Category Archives: Medical Politics

The Politics of Medical Freedom

Posted on September 8, 2017 | Leave a comment

Winner of an Independent Publisher Books Award Bronze Medal for 2017, Paul Stepansky’s In the Hands of Doctors:  Touch and Trust in Medical Care is now available in paperback and as an eBook.  For the paperback edition, Stepansky has written a new preface, a stirring defense of Obamacare as a path to universal health care in America.  It is given here in its entirety in appreciation of the readers of “Medicine, Health, and History.”

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In the Hands of Doctors:  Touch and Trust in Medical Care

Preface to the Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2017 by Paul E. Stepansky.  All rights reserved.

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 In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
                                         — George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946)

Now, less than a year after publication of In the Hands of Doctors, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (aka Obamacare), which I roundly endorse in this book, is gravely imperiled.  Congressional Republican legislators have joined a Republican President in a commitment to repeal the bill that has provided health insurance to over 20 million previously uninsured Americans.  The legislation thus far presented to replace it by the U.S. Senate  (the “Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017”) would, according to the Congressional Budget Office, leave 15 million Americans uninsured in 2018 and 22 million by 2026.   Proposed cuts and caps to the Medicaid budget, which are part of the legislation, would, according to the CBO, decrease enrollment in the program by 16% over the next decade.  In brief, these cuts and caps would jeopardize the health and well-being of the one in five Americans and one in three American children dependent on the support provided by Medicaid.  Disabled and other special-needs children as well as elderly nursing home residents would suffer the most.  A Congressional vote simply to repeal Obamacare absent new legislation would have even more catastrophic consequences.
      Congressional opponents of the Affordable Care Act, no less than President Donald Trump, appear to live in a hermetically sealed bubble that makes only grazing contact with the socioeconomic ground below.  They share space in the bubble with colliding political abstractions that they grasp, one after the other, and radio back down to earth.  The political bubble dwellers offer us yet again the palliatives of context-free “medical choice” and “medical freedom” as remedies for the real-world suffering addressed by Obamacare.
     But these terms, as used by politicians, do not speak to the realties of American health care in  2017.  Rather, they hearken back to the era of the Founding Fathers, when issues of health, illness, freedom, and tyranny were much simpler.  Freedom, as the founders understood it, operated only in the intertwined realms of politics and religion.  How could it be otherwise?   Medical intervention did not affect the course of illness; it did not enable people to feel better and live longer and more productive lives.  With the exception of smallpox inoculation, which George Washington wisely made mandatory among colonial troops in the winter of 1777, governmental intrusion into the health of its citizenry was nonexistent, even non-sensical.
     Until roughly the eighth decade of the nineteenth century, you got sick, you recovered (often despite doctoring), you lingered on in sickness, or you died.  They were the options.  Medical freedom, enshrined during the Jacksonian era, meant being free to pick and choose your doctor without any state interference.  So liberty-loving Americans picked and chose among mercury-dosing, bloodletting “regulars,” homeopaths, herbalists, botanical practitioners, eclectics, hydropaths, phrenologists, Christian Scientists, folk healers, and faith healers.   State legislatures stood on the sidelines, rescinding or gutting medical licensing laws and applauding the new pluralism.  It was anarchy, but anarchy in the service of medical freedom of choice.
     Now, mercifully, our notion of medical freedom has been reconfigured by two centuries of medical progress.  We don’t just get sick and die.  We get sick and get medical help, and, mirabile dictu, the help actually helps.  In antebellum America, deaths of young people under 20 accounted for half the national death rate, which was more than three times the death rate today.  Now our children  don’t die of  small pox, cholera, yellow fever, dysentery, typhoid, and pulmonary and respiratory infections before they reach maturity.  When they get sick in early life, their parents take them to the doctor and they almost always get better.  Their parents, on the other hand, especially after reaching middle age, don’t always get better.  So they get ongoing medical attention to help them live longer and more comfortably with chronic conditions such as diabetes, coronary heart disease, inflammatory bowel disease, Parkinson’s, and many forms of cancer.
     When our framers drafted the Constitution, the idea of being free to live a productive and relatively comfortable life with long-term illness did not compute.  You died from diabetes, cancer, bowel obstruction, neurodegenerative disease, and major infections.  Among young women,  such infections included the uterine infection that routinely followed childbirth.  A major heart attack simply killed you.  You didn’t receive dialysis and possibly a kidney transplant when you entered kidney failure.  Major surgery, performed on the kitchen table if you were of means or in a bacteria-infested public hospital if you were not, was rarely attempted because it invariably resulted in massive blood loss, infection, and death.
     So, yes, our framers intended our citizenry to be free of government interference, including the Obamacare “mandate” that impinges on Americans who choose to opt out of the program.  But then, with the arguable exception of Benjamin Franklin, the framers never envisioned a world in which freedom could be extended by access to expert medical care that relieves suffering, often effects cure, and prolongs life.  But then, neither could they envision the enfranchisement of former slaves and women, the progressive income tax, compulsory vaccination, publicly supported health clinics, mass screening for TB, diabetes, and  syphilis, or Medicare and Medicaid.  Throughout the antebellum era, when physicians were reviled by the public and when neither regular medicine nor the rival alternative sects could stem the periodic waves of cholera, yellow fever, and malaria that decimated local populations, it mattered little who provided one’s doctoring.  Many, like the thousands who paid $20.00 for the right to practice Samuel Thomson’s do-it-yourself botanical system, chose to doctor themselves.
     Those who seek repeal of Obamacare without a credible legislative alternative that provides equal, preferably greater, health benefits to all Americans seem challenged by the very idea of medical progress.  Their use of terms like “choice” and “freedom” invokes an eighteenth-century political frame of reference to deprive Americans of a kind of freedom associated with a paradigm-shift that arose only in the final quarter of the nineteenth century.  It was only then that American medicine began its transition to what we think of as modern medicine.  Listerian antisepsis and asepsis; laboratory research in bacteriology, immunology, and pharmacology; laboratory development of specific remedies for specific illnesses; implementation of public health measures informed by bacteriology; modern medical education; and, yes, government regulation to safeguard the public from incompetent practitioners and toxic medications – all were part of the transition.  The Jacksonian impulse persisted into the early twentieth century, flaring up in organized opposition to compulsory childhood vaccination, and  finally petering out in the 1930s, by which time it was universally accepted that scientific medicine was, well, scientific, and, as such, something more than one medical sect among many.
     “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Thomas Jefferson began the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  What Jefferson did not stipulate, indeed what he could not stipulate in his time and place, were the hierarchical relationships among these rights.  Now, in the twenty-first century, we are able to go beyond an eighteenth-century mindset in which  “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” functioned as a noun phrase whose unitary import derived from the political tyrannies of King George III and the British parliament.  Now we can place life at the base of the pyramid and declare that quality of life is indelibly linked to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  To the extent that quality of life is diminished through disease, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are necessarily compromised.  In the twenty-first century, health is life; it is life poised to exercise liberty and pursue happiness to the fullest.
