Discuss: Conservation and Eugenics

Willem — Wouldn’t universal medical services provided to all without insurance or any payments by individuals other than their regular taxes be a simpler solution? Any other system represents rationing what should be a human right.

There needs to be a hysteresis of mutualism. As such, it’s my sense there needs to be a filtering structure at the care delivery threshold.

Amidst the pathologies of the present institutional constructs, there is considerable wisdom that has been selected for and embodied in the present system.

My fear is physician innovation and adaptation will be sacrificed. We need to select for and sustain creativity and liberty in profession and practice in our physicians. They medical schools and the current hospital orthodoxy have been toxic and for institutional self-interest are significantly pathological actors in disrupting and deteriorating patient-focused medicine. They are case focused; procedure focused; the institutional presumption is Victorian—a concretized view of humanity and human physiology. This has led to the “single bullet” problem that has ravaged the efficiency of medical practice. This is allopathy. Code-based medical practice. This is auto-mechanic predetermined “administrated” procedure. It is following rules as dictated by non-attending authorities.

The authority needs to working for the patient in their presence, with the unfolding clinical path a product of mutualism and customization involving the patient and attending physician as mutual co-learners.

For this to operate, we cannot have other parties hiring the physicians. The physician must work for the patient, as the professional and as the trustee of the patient’s interest in the emerging knowledge base of human medicine.

Thus, the market-based wisdom of private medical insurance companies—they are currently mispositioned, but they are ideal for servicing the administration of the services and payments exchanged between patients and physicians, and the dealing with the managed non-conformances that “the law of large numbers” will spontaneously impose.

What has destroyed the greater social utility of the medical insurance providers is the creation of group and family policies. This is a preposterous construct. All human medicine is individual. If there are to be insurance policies, then they should be etches.

There is a good argument for federally sponsored premiums for all citizens under the age of 27. In this construct, no premium is directly paid by the insured in this age construct, yet, the Treasury would pay the premium directly to the medical insurance servicer, who in turn was required to purchase mandatory stop loss reinsurance from the the Treasury. This loop would require little enforcement. The most tragic medical events would exceed the stop loss and flow to the treasury, but the servicing insurer would continue to administrate and receive the monthly premium for that patient, until the patient becomes dissatisfied and changes to a different insurer who must operate identical policy and stop loss terms.

This keeps the market in the market and the government providing infrastructure only, using the population base to norm the beta of per patient costs. These are easily adjusted by changing the premiums charged for stop loss coverages, or by other budgetary devices available to the government. This allows our population to use our governmental tax base to deal with the occasional surges of morbidity that will hammer the economics of otherwise normed medical delivery.

Now, the international financial scions dictate what the stop loss premiums will be. They can guarantee their profits and pick winners and losers in how they rate the medical insurer the public buys their insurance from.

This also get’s the “ER” cost problem under control.

As for the hospital, most physical plants—however lovely and renewed—are obsolete architectural behemoths that are profoundly inefficient and incredibly expensive to maintain. Consideration needs to be given to building Hospital infrastructure as a national priority and domestic security infrastructure no different than the interstate highway system, hydroelectric infrastructure, airport infrastructure, etc. Our government does these things well.

What our government (and any government) does poorly is contemporaneously serve and protect the individual citizen in the moments of individual living. They are not present. They have no capacity to manage the needs of the individual. There is no authority for this type of variation and adaptive largesse. Government does this very very poorly.

Conversely, government will very effectively cartelize the reinsurance stop loss markets in medical insurance and will be a reliable and competent trustee of the public interest if kept reasonably separated fro the quasi-criminal syndicates favored by Congress and the national political parties.

What must be prevented? No government intrusion or usurpation whatsoever in the dynamic between the patient and the duly licensed physician of their choosing.

Deny no citizen the right to choose their physician or to ultimately decide the treatments which will determine the condition of their life.

But today, such liberty will cause the cartelized culture of Hospitals to financially rape the system with scandalously inflated charges for services provided by the hospital.

The problem is not the physician, nor is it the patient.

The problem is the university, hospitals and transnational reinsurance cartels who exist to become wealthy and pay huge salaries and dividends to select few by parasitizing the traumatic drama that brings physician and patient together for intensive and life-saving care.

