In the April 2006 issue of Health Freedom Watch, founder and president of the Institute for Health Freedom Sue A. Blevins wrote, “It’s crystal clear (upon reading the actual [Massachusetts] bill text) that the plan invades everyone’s privacy by requiring insurers and health-care providers to submit patient data to a centralized clearinghouse (a new council). And it’s clear that forcing Americans to buy a product from a limited number of government-approved insurers limits their freedom of choice. There is a huge difference between freedom and choice: freedom means one is free to choose from an array of options not artificially limited by the government, while choice may include only an artificially limited number of options.”

Not to be outdone by neighboring Massachusetts, Democrat politicians in Connecticut recently proposed their own state government health-care plans. One of them, SB 1371, the Connecticut Saves Health Care Program, would have established a single-payer plan. The bill was passed by the legislature’s insurance committee by a vote of 12-7 in March. On April 10, however, the Hartford Courant reported that “the legislature’s nonpartisan Office of Fiscal Analysis estimated the costs at $11.8 billion to $17.7 billion, depending on variables.” The Courant added, “The cost is slightly more than the entire state budget proposed by the governor.”

EMRs and EBM Pave the New Health-Care Superhighway

An essential component of universal health care is information technology (IT). Elevating IT to a pivotal role, for example, by requiring everyone to have electronic medical records (EMRs), including an electronic “smart card,” a personal national health-care ID number, and so on, has become an article of faith on the part of health-care reform-oriented politicians of all stripes. Closely allied is the preference for IT-driven “evidence-based medicine” (EBM) as a way to (supposedly) objectively judge and codify into clinical practice or law what reportedly works clinically and what doesn’t.

The mad rush to implement everything that is IT-based or IT-related into American health care, however, has blinded the players to the valuable experiences and insights of critics of both EMRs and EBM. The UK is significantly ahead of the U.S. in terms of commitment to and funding of EMRs. Under the British government-run National Health Service (NHS), which has provided socialized medicine to the Britons since 1948, the transition to EMRs began about a decade ago. But critics charge that EMRs have failed to make a positive impact on the drastically worsening British health-care system. EBM also has its knowledgeable critics, but they, too, have been brushed aside by conventional medical policymakers, who instead consider “evidence,” based on criteria that they define and measure, as the highest sacrament of the secular church of scientism at which they all collectively worship.

In 1995, privacy expert Simon Davies published the essay “Superhighway to Dystopia.” In my view, especially considering its brevity, it’s the single best report on the brave new world that is upon us. As a student of medical politics, innovative non-allopathic treatments, and health-care reform, it seems to me that Davies’s concerns are most applicable—chillingly so—to what we see happening today, right now, in the U.S. in the form of the calls by politicians, special interest groups, the media, and other self-interested parties for universal health care, single payer, etc.—potentially the greatest transformation of American medicine since the time of the Founding Fathers.