     Why, then,  is it wrong to require all citizens to participate in a national health plan, either directly or through a mandate (i.e., a tax on those who opt out), that safeguards the right of people to  efficacious health care regardless of their financial circumstances, their employment status, and their preexisting medical conditions?  What is it about the Obamacare mandate that has proven so troubling to our legislators?  When you buy a house in this country, you pay local property taxes that support the local public schools.  These taxes function like the mandate:  They have a differential financial impact on people depending on whether they directly benefit from the  system sustained by the tax.  To wit, you pay the tax whether or not you choose to send your children to the public schools, indeed, whether or not you have children at all.  You are obligated to subsidize the public education of children other than your own because public education has been declared a public good by the polity of which you are a part.  The same goes for that portion of local taxes that provides police and fire protection.  We accept a mandate to support policemen and firefighters whether or not we will ever need them, in the knowledge that other members of the community assuredly will.  Similarly, those who opt out of Obamacare should pay a price, because they remain part of a society committed to health as a superordinate value without which liberty and the pursuit of happiness are enfeebled.
     It is inconceivable that the Founding Fathers would have found unconstitutional or unfair or governmentally oppressive a law that provided life-promoting health care that enabled more Americans to discharge the duties of citizenship and live more freely and productively in pursuit of happiness.  They declared that citizens – all of whom, be it noted, were white, propertied males – were entitled to life consistent with the demands and entitlements of representative democracy.  Their pledge, their declaration, was not in support of a compromised life that limited the ability to fulfill those demands and enjoy those entitlements.
     When, in our own time, the word “choice,” as used by Republican politicians, means that millions of Americans who rely on Obamacare will end up leading compromised lives, the word becomes semantically contorted and ethically bankrupt.  The absence of Obamacare does not, ipso facto, empower lower-income, assistance-dependent Americans to buy the comprehensive health insurance they need, especially when the tax credits under legislation proposed thus far provide far less support than the subsidization lower-income families now receive.  Freeing insurers from Obamacare regulations so that they can offer inadequate policies that lower-income Americans can afford to buy does nothing but maximize the medical risks of these financially choice-less Americans.  Here is a fact:  Economic circumstances wipe out the prerogative to make prudent choices in one’s own best interest.  For lower-income Americans, a panoply of inadequate choices is not the pathway to right-minded decision making.  With the Senate’s “Better Care Reconciliation Act,” unveiled in June and updated in July, 2017, millions of low-income Americans, especially those dependent on Obamacare subsidies and Medicaid, would have had an absence of credible and affordable choices for obtaining health care adequate to their needs.  The call simply to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which the Senate has rejected as of this writing, would take us back to a status quo ante when millions of Americans were either priced out of, or completely denied, health coverage.
     Of course, adult citizens may repudiate mainstream health care altogether on the basis of philosophical or religious  predilections.  Christian Scientists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, hold theological beliefs that often lead them to refuse medical treatment.  Certainly, they are free to pursue health through spiritual healing or, in the manner of medieval Christians, to disavow corporeal health and earth-bound life altogether.  But by law they cannot deny their children, who deserve to live to maturity and make their own choices, the healing power of modern medicine, whether it comes in the form of insulin, antibiotics, blood transfusions, or surgery.  Nor should they be allowed to undermine social and political arrangements, codified in law, that support everyone else’s right to pursue life and happiness through twenty-first century medicine.  Those who, prior to the Affordable Care Act, had inadequate insurance or no insurance at all are not struggling to free themselves from the clutches of federal regulation; they are not crying out for new free market health plans through which they can exercise freedom of choice.  Rather, they are struggling to put food on the table and keep themselves and their families healthy.  To this end, they need to be free to avail themselves of what modern medicine has to offer, unencumbered by politically debased notions of freedom and choice.
     At this moment in history, in a fractionated society represented by a President and Congressional leaders whose daily missives bear out George Orwell’s acute observation about the corruption of language brought on by political orthodoxies, In the Hands of Doctors may have a wistful ring.  I hope not.  I am addressing the personal side of health care – the reality of a doctor and patient, alone in a consulting room, often surrounded by high-tech diagnostic aids but always containing those vital low-tech instruments with which one person reaches out to the other:  the physician’s eyes and hands and voice.  The human face of doctoring, which now includes the doctoring of nurse practitioners and physician assistants, remains essential to the success of any doctor-patient relationship, whatever the institutional arrangements that bring together this doctor and this patient, the former to help the latter.
     Endeavoring to understand the several aspects – and possibilities – of the doctor-patient relationship, I write about the nature of clinical caring; the relation between caring and patient trust; the need to recruit and train physicians who can bring this caring sensibility to their patients; the role of empathy in medical caring; and the obligation of medical educators to revivify primary care medicine to meet the critical shortage of frontline physicians within underserved American communities.  These issues will not go away, whatever the fate of Obamacare.
     When federal legislation, through the practical assistance it provides, extends the reach of trusting doctor-patient relationships to the most vulnerable  groups in society, it has a  function that is both binding and enabling.  It fortifies the webbing that underlies the increasingly disparate parts of our national mosaic.  Obamacare, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Medicaid – these programs do not “bring us together” in a feel good way.  They do, however, prevent a free fall in which the subcommunities and interest groups into which society has decomposed land so far apart they are no longer in hailing distance of one another.  As to the enabling function, a comprehensive medical safety net for all Americans – let’s call it what it is: universal health care – revitalizes political democracy by extending to all Americans a greater possibility of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  In the everyday world, this pursuit boils down to the ability of more people to stay on the job or to work from home rather than not work at all.  Society benefits, since chronically ill people pursuing happiness under the umbrella of universal health care will better resist the complications and collateral illnesses that follow from their primary illness or illnesses.  Society also benefits by enabling healthier happiness-pursuers to avoid hospitalization and, among the elderly, to push back the time when nursing home care is required.  And finally, society benefits by seeing to it that all children, especially those who are disabled, receive every medical advantage as they traverse their own challenging paths to productive, choice-wielding citizenship.
     Obamacare is a far cry from universal health care, but for all its limitations and current financial straits, it has provided these binding and enabling functions for millions of Americans previously without a medical safety net.  Woe to politicians who shred it in the name of choice, a pleasing vacuity that evades the reality of disease and pain among many who are relieved to have a single avenue of subsidized care where none was previously available.
     Health care should be a national trust; everyone deserves what twenty-first century medicine has to offer, regardless of how much or how little choice can be worked into the offering.  Politicians who feel otherwise are enemies of the polity.  Jefferson, who as president helped set up the first smallpox vaccination clinics in the south and then, in retirement, planned a state-supported clinic to provide free medical care to those who could not afford it, would not have brooked the empty insistence that medical freedom and medical choice, unhinged from socioeconomic reality, trump access to medical care per se.  Nor, for that matter, does choice, whatever it may or may not mean, obviate our moral obligation as a society to see to it that best available treatment, whatever the pathway that leads to it, means treatment rendered by caring doctors willing to know their patients as people.

