As a wet-behind-the-ears medical/public health student, Berkeley graduate, and co-founder the first student chapter of the Medicine/Public Health Initiative, I was drunk on the Kool-Aid of collectivism and "population health." I received an Agency Director's Scholarship to study equity and health outcomes and further refine my quantitative and technocratic skills that would be required to build a fairer society that promoted health justice.
I saw with my own eyes the true nature and aims of so-called "Progressives" in the health care arena. I was in the room when it happened. I heard the conversations. I learned how much hardcore D's despise doctors. I attended brainstorming sessions where people openly talked about abolishing private health care, "re-educating" medical students and residents, and building "Federal Medical Schools" and coaxing applicants with "free tuition." My cohort had seminars with Bernie Sander's health policy aides, Kaiser leadership, upper-level VA bureaucrats, and a coterie of quants who worked with Hillary Clinton's team on health care reform...
One Saturday morning while hiking up Stone Mountain, I understood something I never knew before..."The cake is a lie." Margaret Thatcher was right: The Progressives would rather have the poor poorer so as long as the rich were less rich. To achieve those policy aims, you must necessarily take things from other people--things you did not earn and things that did not belong to you. Moreover, I saw how crucial it was to co-opt medicine for political purposes--as the Nazi's did and many, many other groups that sought to institute social control over the masses. It became clear to me that the employment of physicians and other "providers" by large institutions was necessary to achieve those aims. That's how you yolk people to the cause---promote their dependency and limit their choices.
I quietly finished my project on "Race and other Social Determinants of Maternal-Child Health on the Incidence Sudden Infant Death Syndrome" and returned to Texas vowing to never forget what I heard and learned from the public health elite. I re-read my "go-to" books--Catch-22, House of God, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas--and re-dedicated myself to other causes...
www.nytimes.com