Let us invest in their judgment and keep the government and their cartelizing proxies locked out.

Obamacare is all about giving cartelizing proxies control of the patient-physician relationship, and by virtue of a remarkably corrupt Congress and President, and medical university bureaucratic cohort, they intend to usurp our government to guarantee them a monopoly of cartelized insider-dealings.

When that happens, our citizenship becomes an artifact of rhetoric.

Obamacare makes “subjects” of our citizens, and reduces all to the corrupted and self-serving whims of neo-feudal elites.

Enter the permanent ruling class. The rest of us will be but livestock to be bred, worked and rendered at their pleasure.

I previously commented on this article, find the topic very interesting.  This year I found myself with a brain tumor that required immediate surgery.  It was astonishing that no one considered whether I was worth it, whether preserving me was worth it, they just did it, they saved me.  Not sure why this strikes me as strange, the economic mind I guess, but it also strikes me as profoundly and traditionally American.  We want to save everyone, we rescue animals. hurricane victims, everyone.  The current viciousness, mean-spiritedness, in our politics, curiously coming loudest from those who label themselves Christians, is astounding.  Indeed I had the job and the means to have health insurance, but that was because, back in the day, California had the means and wisdom to provide me a public education through law school at low cost and I’ve had a job and paid taxes ever since.  (In a world run by for-profit corporations this would never have happened, and scary that seems to be the country’s direction right now.)  But no one seemed to ask whether I’d “earned it” either.  So apart from all the rhetoric, I feel a lot of gratitude for living in an incredible country with an amazing medical system.  Without an MRI machine, and all those educated people (who joked that it was just brain surgery, not rocket science) I would never have been treated and might well have died.  Darwin didn’t get his way and besides my kids are grown.

I am most impressed by this article, but feel for Wohlforth. It’s a terrible death to confront the ugly truths embedded within any set of comfortable assumptions. Like the author, I remember my first unlikely encounter with the zombie of “racial progress.” In my case it was a transcript of a local Chicago public interest program from 1959 that featured Julian Huxley discussing the precepts of “scientific” or “evolutionary humanism.” This stupid little sound bite sent me down the rabbit hole, past Hardin’s “Commons” and Ehrlich’s “Bomb,” past Sax’s “Explosion” and Vogt’s “Road,” and even past Huxley’s “Religion” and Grant’s “Passing,” to the crazy Progressive era cabal that mixed advocacy for birth control, suffrage, socialism, prohibition, immigration restriction, skull measurement, censorship, conservation, and efficient resource management into a terribly explosive cocktail that, if it were not for the Nazi’s, might have exploded in the United States. While it is true that our simplistic eugenic ideology, which prioritized progress and purity, gave way beginning in the 1940s to a more complex ecological ideology, which prioritizes cycles and diversity, dark strains of the former remain woven into the latter. Recognizing them does not make the rope weaker. It breeds humility and allows us compensate.

Much more intellectual honesty, moral courage and humanistic action is needed. We are about to become a species of 7 billion overconsumers, overproducers and overpopulaters on a finite and frangible planet where resources are dissipating and environs degrading rapidly. As we observe absolute global human population numbers continue to soar exponentially, despite reduced fertiliy rates in many places, we also recognize that never in the course of human events have so few taken so much from so many and determined to leave so little for others.