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In the Hands of Doctors:  Touch and Trust in Medical Care, 1st pbk ed

Paul E. Stepansky

978-0983080770        2016/2017pbk        348pp        $26.95pbk

Release date: September 12, 2017

Order now at Amazon.com

 

 

 

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“Scope of Practice” Minefields

Posted on September 15, 2014 | Leave a comment

“. . . my clinical practice as a women’s health NP began in the mid-1970s.  My colleagues who had gone on to academic careers questioned my commitment to nursing and to nursing values.  A common question was ‘Are you a nurse, or are you a mini-doc?’  My answer was, is, and will always be:  ‘I am a nurse with primary care skills.  I take care of my patients within a nursing framework. . . . my values lie in nursing, not in the medical model.  I care for my patients as a fully prepared, primary care provider of women.” – Judith A. Berg & Mary Ellen Roberts, “Recognition, Regulation, Scope of Practice:  Nurse Practitioners’ Growing Pains” (2012)[1]

“We agree certified nurse practitioners can provide many core primary care services, but it is important that this not be misunderstood as suggesting that nurses are interchangeable with physicians in providing the full depth and breadth of services that primary care physicians provide.  The two professions are complementary but not equivalent.  For diagnostic evaluation of clinical presentations that are not straightforward and for the ongoing management of complex or interacting medical problems, the most appropriate clinician is the physician.” – J. F. Ralston & S. E. Weinberger, “Nurses’ Scope of Practice” (2011)[2]

Entering the debate on the “scope of practice” between nurse practitioners (NPs) and physicians is like parachuting onto a battlefield strewn with semantic landmines and decaying verbiage, while overhead the whistle of incoming word-tipped artillery fire grows louder.  For the opposing forces, the NPs and the MDs, negotiation about the scope of NPs’ provider activities has given way to incendiary propaganda and explosive metaphors.  It is all a matter of logistics, planning, grand strategy, tactical advance and retreat.

When the nursing historian Julie Fairman and her colleagues argue that “physicians’ additional training has not been shown to result in a measurable difference from that of nurse practitioners in the quality of basic primary care services,”[3]  they leave unexamined the meaning of basic.  Someone, after all, has to do the defining, and in so doing, to differentiate basic services from services that, in given circumstances, are not so basic.  Someone also has to stipulate how exactly “quality” is being assessed, qualitatively and quantitatively, in both the short- and long-term.

It is fine to make the commonsensical point that nurse practitioners should be permitted to practice “to the fullest extent of their skills and knowledge,” as recommended by the authors of the Institute of Medicine report of 2010, The Future of Nursing.[4]  But who decides what “fullest extent” actually means in relation to specific clinical contingencies and management challenges?  Is there even consensus on the meaning of NP “knowledge and competence” in contradistinction to the “knowledge and competence” of those who receive medical training?  Literally, then, what are Fairman and her colleagues talking about?

NP advocates make tactical use of the word “partnership” in framing debates about NP expansion.  And yes, certainly we need NPs and physicians to be collaborative partners in providing quality health care.  But the notion of “partnership,” as used by NPs, also subserves polemics.  Partnership, after all, does not entail parity among partners.  In law and business, for example, there are senior partners and junior partners, name partners and equity partners, voting partners and nonvoting partners.  In medicine, there are any number of  procedures (e.g., colposcopy, sigmoidoscopy, nasopharyngoscopy) that fall within the domain of adult primary care, but that many primary care physicians no longer perform, even if they are competent to do so, owing to issues of liability and lack of third party coverage.  This does not mean that primary care physicians, gynecologists, gastroenterologists, and ENTs are not “partners” in care, but rather that “partnership” does not abrogate the need for a division of labor, with the differing responsibilities, obligations, and entitlements that such  division entails.

Physician groups threatened by the legislative incursions of nonmedical providers like NPs are no better and even worse.  The Physicians Foundation is a nonprofit organization of medical groups formed to push back the nonmedical invaders, especially nurse practitioners.  Their report of November, 2012, Accept No Substitute: A Report on Scope of Practice, brims with military metaphors.  The authors, Stephen Isaacs and Paul Jellinek, write of “holding the line” on “expansionary forays” and summarize bulletins “fresh from the front lines.”  “What is the score so far?” they ask.  “Who is winning these scope of practice battles?”  And the military metaphors segue into sports metaphors, with the authors’ dour acknowledgment that physicians “are usually playing defense on scope of practice” brightened by occasional successes in eliminating nonphysician licensing.  In the latter cases, they exult, physicians “are in fact able to move the ball up the field.”[5]

What is one to make of such sophomoric posturing in the face of a serious and growing shortage of primary care physicians?  Where will we find the 51,880 additional primary care physicians that, according to recent published projections, we will need by 2025?[6]  It is easy to appreciate the exasperation of primary care NPs who face such opposition in the face of well-established facts.  To wit:   Only 20% of today’s medical students will choose a primary care specialty; NPs provide more cost-effective care than their physician counterparts; patient surveys reveal satisfaction with the care provided by NPs; and half of all physicians in office practice already work with NPs, certified nurse midwives, and/or physician assistants.  All such facts, be it noted, are ceded by the authors of The Physicians Foundation report.[7]

It is time for physicians to accept not only the reality, but also the socioethical desirability of nonphysician providers.  By the same token, it is time for nurse practitioners to accept the reasonableness of practice limits.  An expanded scope of practice is not a limitless scope of practice.  And, yes, self-evidently, the limits to which NPs are subject will not be identical to the limits imposed on physicians. There are indications for which physician consultation and supervision should be mandatory; there will be procedures that only physicians, including primary care physicians, are trained and legally authorized to perform. Establishing boundaries will always be shaped by power politics and economic self-interest, but it need not be deformed by them.  The process can be elevated by concern for public safety and prudent good sense.  By way of identifying two areas in need of further dialogue informed by complementary needs for patient access and patient safety, consider the topics of chronic disease management and prescriptive authority.

