Progressives have been trying to get complete government control of health care for over 100 years. I wrote about this in my first book, The ObamaCare Train Wreck, in 2014. The roots of the progressive movement can be traced to President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt supported the concept of national health insurance, but never actively pursued legislation to implement it. In 1906, the American Association of Labor Legislation (AALL) began work to achieve this concept.

The Socialist Party of America proposed socialized medicine through national health insurance as early as 1928 in their party platform. Historians differ on when the first bill for national health insurance was actually introduced in Congress. The Wagner National Health Act of 1939, introduced by Senator Robert Wagner (D-NY), may have been the first. It never received the support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The bill evolved into the Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill in 1943 and called for compulsory national health insurance and a payroll tax. But it never got out of committee because it lacked Roosevelt’s support. He feared it would lead to socialized medicine and the AMA did not support it. Nevertheless, it was reintroduced every session of Congress for the next fourteen years.

Then came ObamaCare. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, a bill that will forever be associated with his name. Then Vice-President, and now President Joe Biden, was caught on an active microphone telling Obama, “This is a big f***ing deal!” For once, Biden may have gotten it right.

But ObamaCare only moved the ball forward a little. It still retained the private health insurance that most Americans receive through their employer and would hate to lose. ObamaCare mainly increased the rolls of Americans with health insurance by increasing the enrollment of Medicaid. About 15 – 20 million Americans now had health insurance who were formerly uninsured, most through Medicaid. This happened because ObamaCare changed the eligibility rules of Medicaid to include those earning up to 138% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) and provided subsidies to pay for premiums on the ObamaCare exchanges for those earning above 138% FPL and below 400% FPL.

Then came Covid. The pandemic gave the government the excuse to suspend the rules for removing people who become ineligible for Medicaid. The Families First Coronavirus Relief Act of March, 2020, barred states from removing people who become ineligible from their Medicaid rolls for the duration of the public-health emergency in return for a bump in federal funding.

While this bill was passed during the Republican administration of President Trump, it is the Democratic administration of President Biden that is making full use of the crisis. In a classic example of “never let a crisis go to waste”, the Biden Administration has repeatedly extended the public health emergency to increase the rolls of Medicaid. The next deadline for these rules to end is October 13, but who really believes the Biden administration won’t renew the emergency again just before the mid-term elections.

This pandemic crisis has enabled them to stealthily increase the number of Americans on government-paid, and government-controlled, healthcare. The Wall Street Journal editorial board says if not for Biden’s recurring emergency declaration, about 20 million Medicaid enrollees would no longer be eligible, most because their incomes exceed the threshold for qualifying – even the elevated ObamaCare income levels. Many of these would get private health insurance from their employers, but why pay insurance premiums when the government is giving you Medicaid “free?”

Taxpayers, naturally, are the big losers in this deal. Annual Medicaid spending has increased by $198 billion during the pandemic. That’s about as much as Medicaid spending grew from 2012 to 2019 during the first seven years of the ObamaCare expansion.

In addition to expanding the rolls of Medicaid, the Biden Administration has expanded the rolls of ObamaCare. The American Rescue Act of March, 2021 expanded ObamaCare exchange subsidies to millions of Americans. As a result, millions pay no premiums, and households making more than 400% of FPL receive generous subsidies. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) initially estimated the two-year subsidy expansion would cost $22 billion, but the actual cost was $50 billion.

To make matters worse, the recently passed Schumer-Manchin spending bill, misnamed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, has extended these expanded subsidies for another three years. The CBO has bizarrely forecast the cost will be a mere $30 billion. In a classic display of “funny math,” the CBO expects three years of subsidies will cost 34% less than two years!

Furthermore, the CBO doesn’t account for the Biden Administration’s proposed regulation to fix ObamaCare’s so-called “family glitch,” which limited exchange eligibility for many individuals offered family coverage through their employers. If enacted, the change would make an estimated five million more Americans eligible for more generous subsidies on the ObamaCare exchanges.

What is the impact of all these changes?

The Health and Human Services Department recently reported that the “National Uninsured Rate Reaches All-Time Low in Early 2022.”  HHS estimates there are 5.2 million fewer uninsured Americans than in 2020. Yet Medicaid rolls during the pandemic have actually swelled by 24 million – a 34% increase – while two million more adults have enrolled in ObamaCare exchange plans. In other words, most of the change is people moving from private health insurance to government-controlled health insurance.

WSJ summarizes the impact: “The Administration appears to want to drive more people into Medicaid and tightly regulated ObamaCare plans, and thus make more Americans dependent on government for healthcare. Government also subsidizes employer coverage through the healthcare tax deduction, but this is significantly less expensive for taxpayers.”

This is simply the Progressive movement pushing for complete government takeover of healthcare, one step at a time.

It’s been two and a half years now since the Covid pandemic emerged from China. Most people world-wide have now likely been infected with the virus at least once, according to many leading epidemiologists. If you think you’ve never had Covid, you’re either lucky or you’re wrong.

Some 58 % of people in the U.S. had contracted Covid-19 through February of this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Since then, a persistent wave driven by offshoots of the infectious Omicron variant has kept daily known cases in the U.S. above 100,000 for weeks. Those numbers, however, only count confirmed positive tests. They don’t count people who never got tested.

