Real Affordable Health Care for All Americans

by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster 

Dear D. Pratt Demarest,

Enjoyed your article of March 19, 2020.  We have solutions to the multiple problems you outlined, and we are implementing them and making them available to Americans so they can solve multiple problems in the free market.  You named some of these, others not.

Health Portal begins with the charging method used, taking into account the advice of Milton Friedman, who said, “If the only thing in business which is certain is uncertainty, then we should base our financial systems on uncertainty”.

Our charging method takes into account ‘uncertainty’, also known as erratic incomes, such as so many Americans are now experiencing en mass. 

Other problems with the present system of Rigid Installment Premiums, include:

·        Severage of coverage if a payment is not made on a required, fixed schedule, right when you likely need the services. For 300 years, American doctors and midwives in the free market charged a percentage of income, often in produce or cash, for universal comprehensive medical care for everyone. 

·        Medical providers who make their living from earners, have genuine economic incentives to provide epidemiology, wellness, and preventative care, in addition to rapid yet long lasting curative care. 

·        Lack of a reliable means for people to do comparison shopping on medical treatments and drugs. 

·        Failure to provide information on all possible alternatives, this mandated and enforced by government, which listens most clearly to the medical industry and the pharmaceutical industry. 

·        Removing the control of choosing from those who pay for these services and products.

·        Investing unjustified trust and power in the American Medical Association.  The power the AMA exercised today is enforced by the government monopoly given to them in several increments from 1902 until 1910, achieved this power after a half century of effort to drive other approaches to health out of the marketplace. 

·        Government displacement of long-existing organizations and churches which have a proven record for maintaining their relationship with their members. 

·        “Who do you trust?”, becomes a question people answer for themselves. 

Americans are well able to determine what works for them IF they are provided with the facts and can check these for themselves. 

Ensuring contingencies, such as the coronavirus, would be taken into account by a Mutual Finansurance Mutual.

Think of this as an exercise in returning to self-government. 

Now, let’s talk about facts and government. 

When FDR started Social Security, a dark day for Americans, he took the list of services provided by the Improved Order of Redmen (IORM), the oldest fraternal order in America, and made elaborate promises on the ‘trust’ he was beginning.  The original organization reconstituted itself as the Redmen in 1812.  Before then, you knew them as the Sons of Liberty. Today, I would add Daughter of Liberty. 

Now we know Congress stole all but three years of the income from the Social Security Trust and, with other programs sold to Americans, are bankrupt.  In France, the government also extracts a percentage of income for its version of social security retirement.  These funds are invested in French stocks and bonds as mutual funds, and return profits.  Retirees in France are well off and have funds to enjoy the rest of their lives. 

In America, those who paid into Social Security all of their lives are told what they receive as a tiny stipend each month, is charity, not a proud return on investment.    

Can Americans trust government?   No.  Should they trust Congress to foist another ‘program’ on them for their own ‘good’?   No.  Congress has earned a reputation for unreliability and failure to tell the truth, which stands on its own as a measure best expressed in negative numbers. 

Americans need to organize for their health care outside of government using organizations, including churches, they know they can trust from long experience. 

Mutual Finansurance Cooperatives (MFC) will have little need for infrastructure as signups can be handled by apps with minor variation from the original programming auto-deposit/auto-%PAYEment, and the membership website for interaction.  The template for all banks in the USA will cost only $1.6 million.  The cost of running a single MFC is low and funds are invested as the membership decides by the rules of their own rules.

10,000 individuals can get whatever they want; this is a well-known fact. An insurance mutual with 10,000 individuals have the same statistics as the entire nation. 

America has a long list of beneficial organizations dedicated to an enormous range of causes, and most Americans already belong to at least one of them.  The template for these MFCs is a mutual finansurance company of at least 10,000 individuals who pledge a percentage of income and can choose the health improvement options they want.  No one tells them what they can, or cannot have.  Members are responsible for reviewing the options they have used.  This is made available, without their name or identifiers, to the entire membership.

Because payment is on a percentage of income basis, the loss of a job or other circumstances, do not impact access to health care and the long term contract remains in effect from having financed treatment of pre-existing conditions, insurance probabilities, and preferred human investments.    

Members can decide to add to the percentage they pay so dental, longevity, and other options are also finansured and so included. 

Americans learn about these options on Health Portal, an Interactive TV show which features people who want to talk about their satisfaction level with the health care option they used.  Good or bad evaluations, and the rebuttals, makes good, credible content and attracts more participants to weigh in. 

Mutual Finansurance Cooperatives are not difficult to start, and have a good history for serving their members.  This is the way out of a system which makes its profits currently by extracting money from the slow deaths by drugging and chopping until the patient is dead; an approach so destructive it fits the definition of psychopathic.  Call is socialist or fascist, either term works and fits into the definition of psychopathy. 