Nurse practitioner advocates tout the important role of NPs in managing chronic disease, and type 2 diabetes is typically given as a case in point.[8]  Certainly NPs can manage diabetics whose glucose levels must be monitored and insulin dosages adjusted.  There is also evidence that specialized NPs are highly effective in collaborative practice with primary care physicians, where they serve as diabetic care coordinators.[9]  What then is the problem?  It arises from the fact that management of chronic disease, especially among the elderly, is rarely a matter of managing a  stable disease entity.  In later life, diabetes, however well monitored and managed, typically leads to neuropathy, retinopathy, and/or kidney disease.

Are NPs trained to manage chronic diseases as independent providers when management ipso facto entails a plethora of intersystemic complications?  Consider another example.  Perhaps an NP-nephrologist can manage end-stage renal disease (ESRD), a chronic disease that can be stabilized for long periods with dialysis.  But what happens when such management, and the prolongation of life it entails, leads to diabetes and heart disease, as it often does?  Is such management still within the “knowledge and competence” of NPs?  As I wrote in “The Costs of  Medical Progress”:

Chronic disease rarely runs its course in glorious pathophysiological isolation.  All but inevitably, it pulls other chronic diseases into the running.  Newly emergent chronic disease is collateral damage attendant to chronic disease long-established and well-managed.  Chronicities cluster; discrete treatment technologies leach together; medication needs multiply.

Well-trained NPs no doubt bring much-needed talent to managing intercurrent disease in certain respects.  I am no expert here, but I am open to the possibility that independent management of chronic disease, particularly among the elderly, may not be commensurate with the discrete “skill set” that NPs acquire, even as this “set” is enlarged by the medley of nonmedical skills inculcated by “nursing education and its particular ideology and professional identity.”[10]  Management of chronic disease, that is, often entails complexity of a distinctly medical sort.  Scope of practice debates should be informed by the fact that diabetes, to keep to the example, is no longer a disease with a stable natural history.[11]  The same can be said of kidney disease and heart disease and many types of cancer.  So the question of what NPs can and cannot do needs to be fleshed out in a more clinically realistic manner:  We need to know whether NP-generalists are as capable as primary care physicians of managing chronic illness in the context of life span issues and specific dimensions of patient care.  Are they as capable as primary care physicians, for example, of prioritizing interventions among older patients with multiple chronic diseases?[12]

Another “fullest extent” problematic concerns prescribing privileges.  NPs and APRNs (advanced practice registered nurses) demand the same authorization to prescribe medications as physicians.  This insistence, globally formulated, masks the fact that prescriptive authority is always qualified in various ways. Perhaps physicians, NPs and APRNs, and legislatures should set the all-or-nothing rhetoric aside and wrestle with the real-world issue of “prescriptive authority of various levels” that gets codified in state law.[13]  Is it within the NP’s scope of practice, for example, to change antibiotics without physician consultation for a child who comes to the pediatrician with fever, sore throat, and pain, and whose symptoms have not abated with first-line antibiotics prescribed by the NP?[14]  To begin to get a handle on this kind of issue, one must at present read the law on NP “scope of practice” in a particular state, as NPs have in fact been enjoined to do.[15]

Here is the point: primary care NPs in all states deserve – and now have – “prescriptive authority,” but reasonable people may differ on the breadth of this authority.  Here is an issue that can be subject to empirical research and meaningful negotiation among all the stakeholders, including the public. To wit, what kinds of drugs are NPs trained to prescribe and, based on survey data, what kinds of drugs do they actually prescribe?  Several studies from the 1980s showed “that NPs prescribe a very limited number of relatively simple medications to predominantly healthy populations.”[16]  Perhaps these studies are badly dated and superseded by  recent studies attesting to the broadened range of drugs now prescribed by primary care NPs. Well and good.  Then the “prescriptive authority” granted to NPs by legislatures should be broader rather than narrower.

But, normatively speaking, should it be equivalent to the prescriptive authority of primary care physicians?  Should NPs be granted authority to prescribe controlled substances without collaborative arrangements with physicians and without limiting stipulations as to dosage and duration of use?  Here is another issue ripe for further negotiation informed by empirical research and considerations of patient safety.  I bring no special expertise to the table beyond noting that NPs, however great their knowledge and competence, do not receive the extensive training in physiology, pathophysiology, and pharmacology that physicians do. I do not find it unreasonable that NP-issued scripts should require some degree of physician involvement, as is now the case in 32 states.[17]

The power differential between organized medicine and organized nursing, including medical specialty societies and NP/ACRP societies, has made matters worse for highly trained nurse practitioners seeking to practice to the fullest extent of their knowledge and competence.  But it has also led some NP representatives to demonize medical groups that seek any drawing of lines, since the very act of drawing a line can only derive from the economic imperative to “hold the line” on NP rights.  Consider the reaction of the editor of Policy Politics Nursing Practice in 2006 to the insistence of medical groups that the difference between nurse practitioners with doctorates and physicians be clarified for the benefit of patients. “Does anyone,” he wrote, “seriously see it as part of a conspiracy to mislead patients by having APRNs refer to themselves as doctor? And are physical therapists (who are moving toward a requirement for doctoral-level education), psychologists, and pharmacists in on the conspiracy, too?”[18]

Well, no, hardly.  But the issue here, shorn of polarizing rhetoric, isn’t about willful misleading; it’s about the cultural valence of the title “doctor” and the everyday meanings people impute to it in connection with healthcare.  A patient who seeks treatment from a licensed primary care provider who is referred to and addressed as “doctor” will, absent some kind of a priori clarification, likely assume the “doctor” in question is a physician.  It is not unreasonable to suggest reasonable efforts at patient education to clarify the different roles and orientations of different kinds of providers.  And what prevents NP groups from adopting their own strategy of patient education?  What prevents them from developing and publicizing endorsements of the “doctor of nursing practice” degree that play to the latter’s  “doctoring” strengths in contradistinction to those of physicians?

If there is a conspiracy out there, it is one perpetrated on the public by both physicians and NPs.  It is a conspiracy of partial explanations.  It is the conspiracy among physicians who refuse to cede that nurse practitioners have arrived, that they are licensed clinical providers who are perfectly capable of providing a great deal of what has traditionally been the province of medicine, especially primary care medicine.  But it is also the conspiracy among NP advocates whose rhetoric masks important distinctions, viz., that “fullest extent” of NP/APRN practice is not coextensive with the typically full extent of care that primary care physicians are trained to provide.  This follows from various considerations, not least of which is that family physicians train a total of 21,000 hours whereas NPs train between 3,500 and 6,000 hours.[19]  There, I’ve done it again.  I’ve made a a series of claims that strike me as reasonable and will win me no friends in either warring camp.

