Is Medicare a Slow-Kill Program?

Is this seemingly benevolent reward offered to seniors for a lifetime of work, rather, a guiding hand to the grave?

The new “Inflation Reduction Act” (IRA) has a name that is highly questionable, given its profligate and inflation-stimulating government spending, such as one quarter trillion dollars for climate change tax credits for corporations, and for 87,000 additional IRS agents.  The falsification of the name of this Act alone rings alarm bells for violation of 18 USC Section 1001, which makes it a felony for any government actor to falsify a material fact in a document related to a federal matter.  This crime carries up to five years in prison.   

However, the fine print of the IRA may be even nastier for seniors, black people, and so ultimately for all of the rest of us. 

This new Act pairs Medicare decisions to a group called the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), to carry out cost-effectiveness research (CER).  This review panel is the rehabilitated “death panel” that was so controversial during Obamacare rollout.  Based on this guidance, Medicare will set drug prices based on costs to its program of funding an additional year of patients’ continued lives with a specific drug versus already existing therapies.

Especially on the chopping block are drugs that treat sickle cell anemia and multiple myeloma, which are diseases that disproportionately affect black people, as well as drugs that treat ALS and chronic kidney disease, which disproportionately affect seniors.

If you think our benevolent government would never place a person’s life on the chopping block for being too expensive to continue, consider what ICER President Steve Pearson wrote about orphan drug spending, that it places “an undue burden . . .  on others for the sake of a few.”  And earlier he wrote “Looking forward, . . . broad application of the rule of rescue will be increasingly untenable.”  Choosing drugs that would end up having the effect of shortening lives, rather than those that would end up lengthening lives, turns the bean counters into “de facto death panels,” according to writer Robert Goldberg.

But does Medicare find it so cost-effective for seniors to die earlier that its drug prices would take that cost-benefit analysis into consideration?  That is, is it unreasonable to make the leap from there to the suspicion that Medicare might actually be a slow-kill program?

Image from https://MedicareInteractive.org

Who has really been ‘killing Grandma’ in the COVID era?

Freely breathing creatures of the human variety were criticized and shamed for our unobstructed respiratory practices, through the COVID era, for ‘killing Grandma’ by lack of mask-wearing. But was it us, the relentlessly unmasked, who were killing Grandma?

Scrutiny of Medicare’s mission might have been seen as preposterous before COVID, a respiratory viral disease for which the world went crazy, but actually had no greater mortality than the flu virus.  Infection fatality for COVID is 0.15%, and for a typical annual flu is usually about 0.17% (Statista data from 2006 to 2008, back when the counting was more straightforward.)   COVID symptoms varied from typical flu, especially loss of smell and reduced oxygenation, but otherwise the death rate remained about the same as most years.

Yet for this typical seasonal viral mortality, hospital protocols, among much else in our world, have transformed to something utterly unrecognizable from the recent past.  Ventilators were ordered, distributed and quickly connected to many tracheas, to a worldwide chorus of muffled protests, both from the victims of an over-pressurized tube rammed down the throat, and from their family members who were made to wait outside.   More about this bizarre new protocol below.

Why are Americans forced onto Medicare at age 65?

Before COVID, I never thought too much about Medicare, having been younger then, as we all were.  But recently I noticed the fine print at Medicare.gov says that if a person turning 65 chooses NOT to accept Medicare Part B, which covers primary visits and their referred specialists – and which are exclusively within conventional medicine, never, never naturopathic medicine -  So if you refuse to sign up for Medicare Part B, your social security payment is REDUCED, and it is reduced for life, and there is no way to get out of this reduction.  Furthermore, this reduction is called a “penalty.”  I thought:  Wow!  Here I have to pay my entire working life for a type of medicine that I never use, (conventional medicine) and have zero desire to use.  And then, even the meager social security living allowance is actually reduced if I, a naturopathic physician, don’t succumb and submit to a type of medicine that I have avoided my whole life like plague?   (I have had best knowledge and help from my naturopath and my chiropractor; they are my only primary care doctors, and the only ones I have needed at all for the decades that I have known them, including through a bout with COVID and a disabling acute injury, both now long gone.)

