The Worsening Medical Crisis
Thank you to all who donated to our work last week. There is still time before year’s end to help the hardest working and most effective charity around.
BY BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE
Thank you to all who donated to our work last week. There is still time before year’s end to help the hardest working and most effective charity around. Support Brownstone Institute here.
The crisis hitting medical costs right now is much worse than they admit. For people with private care, insurance is going up dramatically and quickly. For businesses forced to provide insurance to employees, the same is true.
Incredibly, the crisis is not even in the services themselves but in the right to use them at all. Once you do, the deductibles make matters worse. Bottom line: Obamacare is blowing up. Intentional or accident? Only a fool could have put that system together without knowing where it would end up.
Something has to change. Everyone knows it. Neither party seems able to get its act together to do something about it. That something could be a single-payer system, which would bankrupt the country, or a free market that would devolve choices and operations to doctors and patients.
In the backdrop of everything you read about this subject, or the related subject of the vaccine schedule, is the horrible pandemic response. It’s the elephant in the room about which no one wants to speak. Its effects are still with us and hitting the whole of economic life today.
The advisory panel known as ACIP is doing its best to trim the vaccine schedule. But even making small changes is fighting tooth and nail. The reformers are good-hearted but events are moving too fast for even the most perspicacious among them to keep up.
Now to business. Our events page features a fantastic new map that is very easy to use. It helps keep track of Brownstone supper clubs spreading all over the country.
On Wednesday, December 17th, the Brownstone West Hartford Supper Club welcomes L. Todd Wood, the CEO, Publisher, and Editor-in-Chief of CDM Media, publisher of the Connecticut Centinal. Todd has been through heck and back over five years of running an alternative media venue…and survived. The paper has been censored, demonetized, attacked, banned, and otherwise targeted at all levels. He will describe his travails through it all, and how legacy media has become so absurdly one-sided and uncurious about everything that matters. Get tickets here.
On Tuesday, January 6th, the Greater Boston Supper Club welcomes Jeffrey Tucker, founder, author, and President of Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of ten books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. His most recent book is Spirits of America: On the Semiquincentennial. Jeffrey will talk about the loss of trust in everything and the devastating consequences thereof. Get tickets here.
On Monday, January 12th, the Midwest Supper Club welcomes James Bopp, Jr., distinguished constitutional law attorney and Indiana University Trustee. James Bopp, Jr. is Principal Attorney with The Bopp Law Firm, PC in Terre Haute, Indiana, one of the most prominent First Amendment practices in the nation. Mr. Bopp will talk about “The Importance of the First Amendment to America and Higher Education.” Get tickets here.
On Tuesday, January 20th, the Chicago Supper Club welcomes Jeanne Ives. Jeanne will offer critical insights into IL SB 1560. This bill, signed into law by Governor JB Pritzker on July 31, 2025, makes Illinois the first state to mandate universal mental health screenings for public school students in grades 3 through 12, with the state providing “free” resources to districts for implementation. Get tickets here.
On Monday, January 26th, the inaugural Manhattan Supper Club welcomes Lucia Sinatra, Co-founder of No College Mandates, an internationally recognized organization that has courageously led the nationwide charge to restore individual medical autonomy in higher education. Get tickets here.
On Wednesday, January 28th, the inaugural Austin Supper Club welcomes Del Bigtree, the founder of the Informed Action Consent Network, host of a rapidly growing internet talk show The HighWire, and executive producer of the documentary An Inconvenient Study. Del will share insights from producing two documentaries, including the accolades and critical responses to help provide context for the current changes and discussions within the CDC around childhood vaccine schedules. Get tickets here.
Here is some content since our last email.
Everyone Lost at ACIP By David Bell. ACIP was still erring on the side of Pharma, which they presumably have to due to the sponsored-Congress problem. They may have got it right, they may not have. Now the onus is on someone to do sensible prospective trials.
The First Big Lie of Vaccinology By Clayton J. Baker. Antibody production is not immunity to disease. The promotion of this false equivalency represents the first Big Lie of vaccinology. It should be rejected by regulators and patients alike as legitimate evidence of vaccine efficacy in the future.
Why Governments Prefer Cigarette Revenue over Safer Alternatives By Roger Bate. The POUCH Act is a beginning, not an endpoint. If lawmakers are serious about improving public health, they must resist the gravitational pull of the Sinclair Trap and design a nicotine policy that rewards switching rather than punishing it.
The Five Big Lies of Vaccinology By Clayton J. Baker. There was a time – very recently – when mainstream medicine actively promoted OxyContin and other deadly narcotics as safe and minimally addictive. Hundreds of thousands died as a result. The bloom is off the rose for the vaccine industry.
The Pandemic Revealed the Most Cowardly Society of All Time By Filipe Rafaeli. In terms of importance, the Covid-19 pandemic was the biggest event in human history since World War II. Since that time, nothing has caused as much fear across the entire planet as what began in 2020.
Justice Jackson’s History of Shilling for the Deep State By Brownstone Institute. Jackson’s verbose monologues reveal that she understands the importance of this struggle. She knows that her benefactors depend on her denying the President from obtaining “actual control” over the agencies that the Constitution designates to his realm.
Ditch the Subsidies, Grow What Actually Works By Joel Salatin. All farmers have a choice, and the faster our society respects them enough to put their choice consequences in their hands, the sooner farmers will make more creative and innovative decisions. The crop insurance safety net prejudices decisions.
BMJ and Cochrane Hype the HPV Vaccines in the Extreme By Peter C. Gotzsche. There is no such thing as an “anti-misinformation review.” What we have are systematic and unsystematic, also called narrative, reviews. And there is no such thing as a safe drug. All drugs, including vaccines, cause harm in some people.
Private clinics and hospitals tend to be for-profit but more efficient, while governmental clinics and hospitals tend to be for-service but less efficient. If we have a mix of both types, then people with different needs can pursue different solutions.
The core issue of the medical cost crisis (there are multiple crises within the medical field) has to address the two basic issues: (1) for-profit medicine will pursue profits; and (2) the more middlemen in the chain between medical service and the patients, the higher the cost. Who is the most important middleman? Medical insurance, including government-run medical insurance.
How to get there? (1) Single pricing to all medical services, whether a patient comes in from a certain medical insurance network or just walks in. Let insurance companies stick to their risk-sharing principle but not dabble in volume pricing. (2) Remove the tax exemption status of company-paid medical insurance or force companies to give out vouchers. Therefore, spread the decisions made by the company CEO/CFO to individual employers. It is easy to buy out the CEO and CFO with kickbacks. But the only way to buy out general medical customers is good service.
Another side of this issue is that many people are sicker after Covid vaccination. Which means many more doctor visits and specialists as well. So health insurance is being used much much more.