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[1] J. A. Berg & M. E. Roberts, “Recognition, regulation, scope of practice:  nurse practitioners’ growing pains,” J. Amer. Acad. Nurse Pract., 24:121-123, 2012, at 121.

[2] J. F. Ralston & S. E. Weinberger, “Nurses’ scope of practice,” Correspondence, New Engl. J. Med., 364:281.

[3] J. A. Fairman, et al., “Broadening the scope of nursing practice,” New Engl. J. Med., 364:193-96, at 193.

[4] As quoted in J. A. Fairman & S. M. Okoye, “Nursing for the future, from the past: two reports on nursing from the Institute of Medicine,” J. Nurs. Ed., 50:305-311, 2011, at 309.

[5] S. Isaacs & P. Jellinek, Accept No Substitute:  A Report on Scope of Practice. White Paper for The Physicians Foundation, November, 2012 (http://www.khi.org/documents/2014/aug/26/accept-no-substitute-report-scope-practice/), pp. 1, 2, 3, 6.

[6] S. M. Petterson, et al., “Projecting US primary care physician workforce needs:  2010-2025,” Ann. Fam. Med., 10:503-509, 2012.

[7] Issacs & Jellinek, Accept No Substitute, pp. 8-13.

[8] G. C. Richardson, et al., “Nurse practitioner management of type 2 diabetes,” Permanente Journal, 18:e134-140, 2014;  M. J. Goolsby, “2006 American Academy of Nurse Practitioners diabetes management survey,” J. Amer. Acad. Nurse Pract., 19:496-98, 2007; Fairman, et al.,  “Broadening the scope of nursing practice,” p. 193.

[9] Richardson, “Nurse practitioner management of type 2 diabetes,” op cit.; K. G. Shojania, et al., “Effects of quality improvement strategies for type 2 diabetes on glycemic control:  a meta-regression analysis,” JAMA, 296:427-40, 2006; S. Ingersoll, et al., Nurse care coordination for diabetes:  a literature review and synthesis,” J. Nurs. Care Qual., 20:208-14, 2005.

[10] On the notion of clinical competence as acquisition of a “skill set,” see, e.g., J. Fairman, “Delegated by default or negotiated by need?:  physicians, nurse practitioners, and the process of clinical thinking,” in E. D. Baer, et al., Enduring Issues in American Nursing (NY: Springer Pub., 2002),  pp. 311-12 and J. Fairman, Making Room in the Clinic: Nurse Practitioners and the Evolution of Modern Health Care (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 2008), pp. 187, 190.

[11] Chris Feudtner terms it a “cyclical transmuted disease” in Bittersweet: Diabetes, Insulin, and the Transformation of Illness (Chapel Hill: North Carolina, 2003), p. 36.

[12] For exemplary instances of how clinical judgment – and not a clinical “skill set” – enters into the prioritizing of treatment interventions among concurrent chronic diseases, see K. C. Stange, et al., “The value of a family physician,” J. Fam. Pract., 46:363-69, 1998; K. C. Stange, “The generalist approach,” Ann. Fam. Med., 7:198-203, 2009, and E. J. Cassell, Doctoring: The Nature of Primary Care Medicine (NY: Oxford University Press, 1997).

[13] Of course, the issue of  levels of prescriptive authority pertains not only to physicians and NPs, but also to physician assistants, dentists, optometrists, osteopaths, and podiatrists. For the concrete manner in which the state of Florida spells out prescriptive levels for each of these professions, see http://www.thehealthlawfirm.com/resources/health-law-articles-and-documents/prescribing-in-florida.html).

[14] M. Crane, “Malpractice risks with NPs and PAs in your practice,” Medscape, Jan 3, 2013 (http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/775746).

[15] E.g., C. Buppert, “Scope of practice,” J. Nurse Pract., 1:11-13, 2005.

[16] C. D. DeAngelis, “Nurse practitioner redux,” JAMA, 271:868-71, 1994.  The studies  DeAngelis cites are:  P. Repicky, et al., “Professional activities of nurse practitioners in adult ambulatory care settings,” Nurse Pract., 4:27-40, 1980; D. Munroe, et al., “Prescribing patterns of nurse practitioners,” Am. J. Nurs., 82:1538-40, 1982; J. Resenaur, “Prescribing behavior of primary care nurse practitioners,” Am. J. Public Health., 74:10-13, 1984.

[17] “Nurse Practitioner Prescribing Authority and Physician Supervision Requirements for Diagnosis and Treatment” (http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/nurse-practitioner-autonomy/).

[18] D. M. Keepnews, “Scope of practice redux?,” Policy, Politics & Nurs. Prac., 7:84-86, 2006, at 84.

[19] D. Marbury, “Scope of practice debate,” Med. Econ., September 10, 2013, 26-30, at 27 (http://medicaleconomics.modernmedicine.com/medical-economics/news/scope-practice-debate?page=full).

Copyright © 2014 by Paul E. Stepansky.  All rights reserved.

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Posted in Diabetes, Medical Politics, Nurse practitioners, Nursing

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Medical Freedom, Then and Now

Posted on April 13, 2012 | Leave a comment

“A nation’s liberties seem to depend upon headier and heartier attributes than the liberty to die without medical care.”                                                                        ~Milton Mayer, “The Dogged Retreat of the Doctors” (1949)

Conservative supreme court justices who voice grave skepticism about the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 would have been better suited to judicial service in the decades following the Revolutionary War.  Issues of health, illness, freedom, and tyranny were much simpler then.  Liberty, as understood by our founding fathers, operated only in the interlacing realms of politics and religion.  How could it have been otherwise?   Medical intervention did not affect the course of illness; it did not enable people to feel better and live longer and more productive lives.  With the exception of smallpox inoculation, which George Washington made mandatory among colonial troops in the winter of 1777, governmental intrusion into the health of its citizenry was nonexistent, even nonsensical.

Until roughly the eighth decade of the nineteenth century, you got sick, you recovered (often despite doctoring), you lingered on in sickness, or you died.  Antebellum (pre-Civil War) medicine relied on a variation of Galenic medicine developed in the eighteenth century by the Scottish physician John Cullen and his student John Brown.  According to Cullen’s system, all diseases were really variations of a single disease that consisted of too much tension or excitability (and secondarily too little tension or excitability) in the blood vessels.  Revolutionary-era and antebellum physicians sought to restore a natural balance by giving “overstimulated” patients (read: feverish, agitated, pain-ridden patients) large doses of toxic mercury compounds like calomel to induce diarrhea; emetics like ipecac and tobacco to induce vomiting; and by bleeding patients to the point of fainting (i.e., syncope).  It was not a pretty business.