This is a clear choice.  Either a Medical Soviet or the choice to choose.       

An Explanatory Post on Health Care, Part 1, Part 2 will be the Solution - Health Portal

by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

In this post, which will also be an article on FreedomFems, the newsletter for Women’s Institute for Individual and Political Justice, we delve into the issue of Health Care, how to pay for it, how to get what you want, and how to guarantee you will continue to have access to what you have determined works for you.

Today, health care includes anxious waits to find out if your 'insurance' will cover what you need or want. The 'Health Care' provided through government OR mandated by government regulations, keeps those who are early adopters of new technologies and practices from proving what does or does not work. The protocols the medical industry, and that is a huge industry, restricts our choices to those for which they are trained even if they know these are painful, costly, and have a high failure rate. Doctors are people, and people do not change.

Always alive to their own profits, the pharmaceutical industry seeks to justify the creation of ‘drugs’ which, all too often, are based on natural herbs and other resources which work well as they are. 

At the end of this narrative I’ll tell you how I came to the conclusion the Medical and Pharmaceutical Industries are about power and profits and not about healing, even though many working in it are good people, frustrated with what they see but helpless to change it.

The first issue is the inability of most people in professions to accept changes in their mental and emotional paradigm and the fact we are looking at huge industries which are enriching those involved as investors and practitioners.    

First -

A flawed theory which impacted us for two thousand years. 

The Myths of Science and Their Agenda 

The All Powerful and Omni-Potent Cult of the Sperm ...and other emotionally satisfying myths

Aristotle was a respected intellectual in a world based on supposition and theories which were not subjected to the illuminating impact of fact. I call this ‘arrested paradigm’ and it persists today in most hierarchies.   

Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks Will Endanger Your Career – The Ignaz Semmelweis Story

The next story is from my own life and research.  This began before the birth of my first child at age 18.  By the birth of the second child I was looking for a way to give birth at home, and then teaching natural childbirth, Bradley Method. 

During my first pregnancy the usual medical practice was to knock out the mother and take the baby with forceps.  I learned this to my shock and horror by talking to my obstetrician and by reading everything available on the subject.  It immediately occurred to me any medication administered to me would impact the baby.  I discussed this with my OB and he agreed not to knock me out and allow me to give birth without forceps and with no medication.  He lied without even blinking.  The baby was actually crowning, leaving my body when he insisted I be given a spinal.  I was outraged but helpless since neither he or the nurses would pay any attention to my objections. 

I also encountered books on preparing formula as an alternative to breast feeding.  After due consideration and a detailed study of the reasons formula had come into ordinary usage, I decided I wanted to breast feed.  When I asked my baby be brought to me in the hospital, St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, the nurse made me clean my nipples, very thoroughly with alcohol.  Since I was nursing several times a day, every time the baby wanted, my nipples swelled and bled.  The nurses said I should quit and use formula.  I persisted, nursing through the pain. 

Later, I began reading more about the process of birth and all related subjects.  I had realized doctors routinely lie to their patients who are paying them to perform a service, much like any other professional service.  This violated every tenet I then held, age 18, when this first experience took place. 

The next OB again lied to me and forced me to have a spinal.  I vowed never to go to the hospital for birthing again.  Number three and four were born at home, unassisted.  My prenatal care was provided by an OB who was also on call if problems arose. 

Politically, I was shocked when I realized Libertarians thought a woman’s right to give birth where and how she chooses, and if she breastfed her child, was Not a freedom issue.  This raised my first questions about the philosophy of ‘Libertarianism’. 

At this time, fathers were chaining themselves to their wives to prevent their being ejected from the delivery room even when they were trained as their wife’s support. 

Another direct experience with the medical community took place when I fell during my third pregnancy and hurt my back.  The specialist I was directed to see insisted I needed back surgery.  I refused, hearing the probably impact on my ability to function normally. 

After 18 months of extreme discomfort and struggle, a solution presented itself.  At the time I was working on placing volunteer signature collectors for a Libertarian campaign, I think it was Ed Clark’s gubernatorial campaign around 1977 – 1978.  The group of us working on this for Los Angeles were meeting at my home.  One of our collector hosts walked in, took one look at me and took out what looked like a small gun.  Others already gathered stopped talking to watch.  Gary said, “lay down on your stomach, arms to the side.”  I did.  Using the activator gun Gary, a chiropractic student spent about one minute impacting several points on my back.  When I got up there was no pain and it never returned. 

My older sister, Carol Sylvia Pillsbury had died of a heart attack suddenly in 1974.  We went through shock and grief.  Carol was 36 years old, but assumed this had taken place because she smoked and drank alcohol. 

In the years intervening between 1978 and 1994 I lost two siblings more siblings to heart attacks; Anne Pillsbury Gripp died suddenly standing on the sidewalk in Tokyo where she was putting on the exhibit for her business, the Santa Barbara Orchid Estate, at an International Orchid Show.  Anne was the oldest of my parents five children. 

