``The nation is facing two threats,'' writes Craig Cantoni of Scottsdale, AZ. ``The first comes from nations and terrorists that hate us and possess weapons of mass destruction. The second is from a different kind of weapon of mass destruction, a more insidious kind, the kind that is slowly but surely destroying us from within through mass entitlement spending, mass bureaucracy, mass taxation, and mass consumer and government debt.
``Examples of the second type of WMD can be found in the 678-page Medicare reform bill being debated in Congress. The bill reads as if an enemy wrote it to strangle the nation in red tape and to bring us to our knees with the army of bureaucrats, lawyers and consultants that will be needed to interpret what the legislation says.''
Price controls, already a fearsome weapon in Medicare, are part of many clauses in the ``reform'' bill that ``could have been lifted directly from a commissar's manual in the former Soviet Union, where central planning resulted in mass starvation under Stalin and bare store shelves under his successors'':
``The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission shall submit to the Secretary, not later than July 1, 2005, a report on adjustment of payment for ambulatory payment classifications for specified covered outpatient drugs to take into account overhead and related expenses, such as pharmacy services and handling costs.''
For acknowledged administrative costs, the act appropriates $1 billion to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and $500 million to the Social Security Administration. Cantoni states that the costs of the ``678 pages of gobbledegook'' will be ten times more than the government estimates, which never include costs imposed on the private sector and individuals. Nor do they include opportunity costs of shifting resources and talented individuals from productive work into regulatory compliance.
Then there's the cost of the $400 billion entitlement itself, only a small part of which will be borne by the beneficiaries; most will be imposed on current and future taxpayers. This is on top of an already huge unfunded liability for entitlements. With the prescription drug benefit, Medicare is projected to devour more than 35% of the GDP (not just of the federal treasury) by 2077, as opposed to nearly 10% without the new expansion, according to the National Taxpayers Union and Federation ( www.thelibertycommittee.org/deadlycombo.pdf).
Present trends, of course, are unsustainable. One can say that ``our policies today will force future taxpayers to bear a burden more than twice as great as our own children will bear'' (Is War Between Generations Inevitable? NCPA Policy Report 246). However, one cannot force impoverished people to disgorge twice as much revenue. Something else will happen. The longer reform is delayed, the worse the ultimate fallout will be.
In the 2003 biannual Medicare survey of members of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, 13% expected active euthanasia of Medicare beneficiaries 10 years from now. Only 9% anticipated roughly the same treatment as now; 58%, severely rationed care; and 36%, complete collapse of the system (J Am Phys Surg 2003;8:112-113).
In a letter to the editor of JAMA, Meryl Nass, M.D., criticized the study cited in the Sept. issue of this newsletter, stating that adverse reaction rates in the military's smallpox vaccine program were derived from passive, not active surveillance. ``Therefore, the very favorable comparison of military adverse effects to historical rates is misleading.'' Also, the total number of serious adverse reactions in civilians, including 5 myocardial infarctions and 1 stroke, is 71, or 1 in 500 vaccinations. (JAMA 2003;290:2123-2124).
Dr. Nass states that the reply to her letter by Col. John Grabenstein magnifies the errors in the initial report. ``Reports to headquarters'' represent passive, not active surveillance, she observes.
The military authors claimed that in the case of 22-year-old Rachel Lacy, ``pericarditis had not been diagnosed at that time.'' However, the autopsy report by a Mayo Clinic pathologist, and the death certificate, reported ``lymphocytic pericarditis with eosinophils, post-vaccination, and diffuse alveolar damage.''
Dr. Grabenstein told Dr. Nass that ``we don't accept diagnoses from outside the military'' (Insight Sept 30/Oct 13, 2003).
Spc. Lacy had received anthrax, smallpox, typhoid, hepatitis B, and measles-mumps-rubella vaccine simultaneously one month before she died with lupus-like symptoms. Her stored serum had some markers for lupus, and lupus patients are at higher risk from live vaccines.
In the military medical culture, Dr. Nass suggests, the mission trumps good medical practice.
For the cost of implementing the Kyoto Protocol in the single year of 2010 ($150 to $350 billion), we could permanently supply the world's greatest health need: clean drinking water and sanitation for everyone. Yet the maximum hypothetical gain from the Protocol would be to postpone a temperature rise from 2100 to 2106, according to Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist.
The doom-mongers' idea of comparing global warming with weapons of mass destruction is, ``to put it mildly, misleading,'' states Dr. Lomborg. As global temperatures have warmed [since the Little Ice Age], minimum temperatures have risen much more than the maximums, and China has actually seen a decrease in maximum temperatures. Most warming has occurred at night-time and in winter, and three-quarters has occurred over very cold areas of Siberia and Canada (Sunday Telegraph (U.K.) 8/10/03, reprinted in TWTW 9/13/03, see www.sepp.org).
Is preventing improvements in sanitation by squandering resources on Kyoto the functional equivalent of destroying infrastructure with a WMD?
In the ten years that Kyoto has been the focus of billions of spending, 15 million children have died before their fifth birthday because of contaminated water. Not one person has died from catastrophic, human-caused global warming, and probably no one ever will (MacRae AMR, Calgary Sun, see www.sepp.org).
Fortunately, the so-called Climate Stewardship Act sponsored by Senators McCain (R-AZ) and Lieberman (D-CT), which would have implemented Kyoto without the necessity of ratification, failed to pass. Pete du Pont estimated that it would have increased U.S. energy costs 30 to 50% and reduced the GDP by $106 billion, the equivalent of a $1,000 tax on every American household. It probably would have eliminated about 50,000 jobs in the coal industry.
``Passage of the bill would have placed the U.S. in the anomalous position of formally declaring its opposition to the economically disastrous requirements of Kyoto, while at the same time unilaterally implementing them''-even if Kyoto fails to go into force, an increasingly likely prospect if Russia refuses to ratify it (S. Fred Singer, TWTW 11/8/03, www.sepp.org).
Russian President Vladimir Putin said that despite the sales of spare emissions credits, Kyoto would become an economic albatross (WSJ 10/28/03).
The 22nd annual meeting of DDP is slated for the weekend of June 26-27 at the San Diego Marriott Mission Valley. Mark your calendars now!
DDP, 1601 N. Tucson Blvd. Suite 9, Tucson, AZ 85716, (520)325-2680, www.oism.org/ddp.