Antebellum Americans did not have to worry about remedies for specific illnesses.  Except for smallpox vaccine and antimalarial cinchona tree bark (from which quinine was isolated in 1820), none existed.  Nor did they have to worry about long-term medical interventions for chronic conditions – bacterial infections, especially those that came in epidemic waves every two or three years, had no more opportunity to become chronic than diabetes, heart disease, or cancer.

Medical liberty, enshrined during the Jacksonian era, meant being free to pick and choose your doctor without any state interference.  So liberty-loving Americans picked and chose among calomel-dosing, bloodletting-to-syncope “regulars,” homeopaths, herbalists, botanical practitioners (Thomsonians), eclectics, hydropaths, phrenologists, Christian Scientists, folk healers, and faith healers.   State legislatures stood on the sidelines and applauded this instantiation of pure democracy.  By midcentury, 15 states had rescinded medical licensing laws; the rest gutted their laws and left them unenforced.  Americans were free to enjoy medical anarchy.

Now, mercifully, our notion of liberty has been reconfigured by two centuries of medical progress.  We don’t just get sick and die.  We get sick and get medical help, and, mirabile dictu, the help actually helps.  In antebellum America, deaths of young people under 20 accounted for half the national death rate.   Now our children don’t die of small pox, cholera, yellow fever, dysentery, typhoid, and pulmonary and respiratory infections before they reach maturity.  Diphtheria no longer stalks them during the warm summer months.  When they get sick in early life, their parents take them to the doctor and they almost always get better.  Their parents, on the other hand, especially after reaching middle age, don’t always get better.  So they get ongoing medical attention to help them live longer and more comfortably with chronic conditions like diabetes, coronary heart disease, inflammatory bowel disease, Parkinson’s, and many forms of cancer.

When our framers drafted the Constitution, the idea of being free to live a productive and relatively comfortable life with long-term illness didn’t compute.  You died from diabetes,  cancer, bowel obstruction, neurodegenerative disease, and any major infection (including, among young women, the infection that often followed childbirth).  A major heart attack usually killed you.  You didn’t receive dialysis and possibly a kidney transplant when you entered kidney failure.  Major surgery, performed on the kitchen table if you were of means or in a bacteria-infested, dimly lit, unventilated public hospital if you weren’t, was all but nonexistent because it invariably resulted in massive blood loss, infection, and death.

So, yes, our framers intended our citizenry to be free of government interference, including an obligatory mandate to subsidize health care for millions of uninsured and underserved Americans.  But then the framers never envisioned a world in which freedom could be safeguarded and extended by access to expert care that relieved suffering, effected cure, and prolonged life.  Nor could they envision the progressive income tax, compulsory vaccination, publicly supported clinics, mass screening for TB, diabetes, and  syphilis, and Medicare.  Throughout the antebellum era, when regular physicians were reviled by the public and when neither regulars nor “alternative” practitioners could stem the periodic waves of cholera, yellow fever, and malaria that decimated local populations, it mattered little who provided one’s doctoring. Many, like the thousands who paid $20.00 for the right to practice Samuel Thomson’s do-it-yourself botanical system, chose to doctor themselves.

Opponents of the Affordable Care Act seem challenged by the very idea of progress.  Their consideration of liberty invokes an eighteenth-century political frame of reference to deprive Americans of a kind of liberty associated with a paradigm-shift that arose in the 1880s and 1890s.  It was only then that American medicine began its transition to what we think of as modern medicine. Listerian antisepsis (and then asepsis); laboratory research in bacteriology, immunology, and pharmacology; laboratory development of specific remedies for specific illnesses; implementation of public health measures informed by bacteriology; modern medical education beginning with the opening of Johns Hopkins Medical College in 1893; and, yes, government regulation to safeguard the public from incompetent practitioners and toxic, sometimes fatal, medications – all were  all part of the transition.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Jefferson begins the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  What Jefferson didn’t stipulate – what he couldn’t stipulate in his time and place – was the hierarchical relationship among these rights.  Now, in the twenty-first century, we are able to go beyond an eighteenth-century mindset in which “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” functions as a noun phrase whose unitary import derives from the political tyrannies of King George III and the British Parliament.  Now we can place life at the base of the pyramid and declare that quality of life is indelibly linked to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  To the extent that quality of life is diminished through disease and dysfunction, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are necessarily compromised.  In 2012, health is life; it is life poised to exercise liberty and pursue happiness to the fullest.

Why is it unconstitutional to obligate all citizens to participate in a health plan, either directly or through a mandate, that safeguards the right of people to efficacious health care regardless of their financial circumstances, their employment status, and their preexisting medical conditions?  What is it about the term “mandate” that is constitutionally questionable?  When you buy a house in this country, you pay local property taxes that support the local public schools.  (If you’re a renter, your landlord pays your share of the tax out of your rent.)  The property tax functions like the mandate:  It has a differential financial impact on people depending on whether they directly benefit from the system sustained by the tax.  To wit, you pay the tax whether or not you choose to send your children to the public schools, indeed, whether or not you have children.  You are obligated to subsidize the public education of children other than your own because public education, for all its failings, has been declared a public good by the polity of which you are a part.

It is inconceivable that the founding fathers would have found unconstitutional a law that extended life-promoting health care to the roughly 50 million Americans who lack health insurance.  The founding fathers declared that citizens – well, white, propertied males, at least – were entitled to life consistent with the demands and entitlements of representative democracy; their pledge, their Declaration, was not in support of a compromised life that limited the ability to fulfill those demands and enjoy those entitlements.

Of course, adult citizens may repudiate mainstream health care on the basis of their own philosophical or religious  predilections.  Fine.  Americans who wish to pursue health outside the medical mainstream or, in the manner of medieval Christians, to disavow corporeal well-being altogether, are free to do so.  But they should not be allowed to undermine social and political arrangements, codified in law, that support everyone else’s right to pursue life and happiness through twenty-first century medicine.

The concept of medical freedom dominated the antebellum period and resurfaced during the early twentieth century, when compulsory childhood vaccination and Oklahoma Senator Robert Owen’s proposed legislation to create a federal department of public health spurred the formation of the Anti-Vaccination League of America, the American Medical Liberty League, and the National League for Medical Freedom.   According to these groups, medical freedom was incompatible not only with compulsory vaccination, but also with the medical examination of school children, premarital syphilis tests, and municipal campaigns against diphtheria.  In the 1910s, failure to detect and treat contagious bacterial disease was a small price to pay for freedom from what medical libertarians derided as “allopathic knowledge.”   These last gasps of the Jacksonian impulse were gone by 1930, by which time it was universally accepted that scientific medicine was, well, scientific, and, as such, something more than one medical sect among many.