During my lifetime, when human numbers explode from less than 2.3+ bn to 7+ bn worldwide, many experts may not have known enough about what they were talking about when they spoke of human population dynamics and all causes of the human overpopulation of Earth. Their research appears not to be scientific, but rather issues from ideological or totalitarian thinking, or from a specious group-think consensus. Their all-too-attractive thinking, as viewed by greedmongers, is willfully derived from what is politically convenient, economically expedient, socially agreeable, religiously tolerable and culturally prescribed. Widely broadcast and long-accepted thinking from an astonishingly large number of so-called experts in the field of population dynamics appears to have an unscientific foundation, and is likely wrong. Their preternatural theorizing about the population dynamics of the human species appears to be both incomplete and misleading. Most disturbing of all, a widely shared and consensually validated theory about a benign “demographic transition” leading to automatic population stabilization a mere four decades from now is directly contradicted by unchallenged scientific research. As a consequence, and it is a pernicious consequence, a woefully inadequate and fundamentally flawed theory has been broadcast during my lifetime and continues to be broadcast everywhere by the mainstream media as if it is not only science but the best available scientific evidence. The implications of this unfortunately dishonest behavior, inasmuch as it appears to be based upon contrived, ideologically-induced logic as well as an undeniable misperception of what could somehow be real regarding the human population, appear profound. This failure of nerve by ‘the brightest and the best’ has slowed the momentum needed to confront a formidable, human-forced global predicament, one that looms ominously before the human family in our time.
In their elective mutism regarding an incredible error of thought and perception during my life cycle, are first class professional researchers with expertise in population dynamics behaving badly by allowing the “ninety-nine percenters” to be misguided and led down a primrose path by the “one percenters”? The power of silence on the part of knowledgeable human beings with feet of clay is dangerous because research is being denied that appears to shed light upon a dark, non-recursive biological problem, the understanding of which appears vital to future human well being and environmental health. Too many experts appear to be ignoring science regarding the human population.  By way of their willful mutism they effectively consent to the leviathan scale and unbridled expansion of global overproduction, overconsumption and overpopulation activities that are being actively pursued as well as silently condoned by greedmongering masters of the universe, the tiny minority among us who are primarily responsible for ravaging the Earth, ruining its environs and reducing its fitness for habitation by the children. If this assessment of human behavior is indeed a fair representation of what is happening on our watch, then the desire to preserve the status quo, mainly the selfish interests of ‘the powers that be’, could be at least one basis for so much intellectually dishonest and morally bereft behavior. Could it be that the outrageous per capita overconsumption, large-scale corporate overproduction and unrestricted overpopulation activities of the human species worldwide cannot continue much longer on a planet with the size, composition and ecology of a finite and frangible planet like Earth?

For human beings to count human population numbers is simple, really simple. The population dynamics of human beings with feet of clay are obvious and fully comprehensible. We have allowed ourselves to be dazzled by the BS of too many demographers just the way human beings have been deceived and victimized by a multitude of economists on Wall Street. Demographers and economists are not scientists. The brightest and the best have sold their souls to greedmongers, duped the rest of us, made it difficult to see what is real, proclaimed what is knowable as unknowable, and deceitfully engaged in the their own brands of alchemy. In their duplicitous efforts to please self-proclaimed masters of the universe, also known as the keepers of the ‘golden calf’ (a symbol easily visible now as the “raging bull” on Wall Street), they perpetrate frauds at everyone elses expense, threaten the childrens future, put life as we know it at risk, and are deliberately precipitating the destruction of Earth as a fit place for human habitation.

There are many too many overly educated “wise guys” among us who see the blessed world we inhabit through the lens of their own hubris and selfishness, and see themselves somehow as Homo sapiens sapiens and masters of the universe, as corporate kings and emperors with clothes. They supposedly are ”the smartest guys in the room”, like the guy who used to run the global political economy without recognizing that there was an “ideological flaw” in his economic theories and models, the same guy who reported he could not name 5 guys smarter than himself. These are guys who have denied science, abjectly failed humanity, forsaken life as we know it, the Earth and God. These ideologues rule the world now and can best be characterized by their malignant narcissism, pathological arrogance, extreme foolishness, addiction to risk-taking and wanton greed.

The idea that our descendants would make the same colossal mistakes we are making now, because knowledgeable people in our time chose to remain hysterically blind, deaf and electively mute rather than acknowledge science, is absolutely unacceptable.  If such an impossible thing was to occur, would a conscious determination not to fulfill both a responsibility to science and a duty to warn humanity be tantamount to the greatest failure of nerve by the brightest and best in human history?  If aware and responsible human beings were to be granted the opportunity “to will one thing“, let it be that we share widely an adequate enough understanding of all extant science which discloses the population dynamics of the human species to the family of humanity, so those who come after us do not take the “primrose path” we are trodding now, a path that has been adamantly advocated and relentlessly pursued at the behest of the most arrogant, avaricious, foolhardy, wealthy and powerful movers and shakers on our watch, a path to confront some unimaginable, human-driven sort of colossal global ecological wreckage.