In 2004 my older brother, the third of my parent’s children, had a heart attack and stroke from which he would never recover. 

My younger brother, Stephen Martin Pillsbury had mitralvalve repair on his heart.  Five out of five children is a depressing statistic.

I had two heart attacks by 1999.  At the same time, I had storm migraines due to other circumstances in my life.  My cardiologist could find nothing to stabilize my heart which did not conflict with the Vicodin I had to take to function and care for my disabled son.   

Sitting across the desk from him he was obviously at a failure for words.  Instead, he opened his drawer and handed me a business card, saying not to tell anyone where I had gotten it.  The card was for an acupuncturist practicing in the area.  I made an appointment that day.  After six months my heart irregularity was gone. 

My life and experiences made me skeptical of both big pharma and big medicine and so motivated me to look for a solution.  Part 2 coming 

Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks Will Endanger Your Career – The Ignaz Semmelweis Story.

by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster

The persistence of the avoidance of facts in medicine must include the experience of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician whose first job was in obstetrics as appointed assistant to Professor Johann Klein, work which was carried out at the First Obstetrical Clinic of the Vienna General Hospital beginning on July 1, 1846. 

Semmelweis’s duties included examining patients every morning in anticipation of Professor Klein’s rounds.  He also provided supervision for difficult deliveries and performed other tasks assigned to him. 

There were two maternity clinics at the hospital. 

The First Clinic had an average maternal mortality rate from puerperal fever of approximately 10%.  There were two maternity clinics at the Viennese hospital. The First Clinic had an average maternal mortality rate due to puerperal fever of about 10%. The mortality rate at the Second Clinic rate averaged less than 4%. This fact was known beyond the bounds of the hospital.  Poor women being admitted would routinely give birth on the street rather than face being admitted to the First Clinic. 

This surprised and intrigued Semmelweis and he began looking for an answer.  He was quoted as saying this,  “made me so miserable that life seemed worthless”. The two clinics used nearly the same techniques – so where was the difference to be found? 

The First Clinic was part of the training regimen for medical students; the Second was used for the instruction of only midwives. 

Semmelweis systematically eliminated possible causes for the difference in outcome.  First, he eliminated “overcrowding’; the Second Clinic always experienced a higher volume of patients. 

In 1847 a breakthrough occurred for Semmelweis arising from the death of an associate and friend, Jakob Kolletschka.  Kolletschka had accidentally poked by a student’s scalpel as the student was performing a postmortem exam.  The postmortem on Kolletschka revealing a pathology similar to those from women who had died of puerperal fever. 

Semmelweis realized this could be the variable he had been seeking, material from contaminating cadavers which carried puerperal fever.  Medical students had contact only with the First Clinic patients, not those from the Second Clinic with its much lower mortality rate.     

A policy mandating the use of chlorinated lime, known today as calcium hypochlorite, ordinary household chlorine bleach for the First Clinic.  He chose the solution because it was known to eliminate the putrid smell of infected tissue studied during autopsies.    

The mortality rate in the First Clinic dropped 90%, becoming comparable to that in the Second Clinic. “The mortality rate in April 1847 was 18.3%. After hand washing was instituted in mid-May, the rates in June were 2.2%, July 1.2%, August 1.9% and, for the first time since the introduction of anatomical orientation, the death rate was zero in two months of the year following this discovery”, according to Source

Cases of puerperal fever, which was a form of septicemia, could be reduced to near zero if doctors washed their hands in the formula Semmelweis had identified. However, this conflicted with the Theory of diseases which was accepted as fact by the existing medical and scientific opinions of his time.  Semmelweis’ ideas were rejected. 

Semmelweis continued his work in 1848, despite having his ideas and the protocols for eliminating the persistence of puerperal fever; he and documented the outcome, which went far toward eliminating incidences of the puerperal fever all together from the hospital wards.

Disagreements with conservative physicians, including his immediate superior, Professor Klein, resulted in Semmelweis leaving the hospital to return to his native Pest in 1851.

There, he took on oversight of Pest’s obstetric ward at the small St. Rochus Hospital.  Semmelweis virtually, again, eliminated incidents of puerperal fever.  From 1851 – 1855 only 8 patients died from childbed fever from 933 births. 

In his 1861 book, The Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever, Semmelweis lamented the slow adoption of his ideas saying,  “Most medical lecture halls continue to resound with lectures on epidemic childbed fever and with discourses against my theories. The medical literature for the last twelve years continues to swell with reports of puerperal epidemics, and in 1854 in Vienna, the birthplace of my theory, 400 maternity patients died from childbed fever. In published medical works, my teachings are either ignored or attacked. The medical faculty at Würzburg awarded a prize to a monograph written in 1859 in which my teachings were rejected.”