Julie Wernau, writing in The Wall Street Journal, says geneticists and immunologists are studying factors that might protect people from infection, and learning why some are predisposed to more severe Covid-19 disease. For many, the explanation is likely that they have in fact been infected with the virus at some point without realizing it, said Susan Kline, professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School. About 40% of confirmed Covid-19 cases are asymptomatic, according to a meta-analysis published in December in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Many people, like me, have never tested positive for Covid, but they have had “a slight cold”, without a fever, extreme fatigue, or loss of smell and taste – symptoms typically associated with Covid. We may have actually had Covid without knowing it. About 90% of people who get Covid-19 make antibodies that can be detected in their blood, said Sheldon Campbell, a pathologist and lab-medicine doctor at Yale Medicine. But no one is going to do these tests on asymptomatic people.

And then there are those who contract asymptomatic Covid, and yet don’t make antibodies. Most tests can’t distinguish antibodies from infection versus those from vaccination. Because current Covid-19 vaccines target the virus’s spike protein, using a test that looks for antibodies that target a different protein, called the nucleocapsid, can distinguish a prior infection even in those who have been vaccinated. However, the CDC and the FDA discourage antibody testing in many cases, in part because they only show that a person was infected or vaccinated, not how much protection antibodies might provide.

Researchers are currently studying factors that might keep the virus from infecting some people, or that affect how a person responds to the virus. These factors may explain why some patients are immune to the virus and others contract serious disease. Research has suggested that mutations in genes that drive immune response to viruses can affect a person’s ability to fight the disease.

There is some evidence that some people who may have been exposed to certain coronaviruses before the pandemic are equipped with cells that attack SARS-CoV-2 before it can spread, said Steve Jameson at the University of Minnesota Medical School. “Some people come with a little bit of a head start,” he said. People who don’t know whether they have been infected should be careful, he warns, because they might get sick as antibodies wane and new variants arrive.

“There are plenty of people who’ve had the vaccines or even had Covid and then have gotten Covid again,” said Dr. Jameson. “It’s not as if it makes you immortal.”

The wave of woke medical education is gaining strength and will soon crash down on unsuspecting medical students. That’s the message of a recent Wall Street Journal editorial.

Three months ago, I wrote a post called The “Woke” Doctor’s Office which discussed the alarming Op-ed of Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a former associate dean of the curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. Dr. Goldfarb reported his concern that healthcare is being infected by the radical ideology that has corrupted education and public safety. He said while critical race theory (CRT) and crime waves have been in the news, the public is largely unaware of medicine’s turn toward division and discrimination. He said the premise behind all this radical new thinking is that healthcare is systemically racist – that most physicians are biased and deliver worse care to minorities.

Now it seems Dr. Goldfarb’s comments were prescient. In their lead editorial, WSJ editors expose this woke thinking by those who have great influence over the curriculum in every medical school in America. They explain the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) is a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., that represents and advises medical schools. It also has influence with the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, the national accreditor that sets med-school standards. With that kind of influence, when the AAMC tells med schools how to teach, America’s future physicians will be obliged to listen.

The AAMC expects aspiring doctors to become fluent in woke concepts such as “intersectionality,” which the AAMC defines as “overlapping systems of oppression and discrimination that communities face based on race, gender, ethnicity, ability, etc.” That means med students who managed to avoid learning CRT in college or high school will now get it shoved down their throats in medical school.

They will also be expected to demonstrate “knowledge of the intersectionality of a patient’s multiple identities” – not to be confused with personality disorders – and “how each identity may result in varied and multiple forms of oppression or privilege related to clinical decisions and practice.” WSJ suggests this sounds as if every medical diagnosis will have to be made with an accompanying political and sociological analysis.

All medical school students should be taught that black women are at higher risk for a type of breast cancer known as triple-negative and women of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage are at greater risk of the BRCA gene mutation. Naturally, Caucasian men and women are more susceptible to skin cancers, especially melanoma, than African-Americans and others of darker skin color. Oriental men and women are more prone to develop OPLL, a condition of the spine that leads to spinal stenosis. There are many other racial differences in prevalence of disease. While these differences in disease prevalence by race exist, this doesn’t mean these conditions are really about “systems of power, privileges, and oppression” in our society.

WSJ says, “Social and economic circumstances clearly can affect individual health behavior. But the hyper class and racial consciousness that the AAMC wants to instill in doctors may result in worse care for minorities. “Systems of oppression” as a standard of analysis could easily become medical fatalism. . . The implicit message is that the best way to help patients is to expand the size and scope of government.” Sounds like a message written by Senator Bernie Sanders and those who favor socialized medicine.

Most young people who pursue a career in medicine want to help patients. Now they will be taught that “an intricate web of social, behavioral, economic, and environmental factors, including access to quality education and housing, have greater influence on patients’ health than physicians do.” My concern is that such “woke medical education” may discourage the brightest of our youth from pursuing careers in medicine.

According to the American Medical Association (AMA), the U.S. is facing a projected shortage of between 37,800 and 124,000 physicians in the next 12 years. Since training new physicians can take up to a decade, the urgency of this problem cannot be overstated. Yet changes in the medical school curriculum, as we have just discussed, could easily exacerbate this shortage as fewer qualified candidates apply to medical school.

The bottom line is that medicine is probably the least biased, racially influenced profession in the world. This is a solution in search of a problem – a solution that I predict will lead to worse healthcare – not better.