined succinctly in Emmanuel’s 2008 “Principles of Allocation of Finite Medical Resources”[2] where the obligation to eliminate lives that were not worthy to be lived was outlined in blood curling terms. The means to achieve this cost saving effect would involve the application of the British National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) system of Tony Blair fame. With NICE, a quality adjusted life year (QALY) model[3] would be introduced as a universal standard of value to determine which citizen would receive “expensive medical treatment” and which would be only given morphine drops or palliative care, based upon “cost effective” considerations.

The regulator of this QALY system could not be trusted to those “selfish” doctors who were inclined to thoughtlessly provide whatever medical treatment they thought fit to their patients without consideration for monetary values. To try to gain public support against the doctors, multiple references had been made by Obama and his behaviourist hive regarding the “selfish” tendency of doctors to provide unnecessary treatment simply in order to get money from insurance companies. The enforcer of such a program could only be an anonymous board of “experts” outside of the control of congress or the constitution. The name of this group would be the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), and would be the pivot of the whole reform. This was also known euphemistically as the “death panels” by accusators who sadly often knew very little about their subject. Today, a similar reform is silently underway in Canada.

The Irony of Canadian Healthcare

The irony of the Canadian Health Care structure is that due to the nature of Canada’s historic role as an imperial tool used to undermine American System advances in the United States, the seemingly “progressive” policies in Canada such as universal health coverage, have never fully originated from a principle of the general welfare. Without progressive advances having been made in the United States, and the activity of patriots in Canada who capitalized on the waves made by the likes of Lincoln, FDR or JFK, it is fair to say that Canada would never have evolved from its status as a cash cropping fur trading outpost to a modernized society.

It is from this sense of history that one may appreciate the progressive healthcare advances experienced in Canada, while at the same time not be ignorant to the utilitarian bane of Canada’s health system as it has always operated under the top down influence of a centralized empire in London (though with administrative and funding rights to the highly fragmented provinces to keep up an appearance of free choice). This is an empire which demands that the population not exert any influence on those processes which most affect their lives[4], while demanding an adherence to utilitarian, monetarist logic in as far as the empire is able. It is this framework, which has led over the years to the contracting of healthcare resources and utilitarian practice of euthanasia an “open secret” in the Canadian health system.

Turning Canada into a Fascist Meat Grinder

As of 2009, the Health Council of Canada produced a widely read paper drawing attention to the dire need for Healthcare reform in Canada called Value for Money: Making Canadian Healthcare Stronger[5]. Just as in the USA and Britain earlier, the baby boomers were retiring, it was argued, at an unsustainable rate and that in merely a matter of 10 years there would be a disproportionate amount of retirees sustained by far too few active employees. To make matters worse, the Federal Healthcare transfer payments allotted to the provinces for Medicare would be expiring in 2014 leaving a system doomed to collapse were broad reforms not undertaken soon. This report not only supported the NICE and QALY system, but also echoed the “ethical dilemma” highlighted in Ezekiel Emmanuel’s 2008 paper of the very old and pre-mat young who receive enormously expensive care, and whose survival rates, and QALYs are statistically low, emphasizing that waste costs are to blame with extending lives but not quality (or cost efficiency).

The call for health reform was echoed first by right wing think tanks such as the Frasier and CD Howe Institutes, and then publicly by Prime Minister Stephen Harper very soon thereafter. A harsh public backlash was received by the PM, sending much public discussion of reform under wraps for the time being.

Now in July 2012, while the complete disintegration of the financial system is well underway, it is worth noting two relevant elements of the resurgence of health care reform being set in motion. This two fold resurgence takes the form of healthcare reform on the one side being pushed primarily by an infiltration and brainwashing of leading representatives of the Canadian Nurses Association (CNA), and the legalization of euthanasia on the other. In both cases, heart wrenching anecdotal case studies are used to argue for “compassion” while the real top down intention of the architects of such programs, like the Obamacare before it, have only utilitarian views of life, and budgetary considerations in mind.