After World War II,  when the American Medical Association mounted its holy crusade against President Harry Truman’s proposal for national health care, “medical liberty” came into vogue once more, though its meaning had changed.  In antebellum American and again in the 1910s, it signified freedom to cast off the oppressive weight of “regular” medicine and pick and choose among the many alternative sects.  In the late 1940s, it signified freedom from federally funded health care, which would contaminate the sacrosanct doctor-patient relationship.  For the underserved, such freedom safeguarded the right to remain untreated.  The AMA’s legerdemain elicited ridicule by many, the prominent journalist Milton Mayer among them.  “Millions of Americans,” Mayer wrote in Harper’s in 1949, “geographically or economically isolated, now have access to one doctor or none.  The AMA would preserve their present freedom of choice.”  In 1960, the medical reporter Selig Greenberg mocked  medical free choice as a “hoary slogan” based on “the fatuous assumption that shopping around for a doctor without competent guidance and paying him on a piecemeal basis somehow guarantees a close relationship and high-quality medical care.”[1]

Now the very notion of medical freedom has an archaic ring.  We no longer seek freedom from the clutches of mainstream medicine; now we seek  freedom to avail ourselves of what mainstream medicine has to offer.  At this singular moment in history, in a fractionated society represented by a bitterly divided Congress, access to health care will be expanded and safeguarded, however imperfectly, by the Affordable Health Care Act.  Those who opt out of the Act should pay a price, because they remain part of a society committed to health as a superordinate value without which liberty and the pursuit of happiness are enfeebled.  To argue on about whether the price of nonparticipatory citizenship in the matter of health care can be a tax but not a mandate is obfuscating wordplay.  And the health and well-being of we the people should not be a matter of wordplay.

[1] Milton Mayer, “The Dogged Retreat of the Doctors,” Harper’s Magazine, 199:25-37, 1949, quoted at pp. 32, 35; Silas Greenberg, “The Decline of the Healing Art,” Harper’s Magazine, 221:132-137, 1960, quoted at p. 134.

Copyright © 2012 by Paul E. Stepansky.  All rights reserved.

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“Socialized Medicine,” anyone?

Posted on January 24, 2012 | Leave a comment

The primary season is upon us, which means it’s time for Republicans to remind us of the grave perils of “socialized medicine.”  One-time candidate Michele Bachmann accuses Mitt Romney  of “put[ting] into place socialized medicine” when governor of Massachusetts.  Newt Gingrich, rejecting Romney’s defense of the Massachusetts law as something other than socialist, declares that  “Individual and employer mandates are bad policy leading down the road to socialized medicine, whether the mandates are adopted at the federal level or the state level.”  Ron Paul, not to be outdone, derides our health care system as “overly corporate and not much better than a socialized health care system.”  Rick Santorum mournfully announces that socialized medicine is “exactly where we’re headed.”  And then of course there is that noncandidate and subtle political thinker Sarah Palin, who apparently tolerated Canadian single-payer health care well enough when it was available to her and her family members, but never fails to lambast the health care reform bill of 2010 (“Obamacare”) as the great evil, the capitulation to socialist medicine that will lead us straight into the bowels of socialist hell.

As a historian of ideas, I am confused.  What exactly do these Republicans mean by “socialized medicine” and, more generally, by “socialism”?  Are they referring to the utopian socialism of the early nineteenth century that arose in the wake of the French Revolution, the socialism of Charles Fourier, Henri Saint-Simon, and Joseph Le Maistre?  Are they referring to Marxist socialism and, if so, which variant?  The socialism of the early Marx, the Marx of the  economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology or the socialism of the late Marx, the Marx of Das Kapital?  It is difficult to imagine the candidates rejecting the conservative socialism of Otto Bismarck, the German Iron Chancellor who, during the 1870s and 1880s, wed social reform to a conservative vision of society.  But then again they might:  Bismarck’s reforms, which included old-age pensions, accident insurance, medical care, and unemployment insurance, paved the way for the triumph, despite Bismarck’s own antisocialist laws, of Germany’s Social Democratic Party in the early twentieth century.

Perhaps the Republicans mean to impugn a broader swath of post-Marxist reformist socialism (also termed “democratic socialism”).  Does their antipathy take in the British liberal welfare reforms of David Lloyd George that from  around 1880 to 1910 constructed Britain’s social welfare state?  After all, Britain’s National Insurance Act of 1911 provided for health insurance, and many of Lloyd George’s  acts aimed at the health and well-being of British children.  Child labor laws, medical inspection of schools, and medical care for school children via free school clinics were among them.  Certainly all the candidates would repudiate FDR’s New Deal.  Depression or no, it was a medley of socialist programs that culminated in a social security program that workers could not opt out of.  But then again, perhaps the candidates do not understand socialism as the cumulative protections of democratic socialism.  Maybe the socialism they impugn is only hard-core late Marxism and its transmogrification after 1917 into Soviet Marxism-Leninism, both of which now slumber peacefully in the dustbin of history.  I don’t know.  Does anyone?  Maybe some of these candidates only see red when contemplating employment of physicians by the state.

When it comes to “socialized medicine,” just how far do the Republicans seek to turn back the clock?   Does more than a century of social welfare reform have to go?  Certainly they must repudiate Medicare and Medicaid, whose passage in 1965 was, with respect to the elderly and indigent, socialism pure and simple; for the AMA these programs sounded the death knell of democracy.  But why stop there?  If they really want to root out medical socialism, they can hardly condone Medicare’s precursor, the Kerr-Mill Act of 1960 that made federal matching funds available to states that underwrote the costs of health care for their indigent elderly.

