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January
19
2023

In my Lifetime I Have Witnessed the Death of Independent Medicine and Fair Trials
Paul Craig Roberts

I often refer to how much of America has been eroded away during my lifetime, so much so that the country  into which I was born no longer exists.  Younger people don’t know what’s been lost as they never experienced the real America.  What is normal to people is what they are born into and grow up with.  The numerous infringements on individual freedom, for example, that exist today as normal and unquestioned would have been impossible in my youth.  

Is your doctor in private practice or is he an employee of a HMO or a health care provider such as a hospital’s corporate empire?  

Why does it matter?  If he is a corporate employee, he has lost his independence and has to comply, regardless of his judgment, with protocols handed down by the likes of Tony Fauci and Big Pharma as in the restrictions placed on Covid treatment.  Corporate employees were prohibited from saving lives by treating Covid patients with Ivermectin or HCQ.  Those who thought the Hippocratic Oath protected them and ignored the protocols in order to save lives did so at the cost of their jobs and medical licenses.   Doctors in private practice  cannot be fired, but medical boards can still go after them, but it is not as easy.

Over the course of my life I have watched the gradual erosion of medical independence.  It has occurred through a variety of means.  Medicine in the US today is a price controlled business.  Medicare and private insurance companies set the prices doctors are paid for the range of services and treatments.  The prices discriminate against doctors in private practice. There is one set of prices for corporate medical practice and another set with lower prices for doctors in private practice.  The intentional effect is to drive doctors out of private practice.  I have watched it happen to my doctors.

A study in 2021 found that “Physician reimbursement for services performed by a doctor working for a hospital or health system is significantly higher than that paid to independent physicians for the same services, according to a recent Health Serves Research study.” 

The report states: ”Medicare reimbursement for physician services would have been $114 000 higher per physician per year if a physician were integrated compared to being non-integrated. Primary care physicians faced a 78% increase, medical specialists 74%, and surgeons 224%.”

It is the same with private insurance. HMOs are reimbursed more than doctors in private practice.

Notice the use of language as well as the massive difference in payment rates.  A doctor who is an employee and has lost his independence is “integrated,” while a doctor in independent practice is “non-integrated.”  To me “non-integrated” sounds like someone who is positioned outside the approved way of practicing medicine and most certainly is not a profit maximizer. The onus is on him to get “integrated.”

Ask yourself what reason could there be for the massive difference in payments other than to terminate the independence of medicine by driving  doctors out of private practice?  It is an expensive undertaking with integrated doctors costing $114,000  more each annually, but worth it to someone.

This is Big Pharma’s agenda.  Once private practice is extinguished, Big Pharma and its marketing agents–NIH, CDC, FDA, WHO–can control treatment protocols for the purpose of maximizing Big Pharma’s profits or injecting people with “vaccines” that reduce population in accordance with the agenda of WEF, global warming, and Bill Gates.  Big Pharma already controls most medical research and thereby the findings as 70% of medical research is funded by Big Pharma research grants.  Former editors of the two most prestigious medical journals have said that the articles published in the journals cannot be trusted because of Big Pharma’s funding.

Think back to the way that the fear that drove people to be vaccinated with an untested substance was whipped up by financial incentives given to hospitals to report every death as a Covid death.  Think back to the use of the inappropriate PCR “Covid test” that produces 97% false positives. Both were orchestrations that drove people to be vaccinated.  Remember also that you couldn’t use airlines to travel without being vaccinated, or go to school, or play on a sports team, or work for government, or be in the military, or be a hospital nurse, hospital doctor, or airline pilot, etc.

All of this and more was used to achieve as complete a vaccination of the population as was possible despite the known fact that you never mass vaccinate in the face of a pandemic because the result is numerous variants and the undermining of natural immunity.

In other words, already there is enough control over medical science as to effectively silence the truth.  This is especially easy as the Western world does not have an independent print and TV media and as many Internet sites  are funded by entities interested in controlling explanations.

I don’t yet know the full history of the organized attack on private practice.  I am not speaking of “socialized medicine” as corporate medicine is private.  I do know that ObamaCare caused payment differences between private practice and corporate medicine to grow larger because independent doctors and physical therapists told me of their attempts to become affiliated with corporate medicine so their billings could be sent as corporate and failing this sold their practices to HMO chains and retired on the proceeds.

In short, and without any doubt, independent medicine in the United States (in these days of Identity Politics an oxymoron) is doomed and on the way out.

What does it mean for us?  It means that in place of the Hippocratic Oath there will be Big Pharma’s profit-serving or the elite’s population control agendas.

If the points I am making have been made before, I have not seen any sign of them. And I don’t expect this article to get the attention of any investigative journalist in the print and TV media.  We are silently losing the ability to get medical care and are slated to be used for private agendas.

But this must be illegal you say!  So what?  Don’t expect any action by the legal system.  US Senator Ron Johnson held hearings on the alleged pandemic and the adverse effects of the mRNA “vaccines.”  But he was smeared, and the hearings were ignored.

The House Republicans have promised an investigation, but it is unlikely to happen.  The presstitutes will label them “conspiracy theorists” and Big Pharma will target them with political campaign contributions to their election opponents.

In my book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions (2000) I showed that Justice is a thing of the past.  It has been a long time since trials were held to determine innocence or guilt.  Today innocence or guilt is resolved with plea bargains.  According to US Department of Justice (sic) statistics, 97% of felonies are settled by plea bargains.

A plea bargain, not a trial defense, is the work of defense attorney’s today.  The defendant faces a charge, and his lawyer works with the prosecutor’s office to reduce the charge to a less severe one in exchange for not contesting the charge.  This provides the prosecutor with a conviction which builds his effectiveness and chances of running for public office, while freeing his time and the trial judge’s from trial use.  A week or longer of time is saved in an hour or two of negotiation.

The defendant even if innocent submits to incriminating himself, a Constitutional prohibition, because his attorney tells him that if he goes to trail, exculpatory evidence can be withheld, prosecutors can bribe people to give evidence against him, that the judge will tolerate all this, and that the system exists to produce convictions, not innocence or guilt.  The defendant’s attorney tells him from experience that the longer he holds out on a plea deal the greater the chance that the charges will increase in order to pressure him and the harder to negotiate a light sentence.

The result of plea bargain deals is that police evidence and the prosecutor’s case are seldom tested.  As they are seldom tested before jurors, we have no idea of the justice of any conviction.

As I have previously informed readers, when I was young a defendant who experienced conviction in the media, as did Derek Chauvin, would have had the case against him dropped by the judge on the grounds that it was impossible to swear in an objective jury.

But this protection of defendants against the media has also been discarded.  

I am confident that many of those who submit to plea bargains are innocent.  I am also confident that those who are guilty are not guilty of the negotiated crimes to which they confessed as these “crimes” were invented in negotiation to take the place of the original charges.  In this sense, everyone imprisoned, unless convicted by an objective jury with all evidence both for and against considered, is innocent.

So to conclude this essay, in my lifetime we have made a mockery of the Hippocratic Oath and Justice.  Not long ago I read an article by a Harvard professor, perhaps from the Medical School, perhaps underwritten by a Big Pharma grant, that the Hippocratic Oath was a fiction, that the oath doesn’t say what it is represented to say.  If there never was a Hippocratic Oath, it doesn’t matter that Big Pharma and Corporate Medicine are taking it away.

What can be done?  I do not know.  Thomas Jefferson, a discarded Founding Father, said 200 years was as long as freedom could live without being refreshed with revolution against the tyranny that again shows us its head.


Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

 

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