U.S. Constitution versus the Federalization of Health

Personally, I find the feds’ involvement in health truly sinister.  That is, I don’t see it as just a matter of “Oh well, we have grown a lot since 1788. In those days they did not have antibiotics or neurosurgery, but now we need national supervision of such things,” I see it as a plan for control.

I think that a group of men, starting in 1776, intended to get complete control over the American nation. Many analysts have said so, calling that group a “cabal,” or naming some specific secret society such as the Masons as the culprit. This article is not about that general cabal.

I do not know of anyone who has suggested that some bunch of men sought from early days to construct a federal health authority. I suspect that such a group does exist. Allow me to use “poetic license.” I am going to give them a silly name, the Fed Healthers (the FHs), and claim that they really do operate in a coordinated way.

The poetic license here is that I don’t really know if there be such a group. But by theorizing that the FHs exist, I can try to outline where they have done their darndest to leave every person – presently 340 million of us – dependent on some form of national health authority.

If, today, a dog bit my leg, the medical treatment would involve FH – federal health – in several ways, as follows:

.1. The insurance company that I chose on the free market – say, Blue Cross – has already got restrictions on how much it will reimburse me, per federal guidelines. 2. The hospital that I will hasten to monitors itself all day for compliance with federal regulations 3. The “medical device” that the ER (Emergency Room) uses to stop the flow of blood from my leg would have to be one that was approved by the FDA, Food and Drug Administration.  4. The doctor in charge has his “standards of practice” disciplined by a board which is state, not federal, but which takes marching orders from a private national group, the AMA, American Medical Association.

Gosh, could the FHs of the Year 1798 have foreseen all that?  Why do I pick 1798? The first Congress met from 1789 to 1791. The fifth congress, in 1798, managed to pass the first federal health law: “An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen.” It consisted of telling all captains of US vessels that anchored on the coast to deduct 20 cents per month from sailor’s pay to use for medical treatment. This then justified a special hospital for those sailors.

The following is an excerpt from my 2013 book Consider the Lilies:

From there [the idea of a seamen’s hospital], it took only one more flick of the pen to say that the hospital would have a boss, to be called “the surgeon general.” Yes, that’s how he got his start; federal “health authority” came in with the cat, so to speak.

Congress does this all the time. It lets very unconstitutional things in with the cat. I’ll now inventory some things that came in over the years thanks to that charitable seaman’s hospital.

By 1899, Congress gave the Marine Hospital the authority to perform quarantine, “interstate.” [Just wondering: were the FHers planning a 1918 flu type thing?] In 1878, it had passed a Quarantine Act “to prevent the introduction of contagious or infectious diseases into the United States.” That was a set-up for the 1890 move in which Congress strengthened quarantine, on the pretext of concern about the outbreak of cholera in Europe. Ah, the pretext of emergency, the route for many a foul law. Caveat!

In 1899, Congress ordered the Marine Hospital Service, which would soon be renamed the US Public Health Service, to study leprosy. That initiated a trend, which we see in the National Cancer Institute of our day, of the feds “owning” a particular disease. Do you recall a First Lady helping to federalize mental health?

Soon the USPHS had a “reserve corps” to act in emergency, thanks to the 1918 flu pandemic. In 1930, the Surgeon General was tasked by Congress to investigate narcotics and “relatedly” the cause and treatment of mental disorders. Any worries there? The Soviet Union was adept at using the psychiatric profession for social control, but we knew such a thing could never happen in the land of apple pie….  [end of excerpt].

In 1836, Henry Clay, a US senator from Kentucky, saw a need for a marine hospital to serve boatmen on the rivers and lakes area, and Congress funded one in Louisville KY, and later six more.  Note: that raises, to me, a hint that Clay was a Federal Healther (or horse traded with a FH; much legislation involves horse trading).

In 1875, the Sisters of Mercy were invited to operate the Louisville hospital [??] In both the Civil War and World War I, that hospital treated soldiers.

The FTC and the FDA

Another way in which federal health care grew was through a sort of consumer protection gig. Article I, section 8, Clause 3 of the US Constitution, says “Congress shall have power …to regulate commerce … among the several states.”  At the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 the issue seemed to be one of a state creating barriers to other states’ shipping.

In 1914, Congress passed the Federal Trade Commission Act. The Commerce clause (the unofficial name of Clause 3, above), started to mean that the state that was shipping its goods to customers in another state had better not cheat customers. Personally, I think that is a reasonable stretch of the wording of the Commerce clause. Congress can “regulate.”

Hence there are laws about “honesty in labeling” and the Federal Trade Commission, FTC, has the power to seize interstate goods that are falsely labeled, and power to bring a prosecution against the accused. Remember, they can’t do it for intrastate packages, though any state can make a law about honesty in labeling.

Now let’s get back to the title of the article at hand: “U.S. Constitution versus the Federalization of Health.” It looks to me that the present involvement of the feds in health is a bad thing. One can see what the feds (and media) did, regarding Covid, pushing the “safe and effective vaccine” long after its harmful effects were on record.