So this blatant First Amendment violation is baked right into Medicare policy.  But let’s explore further how it plays out in the case of retirees.

It turns out that an employee arriving to age 65 is at the mercy of an employer, particularly if in a small company. On this page, Medicare.gov implies that an employer, particularly of under 20 employees, has the right to commit age discrimination, in blatant violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.  This could have the effect of forcing the 65-year old employee off of the company insurance that other employees still have, by virtue of their youth, and onto Medicare, at the discretion of the employer.  It seems that Medicare is begging for litigation against this mandate and this penalty.

I would argue that this forced herding into conventional medicine is a violation also of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . .”  What could Medicare possibly have to do with religion?  Well, you see, if one believes that the synthetic, mono-molecular, patented chemicals that are produced in factories by a pharmaceutical industry could possibly have beneficial or restorative or synergistic – or even well-tolerated - impact on a body that is the heritage of millions of years of intimate contact with the biodiversity of nature – If one would like to believe that, one is certainly welcome to do so.  It just doesn’t happen to be a creed to which I subscribe. 

Therefore, I feel a bit like the Virginia colonial Baptists who complained to Jefferson and Madison about being forced to pay taxes to the Anglican Church, not being Anglicans themselves.  Jefferson and Madison agreed with the right of the Baptist protestors to be free of Anglican control, and as a result we have the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which protects you and me from being subject to the rituals, sacraments, forced worship, genuflection, church attendance and tithes of someone else’s religion.

Therefore, I think the Medicare Part B penalty is unconstitutional and unjust.

And why would people be penalized for rejecting a “free” entitlement?  What is the government’s motive for inflicting this penalty?  Is it that living a long healthy life without chronic disease, on a natural medicine regimen is too expensive for the social security fund?  Is it no longer commendable to make it to one’s 90’s or over 100 years of age? Perhaps only a conspiracy theorist could even imagine an entitlement being subject to an actuarial priority, or could imagine a goal to eliminate the long-lived, unvaccinated, natural living cohort, for unwanted illustration and example of the benefits of that lifestyle to others.

Next, let’s look at what happened in hospitals during peak COVID

Now let’s go back to how COVID changed hospitalization and particularly “healthcare” and its creeping inclusion of euthanasia, in the case of seniors.

Since COVID came along, the public has had brief, not-well-publicized glimpses into the much-altered lives and health of hospital patient escapees, and we have heard some horrendous stories of how they were treated while there.  As a physician, I have heard through the stethoscope radically altered heart rhythms of such escapees who managed to survive a Remdesivir assault.  Remdesivir is a drug that is known to be highly toxic to the liver and the kidneys and the lungs.  Multiple organ failure was repeatedly observed after use of this drug.  Yet it is Anthony Fauci’s drug of choice for treating COVID.  Remdesivir has been observed to lead to respiratory failure in 11% of the patients who are on it for 10 days (“commonly reported,”) even to the point of then requiring intubation.

So Remdesivir is clearly contraindicated in COVID patients, yet in the upside-down world of hospital medicine, it is “standard of care.”

Hospital COVID procedures in the US have been revealed in horrifying anecdotes, empirical observations by very rare whisteblower nurses and doctors.  For example, in 2020, ER physician Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell blew the whistle on ventilators that had an 80% mortality rate within a couple days of use with COVID patients.  He asked why it was expected for him to be blowing patients’ functional lung tissue out with way over-pressurized ventilators, noting the high mortality.  Nurses would mention hospital patients who in 2020-2021 were deprived of both food and water, with a story of a hospitalized man who had to crawl on hands and knees to not be seen by the staff, to the toilet bowl, in order to get a drink of water, and others’ similar desperate grasps for survival.  This was especially the case with seniors who were positive for COVID, and even more discriminatory for patients with multiple co-morbidities.

With COVID, came the 2020 US CARES Act, a little-mentioned $160 billion, then $178 billion, boondoggle (more than double the cost of the Ukraine boondoggle so far, AND before intense recent inflation).  This Act funded some very peculiar hospital protocols – with tens of millions, and hundreds of millions, of dollars going to the biggest hospitals for COVID treatment.