In mid 2011, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released a report demanding Canada act promptly to overhaul its unsustainable healthcare arrangements[6]. The fruits of the IMF report began to be felt in June 2012, when the results of an 8 month long study were released during a national conference held in Vancouver, British Columbia by the Canadian Nurses’ Association[7]. The contents of the C.N.A reports allow us an insight into the rationale of this deadly logic. The study was spearheaded by a group that had formed in May 2011 known as the National Experts’ Council (NEC). Among the 13 person group representing the 260 000 registered nurses across Canada are 12 medical professionals and one dubious character by the name of Thomas d’Aquino. D’Aquino has made a name for himself over the years as a high level operative in the Canadian oligarchy having first worked in the Privy Council office serving as Deputy minister in the 1970s, and then having been the president of the secretive Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) for over 20 years, representing the CEOs of the biggest financial institutions and Corporations across Canada. In 2009, d’Aquino left his post to Privy Councillor John Manley, and has since devoted his energy to healthcare reform on the NEC. As a self described “disciple of Schumpeteer and the Market”, d’Aquino has advocated the ideology of creative destruction such that economic collapses are considered the greatest opportunities to force revolutionary change in social customs.

The influence of d’Aquino can be felt in the results of two published documents presented during the Vancouver conference of 2012, namely A Nursing Call to Action and Better Value: An Analysis of the Impact of Current Healthcare System Funding[8].

The three most Orwellian aspects of the proposed cost saving measures featured in the reports are: 1) Information technologies to usher in evidence-based medicine, 2) Remove the power of allocating care from the physicians, and 3) Encouraging end-of-life care as a replacement to expensive “acute” care. Let us take a closer look at the treatment of these three components below:

1) Using modern technologies may sound good, until one realizes that those technologies advocated by the NEC do not include more MRIs, or actual life saving equipment, but rather “information tech”. Actual reliance on “technological solutions” is actually deemed part of the problem by the authors. According to the authors, having databases (not at all a bad thing in itself) is the key component to ushering in a truly universal “evidence-based” system of treating patients. The evidence based method is useful on an assembly line, but in regards to scientific diagnoses, serves to merely de-humanize the medical process whereby cold computer programs are given increasing power to determine effective treatment rather than the minds and insight of the doctor.

2) Removing the power of prescribing care from physicians who have little regard for cost, and putting it into the hands of “teams”. As one section of an NEC report describes: “Our focus on acute treatment makes family physicians gatekeepers, and their training is to send patients for specialized diagnostics and treatment, which in recent years have often been offered in hospitals and other institutions. We cannot break out of the cycle of sickness-doctor-acute care until we make the choice to fund differently and re-inforce the shift to team-based community care with plans for more accountability for health spending… We need funding to support the delivery of evidence-based care through strong primary health care networks, with teams working together to increase access to well-integrated care. Care should be accessible wherever it is most safe, effective and affordable.” This “team treatment” policy is no different from the Obamacare in either form or function. Under Obamacare, it is known as the Accountable Care Organization System, in which there are penalties, some of which are already going into effect, for hospitals carrying out too many readmissions, especially for older people.

3) Keeping chronically ill and terminal patients at home instead of occupying expensive hospital beds whereby it is advertised that $20 000/year per patient could be saved. It is asserted that “statistically speaking” 15% of hospital beds are being used wastefully by patients who could have merely stayed at home benefiting from the occasional help of a visiting nurse. Overall, 85% of medical resources are consumed by 5% of the population, most of whom would rather die in the comfort of their own home then live longer sustained in a cold hospital. The Nursing Call to Action quotes from a Royal Society of Canada- Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association report to the Senate calling for “ensuring that resources that could be better used for wanted palliative care are not diverted to unwanted acute care”. This brings us into the second component to the orchestrated transformation in the healthcare paradigm… euthanasia.

Eliminating the Elderly

It is no coincidence that the attempt to circumvent the doctors associations which have demonstrated a resistance to the new reforms by brainwashing the nurses association is moving in line with an unprecedented push for euthanasia legalization in the Canadian legal system. On June 15, merely 7 days before the Vancouver NSA conference, BC Supreme Court Judge Lynn Smith delivered a ruling that a physicians’ denial of assisted suicide is unconstitutional. Even though the Parliament came up with a negative decision on the issue of physician assisted suicide in April 2010, Judge Smith gave the parliament one year to amend its laws.

