Medicine’s Secret Society
Revisited.

Editorial written by
Evelyne Shuster, Ph.D. for
The Philadelphia Inquirer,
January 7, 1997.

The More It Changes,
the More It Stays the Same.

On March 14 – 15, 1997 the American Medical Association (AMA) will proudly commemorate the sesquicentennial of its first national code of medical ethics. To celebrate this historic moment the AMA is organizing a conference, which will be held in the Hall of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences where the code was approved. This event should probably be noted. But what I find most disturbing, to say the lest, is that in the AMA’s roster of speakers described as the nation’s most renowned and respected physicians, bioethicists and historians, there are no blacks, or minorities and barely any women. We know that the AMA has never been a friend to blacks or women. Blacks, for example, could not be AMA members until 1950 – 51. A century and a half later, this same bias, if no outright discrimination is reflected in the conference list of featured speakers as if there were still no minorities and no women that can professionally measure up to white men.

Silence is no longer an option. Therefore, I feel obligated to call for a general boycott of all conferences which, like this one, continue to ignore or overlook the valuable contributions of women and minorities in medicine, law and bioethics. Only then, can we change the course of history and face with confidence in our rich cultural and gender diversity the challenges medical science and society face.

—Sincerely,
—Evelyne Shuster, Ph.D.
—Medical Ethicist
—Philadelphia

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Reflections on a Mindless Mind Reader.

Written by Stuart Ewen to
CBS Evening News,
June 25, 2007.

To the News Division of CBS:
I was thoroughly disgusted by Jeff Greenfield’s smug dismissal of Michael Moore’s “Sicko” (Evening News, June 22, 2007). I have the seen the film and am not alone in thinking that Moore lays out a formidable and accessible case for the establishment of a “single payer” healthcare system in the United States.

It’s hard for me to imagine Americans seeing this film and accepting Greenfield’s clueless proclamations about how “Americans are just different” and wouldn’t embrace guaranteed healthcare and would extend their support for a corrupt corporate system that makes its blood money by denying people access to necessary medical treatment.

Good reporting would have included the historical fact that in 1949, just when Britain instituted its National Health Service, the United States was about to set up a similar system. In the beginning of 1949, Truman and the Congress were committed to establishing this final element of the New Deal social insurance agenda. Most observers predicted passage. Americans were in need of something like this and working and middle class people expected it.

In the face of the possibility of separating medicine from profiteering, the AMA and friends hired Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, who were the prime public relations sharpshooters for the corporate right. All of the vintage anti-National healthcare materials seen in “Sicko” (including a Ronald Reagan phonograph recording that suggested healthcare was the first step towards the takeover of America by totalitarian socialism) were produced under Whitaker and Baxter’s direction to turn the country away from what had appeared to be a a widely-desired fait accompli.

By year’s end, riding a mounting horror show of anti-Communist agitation, the bill was defeated. A single-payer National Health system was dead along with the idea that healthcare was a basic human right.
Amid the postwar prosperity, and into the 1960s, many union workers had decent health benefits for a time, but by the 1970s these benefits (pensions as well) began to be eroded and/or eliminated. In the name of free enterprise, and to save the nation from the purported evils of socialism in any form, our society had surrendered the notion of healthcare as an inalienable right, and this
is the root of the predicament that Moored documents and illuminates so clearly.
(I have written about this in my book,
PR! A Social History of Spin, which you might want to look at.)

Since then, every time the possibility of a single-payer system has been broached, the propaganda machinery of the HMO and pharmaceutical industries has kicked-in to warn Americans that guaranteed healthcare is the work of the devil. Whether people have bought this hooey is questionable. Presidents, as well as a corruptly compensated Congress, however, have continued to carry the illusory torch of “freedom.” Freedom from enjoying the security provided by a universal socially funded health care system, that is.

Greenfield’s reporting isn’t only pompously ignorant punditry. It also adds to the misinformation promoted by the medical industrial complex. Jeff would be doing viewers, and his tattered profession, more of a service if he bothered to “Follow the Money.” If he reported on the history of deceit that has kept Americans from an unquestioned right to health care that most people in other industrialized nations take for granted. Without an informed public, democracy is impossible.

Where do you stand?

—Stuart Ewen
—New York City

Comments will be reviewed and
posted on a daily basis.