Yet, in the US, we still have little system-wide testimony or evidence of brutality to hospitalized COVID patients revealed in the mass media to the public.  Unfortunately, many of the closest witnesses are now dead. 

So let’s then look at the UK, and then what we know of parallels between the UK and the US.

The UK has revealed more of the financial and political involvement in euthanasia decisions in high-risk hospital situations, in publicly available documents.

Journalist Maajid Nawaz spoke with UK medical researcher Stuart Wilkie.  https://odysee.com/@MaajidNawaz:d/Radical-Episode-17:d

Wilkie told Nawaz, “Hundreds of thousands of people are being routinely murdered in the National Health Service.”  Where does he get that information?  Well, he found in the House of Lords Library and the House of Commons Library some revealing documents. 

Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer, in a document that he insisted not be released to the public, wrote of “consideration of mass burials and the potential use of population triage by the NHS . . . [which raised questions of] potential responses of the general population upon hearing that such measures were being considered or used.”  This document is in the House of Lords Library.

Euthanasia has been openly discussed and openly practiced.  Here we see a House of Commons definition: “A good death requires three things: syringe drivers, the medications, and the staff to administer it.”  Euthanasia is from the Greek for “good death.”  This mass killing was financially incentivized, and lack of cooperation was disincentivized in UK hospitals.

UK patients are also disincentivized from choosing to live.  When a hospital patient is pressured to sign a Do Not Resuscitate order, they are told ‘if we try to resuscitate you, we will break your ribs.’  You don’t want painful broken ribs, do you?  At every step, from hospital triage and admittance to treatment, seniors suffered by far the worst of any age group.

It is not in dispute that the UK government ordered an inordinately large amount of Midazolam in the COVID era.  By the time peak COVID mania had crested, 27 months of drugs were used within 9 months in the UK.   Somehow Midazolam was added to treatment for COVID disease protocol.  As Nawaz asks, “Why add a drug that makes it harder for you to breathe?” when COVID already impairs oxygenation? 

Midazolam should have been the LAST thing a COVID patient would be given. 

Oh, it was the last thing they were given alright.  Together with another respiratory depressant, acting in lethal synergy.  That drug is morphine.

The amount of Midazolam needed to kill a person within 24 hours is about 9.5 mg, and this was used in UK hospitals, where 83% of those died within 24 hours on that dose, together with 14 mg morphine, which has a highly dangerous synergistic effect, when dosed together with Midazolam, of respiratory depression.  It has been known for decades that these drugs used together risk respiratory arrest, which is lethal.

In the United States, where states permit execution by lethal injection, Midazolam is one of the major drugs used for that purpose. 

Again, this lethal drug, used on death row to kill by lethal injection, is what UK and US hospitals gave routinely to COVID patients.

Here is what Wilkie found of the extravagant drug purchases made in the UK, divided by the number of UK hospital patients projected here to be killed by it = 549,000.  This left a highly lethal 18 mg of Midazolam per patient, nearly twice the known lethal dose being used in UK hospitals.  Meanwhile, prior manufacturer protocols for patients over 60 years of age, for alleged therapeutic use, is closer to only one milligram.

Keep in mind that Midazolam has nothing at all to do with treating a respiratory condition; quite the opposite, it is a respiratory depressant.  Its use, besides killing those on death row, is in “end-of-life care.”  And it interferes with memory and with speech, both of which actions have a well-known inhibitory effect on protest, the reporting of crimes or assertion of one’s choices.  How convenient.  Worse, the new COVID protocols forced family members and other patient advocates to wait outside, unable to observe the atrocities committed inside.

Worse still, the commonplace withholding of food and water from hospitalized COVID patients in the UK as well as the US was widely reported.  Resulting dehydration interferes with liver processing of any drugs given, which heightens risk of toxicity.

As Maajid Nawaz says in the above interview with researcher Stuart Wilkie, “This takes us to Nuremberg level crimes against humanity.”