Natalie Sonnen , a spokeswoman for the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition of B.C responded that “when you place the killing in the hands of medical practictioners there is no way to control that. This decision was made in an ideal situation where there would be no abuse or intentions to kill vulnerable people. Once you grant assisted suicide as a right, which is where we are headed, it becomes a right for all, whether you are deemed competent to make the decision or not” adding that 38% of doctors polled anonymously in places where assisted suicide is legal admitted to killing patients without their consent. Echoing this warning, on June 19 2012, Professor Pullicino, a leading British neurologist speaking at the Royal Society of Medicine revealed that 130 000 elderly patients are killed every year in the NICE reformed Liverpool Care Pathway system. Among the patrons of this system is none other than the son of his royal virus himself, Prince Charles.

Let us make no mistake. The Canadian health care system, like that of its American counterpart, is sick. The high quality healthcare system of the Bretton Woods epoch is a far cry from what is being dealt with today. The systemic change effected by Nixon’s 1971 decoupling of money from physical economy, and the 1973 nixing of the Hill Burton system has resulted in a healthcare system which has been subsumed within a logic of monetarism. Increasingly, as the sacredness of human life was deemed unworthy of monetary concerns in the domain of globalization, the other branches of modern civilization were expected to conform to the new rules of “each against all”, and “supply and demand’ by the high priests such as Milton Friedman, Paul Volcker, Von Hayek and Alan Greenspan. Monetary prosperity could flourish if the sources of wealth were monetized and turned into commodities for speculation, while “non-profitable” overhead such as infrastructure maintenance and improvement was cut increasingly to produce what LaRouche defined in the 1960s as “fictitious capital”.

Through such a wasting process, underinvestment into the “non profitable” healthcare infrastructure in Canada and the privatization of healthcare infrastructure in the USA resulted in increasing deaths all around. While in Canada, citizens were increasingly receiving lower quality services and longer waiting times for life saving tests, in the United States, whole sections of poorer citizens were thrown under the bus completely via Nixon’s HMO law of 1973 making healthcare inaccessible for whole sections of the population.

What Must Be Done

The key solution to this crisis is not to be found within the context of the collapsing monetary order or its associated rules, but only in a fundamental change in the system itself. While the demographic crisis is real, it must be recognized that the monetary burden is nothing but a chimera. It is only by re-introducing a global commitment to the future through high energy intensive projects such as the North America Water and Power Alliance, Arctic and Space development that the real wealth generation so necessary to offset the retiring baby boomers may be effected. This process must be modelled upon the experience of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal of 1933 and may only be unleashed were Canada to participate in the global drive for a Glass Steagall separation of banking, and a return to the principles of Hamiltonian National Banking utilizing a newly chartered Bank of Canada as a public conduit for issuing productive long term, low interest credit into the real (ie: not speculative, not entertainment) economy.

In a time of peace, there is never a reason to triage healthcare, and the argument that there are such things as “finite medical resources“ and “budgets that must be balanced at all costs regardless of human suffereing“ must ever be tolerated. Seen from a higher vantage point, of top down intentions, we find that such logical conclusions are nothing but fascist mental traps set for the uncreative and immoral among us. Men and women worthy of the title `civilized human` do not bow down to the gods of the market place under any condition, nor are they respectful of the limits to the quantity or quality of life of each human being set by those same `gods`.

It is only from the future vantage point that a truly systemic change can occur. In such a system, the ancient truths extolled by Roosevelt would have to be re-discovered and restored in the temple of civilization, that value is not a measure of utilitarian or monetary considerations, but rather of the efficient power of every creative mind, regardless of the age of its associated body, that allows for the successful growth of our nation and the species ever more unboundedly into the depths of the solar system, galaxy and higher cosmos which in the end, is our true birthright, environment and home.