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Special Report

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Oddly, Banker Stark made his millions by being a capitalist himself. While he is long since out of the banking game, one can only presume that his current view of capitalism and its practitioners came sometime after he was collecting his obviously quite considerable banking paychecks, not to mention when he was negotiating his very capitalist salary with his board of directors. After all, how did Banker Stark become wealthy in the first place? One bets he did not want the federal government intruding into any of that!

Underlying assumption number two, the love of government bureaucracies, means that the Banker and the Lawyer attribute powers of wisdom and competence to bureaucrats working out of concrete boxes in Washington. When you are facing a serious medical problem, they honestly believe you should be directing your questions not to your doctor but rather to the people in those boxes. Not feeling well? Take two aspirin and call a Washington bureaucrat in the morning. Having spent time working in one of these bureaucratic boxes I can certainly say that, as with drug or biotech companies or doctors there are good people here too. But qualified to get between you and your doctor? Please.

These are two very serious philosophical differences, and they have deeply critical consequences, in this case for cancer patients. Make no mistake: today the targets are Amgen (which, by the by, not only provides good jobs to its 18,000 employees but health insurance as well) and Johnson & Johnson (ditto on the jobs and health insurance front) and doctors (presumably ditto again, if not in the same numbers as a big company.) Tomorrow it will be some other capitalist enterprise that provides good jobs at good wages for people performing a genuine service with valuable products or services for the rest of us. In Waxman's case, as previously mentioned, the Lawyer is not only interested in making your medical decisions he wants to decide who you listen to on your radio. Think about that. Lawyer, doctor, radio censor. Interesting work if you can get it.

THANKFULLY THERE ARE PLENTY of people in both the House and Senate who are up in arms over the actions of the Banker, the Lawyer and their friends and political allies the Bureaucrats. Literally a majority of the Democrat-controlled House has joined together to protest the decision by the Bureaucrats at CMS on this issue, led by Michigan Republican Mike Rogers, a cancer survivor himself, and California Democrat Anna Eschoo. Over in the Senate no less then Senate Finance Chairman and Montana Democrat Max Baucus has sponsored a Senate Resolution to overturn the CMS decision, creating a very interesting difference between three prominent and powerful Democrats. Notably, Baucus has been joined by a bi-partisan list of Senators that includes Idaho's Republican Mike Crappo, who has survived two bouts with prostate cancer, and Oklahoma's Republican Tom Coburn who is -- surprise! -- actually a real, honest-to-goodness practicing physician, the only one in the Senate.

There is something else troubling here, and it goes to the sensitive (for conservatives) issue of just where the Bush White House puts its conservative principles on occasion. The CMS is, of course, a government agency. Which means it is overseen by Bush Cabinet member Michael Leavitt, the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The obvious question for conservatives is why in the world is the Bush administration letting the professional bureaucrats make a decision like this? To the point, this is an extension of the dissatisfaction that was expressed last November in the 2006 elections: why elect conservatives if they abandon conservative principle the moment they win and sit down to govern? Letting bureaucrats instead of doctors and patients decide who gets what cancer treatment is decidedly not a conservative -- or for that matter 21st century -- decision.

There are more gory details here, including the predictably slanted story in the New York Times this past May 9th. "Doctors Reap Millions for Anemia Drugs," headlined one in a series of stories in this vein. Would you expect anything else from an Old Media institution that reaps millions by running plagiarized stories, revealing national security secrets and secretly giving cut-rate full page ads to its political soul mates? The fact that the paper uses its news stories and ad pages to push its various agendas really isn't news anymore. While this is most prominently witnessed with stories about Iraq or the Bush administration, this episode is a timely reminder that the paper has other items on its agenda. In this instance discrediting oncology doctors with a story that simply ignored basic facts about the high incidence of chemotherapy-related anemia and neglected to speak to a single cancer patient choosing to receive ESAs is just one small way to make the case for government-run health care, a longtime favorite of the Times. Ditto the decision to ignore any detailed reporting on the basic economics of federal and private reimbursement of drugs used by oncologists, a reflection, of course, of elite journalist's hostility to the basic facts of life in capitalism. As with Banker Stark, this hostility at the Times seems to vanish only when its reporters are picking up their pay checks or the Sulzbergers are protecting their stock options. To borrow from Al Gore, you might say such basic facts as the cost to produce or purchase drugs are "inconvenient truths" for the Times.

MAKE NO MISTAKE, BANKER STARK and Lawyer Waxman are above all emblematic of the glaring failures of a bureaucracy-driven government health care program. They believe they themselves, along with the bureaucrats, should be making decisions as to precisely what kind of health care you should be receiving. ESAs today, your pregnancy or prostate or Alzheimer's medication or exam and treatment tomorrow. Stuck at worst in the 1930s mind-set of FDR's New Deal or at best in the mid-1960s world view of LBJ's Great Society, this is part and parcel of a mentality that prefers outdated concepts that have been repeatedly proven unreliable over 21st century principles that themselves have been developed as a result of past failures and new technology. Why, after all, are Stark and Waxman concerned about Medicare fraud? Because defrauding a bloated government-run bureaucracy created over forty years ago is easy to do. How easy? No less than Secretary Leavitt himself went before Congress last summer to request $1.3 billion to combat Medicare fraud. Gee. Imagine that.

Never once in this episode does it appear to occur to Stark that the goal should be to get the bureaucracy out of the way, bring knowledge from the Amgens of the world to doctor to patient even more rapidly, with patients and their doctors making the final decision on patient care. Government decisions (aka the Food and Drug Administration) reflecting the science about the reliability of a medicine is fine. In fact, in this case the FDA has issued a "black box" label that warns doctors of overprescribing. No responsible person would ever claim there is no role for serious science. But once the facts have been laid out for doctor and patient, the question is: do you really want to have politicians and bureaucrats making decisions about your personal medical situation? Speak now, because Freddy Krueger keeps coming back when you least expect him.

The job that lies ahead in health care is to insist on an environment that allows innovation and the free market to work. To give individual Americans real choice in their selection of health care. To make sure that when you are sick you are consulting with the doctor of your choice and not the Bureaucrat mandated by the Banker and the Lawyer. It is way past time as well, obvious or not, to have a fundamental respect for the capitalists who take the risks and put up the capital and do the work that provides the rest of us with everything from cancer drugs to the computers that analyze them. Stop demonizing the Amgens of the world and give them not only some credit where credit is due but a little simple respect for their contributions to the rest of us.

The idea that a banker and a lawyer in league with government bureaucrats are insisting they know more about the costs of making drugs then the drug-makers themselves, that they also insist they know more about treating cancer then cancer specialists, and that they have every intention of removing you from the decision-making aspects of your own medical treatment should tell Americans everything they need to know about the great debate that lies ahead. In two words? Can you say "Hillary Clinton"?

This fuss over ESAs isn't about medicine, this is about a Washington style trick-or-treat. This isn't health care, it's brain dead politics. And the idea that you should entrust your health care to the likes of Pete Stark and Henry Waxman?

Psycho.

topics:
Taxes, Health Care, Hillary Clinton, Economics, Medicaid, Environment, Law, Iraq, NATO, Medicare