But the promotion of “palliative,” “end-of-life,” and other compassionate-sounding terms for the killing of sick and hospitalized patients has become more commonplace, since 2011, both in the UK and in the US.  Further, the particularly lethal combination of Midazolam and morphine used in UK care homes, was authorized – not just for doctors to carry out, but also nurses and medical assistant staff – and it was authorized by the UK government in this document.  And not to worry, because this document says clearly: “Sedation and opioid use should not be withheld because of a fear of causing respiratory depression.”

Seniors are an unwanted financial burden to the powers that be.

Why did this happen?  

Number crunchers had apparently decided that seniors were too expensive for a country to support in their senior years.  “Savings in pensions, reductions in costs for health care” are motives that journalist Stuart Wilkie attributes to risk-benefit calculations.   “Britain is killing our old people on a mass scale.”

The Times of London on July 26 2022 reported a brutal triage system termed “Exercise Cygnus” of scoring patients according to number of co-morbidities and deliberately leaving some to die without food or water, and hastening the deaths of others.  All 80 year olds were and most over age 75 were targeted.

Back in the early 2010’s, a program named Liverpool Care Pathway forced a similar regimen of dehydration and starvation on British seniors.  Much bad press and uproar among the public led to talk of that program’s being shut down.  However, it was not shut down.  Instead, it was sold to 22 countries, including the US.  The US then re-named it the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, which then took an interest in “end of life care.” Then President Obama noted during his promotion of his signature program that one quarter of all healthcare spending for an individual takes place during the final year of life, and he spoke of end-of-life counseling.

What does this have to do with Medicare in the US?  

Well, Obamacare was a renamed Liverpool Care Pathway, a notorious program, now acknowledged to be a slow-kill machine for seniors, and is now widely criticized throughout Europe.  In the COVID era, this has become a slow-kill weapon against all patients over 60, who find themselves in the extreme misfortune of going to a hospital for any reason, being pronounced as a COVID patient, and then finding themselves on drugs that impair anterograde memory, that is, new memories, memory of anything happening at the time or afterward.  Midazolam just so happens to have that known effect. Both hospitalized seniors and those in care homes are in the crosshairs of such programs.  Many were not at the end of their lives, nor had life-terminating conditions, but were targeted nevertheless.  In the UK, Liverpool Care Pathway was continued, but its essence was renamed to NG-163. 

In the US, the killing program of seniors was given the benevolent sounding name of the US CARES Act, the massive boondoggle COVID hospital program that taxpayers would not have heard about, were it not for MN State Senator Scott Jenson, MD, who blew the whistle to the public.  No one else talks about the US CARES Act, which funded the genocide of seniors in the US under the pretext of anti-viral efforts.  Remdesivir, a drug that causes kidney failure, but for some insane or malevolent reason has been given to hospitalized COVID patients, was offered at first, but then if that drug, nicknamed by hospital personnel, “run, death is near” did not finish the job, then Midazolam and morphine were offered as follow-up. 

Let us all now ask:  If 1) Medicare has affiliated with risk-benefit experts who decide what another year of life for a random patient is worth, and 2) If the US CARES Act funded such deadly hospital protocols as Remdesivir, Midazolam and ventilators, which were mostly used on seniors (average age of COVID death was 81 in 2020), and 3) Medicare is now mandatory, with penalties for not going along with it, then is Medicare in every senior citizen’s best interest?  Should a person be able to opt out of it?  Or to have a person’s Medicare funds directed to a form of healthcare of each person’s own choosing?

And by the way, are existing laws and the Constitution ever going to be enforced against the lawbreakers?  Or are they too big and too numerous to jail?

Postscript, 9/5/22:

Some confusion is apparent in the comments. The penalty for declining Medicare Part B is new, and applied to those just turning 65 recently. I linked to Medicare pages and a retirement counselor showing this penalty. Those of you who declined Part B earlier were spared that penalty, which is a deduction from social security payments, as you write in the comments.

A technical glitch led to this confusion. I had chosen green as a contrast color for my links, but re-reading my article on my phone, the green does not show up with much contrast at all. So going forward, I will choose a more vivid contrast color for links, so that it is clear when I am backing up assertions with sources.

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