I have gathered solid research on the feds persecuting good doctors and suppressing good cures. We don’t want big government in medicine. For starters we should tell Congress to repeal the unconstitutional Food and Drug Act, at least that part of it that gives the FDA the right to evaluate a medical treatment’s safety and effectiveness. How could that possibly be constitutional? When the FTC says a package is wrongly labeled it does not talk about the merits of that product.

Surely the FDA has no right to withhold good treatments. I said that the FTC’s authority regarding mislabeling seems reasonable as a regulation of trade, but there is no rationale for the government to run the lives of doctors and their patients. The FDA – plus the AMA – have taken away the doctor’s right to do what she feels is best. Wow.

Medicare, Obamacare, etc.

Recall my fictitious dog-bitten leg. I said that each hospital is monitoring its own obedience to federal regs. This has a lot to do with money. Regs get obeyed when the consequence of disobedience is big punishment. In regard to hospitals, Medicare, Obamacare (aka the Affordable Care Act, the ACA) both the hospital and the patient may lose money by not conforming.

For example, hospitals insisted during Covid that new patients take the Covid test, and later when the vax became available, that they take the vax. Even when a family strenuously objected. The effect of this on the whole population was that people started to believe, and bow to, an idea that a dictatorial government has a right to require anything “for the greater good” of all.

The way in which Medicare, in 1965, came in with the cat, was that during President Roosevelts’ New Deal of the 1930s welfare handouts were seen as urgent, and this also set the mood for passage of the Social Security Act as an insurance scheme. Employers were required to withhold some money from a worker’s pay and kick in some of the employer’s funds too, paying this in as a tax to be redeemed upon retirement or disability.

I think Roosevelt’s plan imitated that of Otto von Bismarck in Germany circa 1880. Th goal was to reduce people from independence to dependence, from strength to weakness.

Under President Lyndon B Johnson (surely a federal healther!) Medicare was simply added to the Social Security Act. The patient over age 65 could now go to hospital for free but the government could control hospital procedures.

Mary Maxwell Gets Corrected

Before wrapping this article up, I am pleased to make a confession. I said that the First Congress brought in the idea of the seamen’s hospital.  But just now I found an article by Ray Raphael, with the title “James Madison’s the Founding Father, We Quote on the Constitution, but Which Madison Should We Cite?” His theme is that Madison supported the seaman’s hosputal idea back in 1787, and that he

is not as strictly constitutionalist as rumored. I quote Raphael:

“At the Federal Convention, on September 15, Madison had stated that an “object for tonnage Duties” was to provide for “support of Seamen etc.” and that this federal disability program would be covered under Congress’s power “to regulate commerce.”

Just admitting here that I was wrong, K?

List of Congress’s Non-adherence to the Constitution

My theory is that the trouble we are having now with a government that dictates outrageous things regarding health, is not a new thing. I believe that this sort of control was mapped out early. I see these steps as part of a sinister plan:

— 1798 open a Marine hospital, with a surgeon as head

— 1878 Congress passed the Quarantine Act, to prevent people entering US with contagious diseases

— 1899 Marine Hospital gets authority to perform quarantine “interstate”

— early 20^th century, Marine Hospital is renamed US Public Health Service

— 1906 US Food and Drug Administration is formed

— 1914 Federal Trade Commission Act creates the FTC

— 1918 flu (which started from an army base in US) is seen as emergency

— 1930 Surgeon General tasked to investigate narcotics and the cause and treatment of mental disorders

— 1933 Social Security Act (for retirement pensions)

— 1933 Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act “consumer protection”

— 1944 Public Health Service Act – can enforce quarantine

— 1960 short-limb tragedy in Germany and UK did not reach US because had kept thalidomide out; this raises the status of FDA

— 1962 after tragedy of elixir sulfanilamide [ahem], law amended to include DESI, Drug Efficacy Study Implementation which incorporates advice from National Academy of Sciences

— 1965 Medicare for aged and disabled

— 2010 Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”)

— 2016 the 21^st Century Cures Act, which supports networking of medical records

— 2020 Trump orders vax manufacture via Operation Warp Speed

— 2021 Biden orders vax for workers at any facility funded by Medicare

— 2024 Many doctors speak out. 17,000 highly qualified people sign a demand to stop the vaccinations

Conclusion

I conclude that most of the above steps were not reactions to reality and were not altruistic. I think FHers (“federal healthers”) planned it all and that their goal is to keep people down, or even dead, rather than let them rise and challenge the secret rulers.

As stated at the beginning, I am using poetic license. I do not know that even one FHer has ever existed. However, when researching my book Consider the Lilies: A Review of 18 Cures for Cancer (2013), I noted that entities such as the FDA and the AMA constantly attacked the discoverers of good cures and never, ever provided then with a fair hearing for their claims, much less a clinical trial.

Why would such organizations, allegedly concerned with health, do that?