And what of the FDA, that competition-draining, creativity-stifling offspring of Rooseveltian socialist thinking.  Who is the government to tell medical equipment manufacturers which devices they may sell to doctors and the public?  The 1976 Medical Devices Amendments to the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938 would have to go.  The more than 700 deaths and 10,000 injuries attributed to defective cardiac pacemakers and leaky artificial heart valves by the Cooper Commission in 1970, not to mention the 8,000 women injured (some left sterile) by their faulty contraceptive Dalkon Shields – this was a small price to pay for an open marketplace that encouraged and rewarded innovation.  The 1962 Kefauver–Harris Amendments to the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938, which arose in the wake of the thalidomide tragedy of 1961, would probably fare no better.  After all, these amendments dramatically expanded the FDA’s authority over prescription drugs by requiring drug companies to conduct preclinical trials of toxicity and then present the FDA with adequate and well controlled studies of drug effectiveness  before receiving regulatory approval.  I wonder if principled antisocialists can even abide the FDA-enforced distinction between prescription-only and nonprescription drugs, as codified in the 1951 Durham-Humphrey Amendment to the 1938 Act.  Before then, Americans did just fine self-medicating without government interference.  Sure they did.  Citizens of the late 30s could be relied on to decide when to take the toxic sulfonamides (which depressed white cell counts and led to anemias), just as citizens of the late 40s knew enough pharmacology and bacteriology to decide when and in what dosages to use the potent antibiotic “wonder drugs,” all of which could be obtained over-the-counter or directly from pharmacists until the 1951 Act.

But why stop there?  Perhaps Republican political philosophy obliges the candidates to repudiate the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act in toto.  After all, it authorized the FDA, a federal agency, to review the safety and composition of new drugs before authorizing their release.  Yes, the legislation arose in the wake of 106 deaths the preceding year – many children among them – from sales of the Tennessee drug firm S. E. Massengill’s Elixir Sulfanilamide.  The Elixir was a sweet-tasting liquid sulfa drug that – unbeknown to anyone outside the company — used toxic diethylene glycol (a component of brake fluid and antifreeze) as solvent.  But, hey, this was free-market capitalism in action.  Sure, hundreds more would have died if all 239 FDA inspectors hadn’t tracked down 234 of the 240 gallons of the stuff already on the market.  But is this really any worse than having 10,000 or so European and Japanese kids grow up with flippers instead of arms and hands because their pregnant mothers, let down by the regulatory bodies of their own countries, ingested Chemie Grünenthal’s sedative thalidomide to control first-trimester morning sickness?  A free medical marketplace has its costs, dead kids, deformed kids, and sterile women among them.  Perhaps, in the Republican vision of American health care, this marketplace had every right to bestow on Americans their own generation of thalidomide babies, not just the small number whose mothers received the drug as part of the American licensee’s advance distribution of samples to 1,267 physicians.

If we’re going to turn back the clock and recreate a Jacksonian medical universe free of intrusive, expensive, innovation-stifling, rights-abrogating big government, let’s go the full nine yards.  Let’s repudiate the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, which compelled drug companies to list the ingredients of drugs on the drug labels.  Sure, prior to the act most remedies aimed at children were laced with alcohol, cocaine, opium, and/or heroin, but was this so bad?  At least these tonics, unlike Elixir Sulfanilamide, didn’t kill the kids, and the 1906 Act did put us on the path to government overregulation.  And, anyway, it’s up to parents, not the federal government, to figure out what their kids ingest.  Let them do their own chemical analyses (or better yet, contract unregulated for-profit labs to do the analyses for them) and slug it out with the drug companies.

And, while we’re at it, let’s roll back the establishment in 1902 of the brazenly socialistic Public Health and Marine Hospital Service, with its “big government” division of pathology and bacteriology.  Okay, it did a few things Republican candidates would likely applaud, like preventing incoming immigrants from coming ashore with infectious diseases like cholera, yellow fever, and bubonic plague.  But the Service couldn’t leave well enough alone. With its federal budget and laboratory of government employees, it went on to identify infectious diseases like typhoid fever, tularemia, and undulant fever.  Then, during World War I, after its name had been shortened to the Public Health Service, it isolated the organisms responsible for epidemic meningitis and developed tetanus antitoxin and antityphoid vaccine.  But, hey, private enterprise of the time would have addressed these issues better and more cost effectively, right?  And it wouldn’t have placed us on the road to socialist perdition.

Compulsory vaccination for smallpox and diphtheria?  State laws that beginning in 1893 required public schools to exclude from enrollment any student who could not present proof of vaccination?  Forget it.  States and municipalities had no right forcibly to intrude into the lives of children with their public health inspectors, followed by school physicians with their vials of toxin-antitoxin.  What was this if not socialist medicine, with the state abrogating the rights of parents and school principals alike – the former with the right to keep their children unvaccinated, that they might contract infection and pass it on to classmates and family members; the latter with the right to keep school enrollment as high as possible without government interference.

Here’s the point of this exercise in conjecture:  If we’re going to have a national debate about health care, then our candidates must cease and desist from using evocative words that incite fear and loathing but mean nothing because they mean anything and everything.  You can’t have a debate without people capable of debate, which is to say, people who grasp ideas as something other than sound bites that mobilize primitive emotions.  Debaters make arguments and cite evidence that support them; they don’t throw out words and wait for a primal scream.

It would be nice if we had presidential candidates willing and able to explain their take on specific ideas and then wrestle with the applicability of those ideas to the real-life problems of specific groups of Americans.  It would be nicer still if all this explaining and wrestling and applying were informed by the lessons of history.  I believe we will have such debates shortly after hell freezes over.  Therefore, I offer my own ideational stimulus package to inch us toward this goal.  I propose an Act of Congress that proscribes the use of certain words and phrases among all presidential candidates.  Each time a candidate uses a proscribed word or phrase in a campaign speech, a TV commercial,  or an internet posting, he or she, if nominated, forfeits one electoral vote earned in the general election.  In the realm of health care, “socialism,” “socialist medicine,’’ “big government,” “death panels,” “overregulation,”  “the people,” and “the American way” would top the list.  Such terms cannot be part of a national debate because they do not promote reasoned exchange.  They have emotional resonance but nothing else.  In fact, they preclude debate by allowing the word or phrase in question to carry an implicit meaning that reaches consciousness only as a gut-churning abstraction.  Gut-churning abstractions, be it noted, tend to be historically naïve and empirically empty.

So I end where I began:  What exactly do our Republican candidates mean by “socialized medicine” other than a global repudiation of the health care reform bill of 2010?  Do they mean that medicine was just socialist enough before the bill passed, but that specific components of the bill – like preventing insurers from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions – take the country to a point of socialist excess serious enough to abrogate the new protections the bill affords uninsured and underinsured  Americans.  Or perhaps American health care, even before the legislation, was simply too socialist, so that it becomes incumbent on our elected leaders to turn back the clock, undo past legislative achievements, reverse specific governmental policies, and disembowel certain regulatory agencies.  But if the latter, exactly which laws and policies and agencies must be sacrificed on the altar of a free and open medical marketplace?   I don’t know what the Republican candidates have in mind, but I’m all ears – once they stop lobbing word grenades and actually make an argument.

Copyright © 2012 by Paul E. Stepansky.  All rights reserved.

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