ACORN co-founder Wade Rathke discussed the role of ACORN and SEIU in the government takeover of healthcare during a book signing in New Orleans.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) have a symbiotic relationship. Rathke called SEIU “one of the pillars of the ACORN family of organizations.”

While serving as ACORN’s Chief Organizer, Rathke created SEIU Locals 100 (Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi and Texas) and 880 (Illinois, Indiana and Kansas). After establishing SEIU, Rathke held executive positions in labor unions while working as ACORN’s Chief Organizer.

ACORN whistle-blowers swore SEIU and a coalition of labor unions gave ACORN $1,729,462 for political activities and union organizing in 2008, mixing together taxpayer money and union funding. It would seem that the American taxpayer has been picking up the tab to promote Rathke’s political agenda and advance his unionizing activities.

While governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich signed an executive order allowing collective bargaining, which helped SEIU unionize health-care workers. The mega-union had been Blagojevich’s biggest supporter, donating more than $1.8 million over two campaigns for governor.

Now SEIU is in the process of building an empire to handle America’s healthcare needs, which explains its unrelenting fight for a public option. Obviously, the mega-union envisions greater demand for its services and plans to mine the mother load of new dues-paying members.

Now that it’s been discovered that Medicare’s denial rate is roughly 1.7 times that of the top private carriers combined, will the AMA and Brother O’s “cherry picked” medical practitioners continue to sacrifice what’s left of their professional integrity and creditability to promote a government-run health care system that is more likely to deny patient care than administer it?

Supporters of ObamaCare’s public option parrot bromides damning private insurance companies for denying claims and canceling coverage.

“We are held hostage at any given moment by health insurance companies that deny coverage or drop coverage or charge fees that people can’t afford,” Brother O said in August.

Brother O neglected to mention that the worst offender is the oft touted government model, Medicare. The American Medical Association (AMA) and Brother O’s cherry-picked medical professionals endorse the public option because, like Medicare, it would be a better provider for patients when it comes to decision-making autonomy and the ability to get patients the care they need.

Beverly Gossage, Research Fellow for Show-Me Institute and founder of HSA Benefits Consulting, discovered in the AMA’s 2008 National Health Insurer Report Card that Medicare is most likely to reject a claim, denying 6.85 percent or 475,566 claims, which is more than the seven top commercial health insurers and is double their average.

Gossage’s findings mean the AMA, the cherry-picked medical professionals, and the ObamaCare supporters have endorsed a plan “whose closest existing example is the most frequent denier of claims.”

In television ads and news releases, supporters of ObamaCare have shamelessly portrayed insurance companies as insensitive greedy louts with itchy fingers on hair triggers willingly to deny claims for wealth. 

Will the shameless supporters of ObamaCare now portray the government-run insurer Medicare as a cold-blooded bunch of bookkeepers and bureaucrats? The cows will be home long before such a portrayal happens.

Consumer Reports has tossed away political neutrality to side with Democrats in support of a government run health care system that will be costly to consumers.

“[W]e are doing something that we’ve never done before. For the first time ever, Consumers Union is weighing in with a TV ad that calls on lawmakers to find a solution for health reform,” said Jim Guest, publisher of Consumer Reports.

The Consumers Union insists that the Democrat proposals will provide high quality care at lower costs, yet the exact opposite is true.  If enacted, the Democrats’ proposals would exacerbate a system in which consumers have no stake in the cost of medical services and products.

Consumer Report fails to present the downside of the Democrats’ health care proposals to help consumers to distinguish between truth and propaganda.

The Democrat proposals would create bureaucracies to monitor people’s lives, inject government into people’s private lives via centralized medical records, mandate health care that would tax people for failing to engage in economic activity, and involve the IRS in enforcing the mandate through receipt of individual health insurance information.

By aligning itself with proposals “laden with taxes, penalties, punishments, government bureaucracy and out-of-control spending,” Consumer Reports has diminished its status and destroyed a once noteworthy reputation for providing politically neutral, accurate information.

Terminally ill patients die prematurely under the British system of socialized medicine, a subtle form of euthanasia. Many are condemned to die too soon under the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) death forecasting scheme, the London Telegraph reports. Leading experts, who care for the terminally ill, claim that some patients are being diagnosed as being close to death “without regard to the fact that the diagnosis could be wrong.”

The NHS scheme, known as the Liverpool Care Pathway, puts terminally ill patients on the fast track by withdrawing fluid and drugs and administering continuous sedation until they die.

Under Pathway guidelines, the medical team treating the patient decides when the patient is close to death. To determine whether the patient is a candidate for Pathway, the team looks for signs, which include if the patient is unconsciousness or has difficulty swallowing medication.

The experts caution that these signs can also point to other medical problems. For example, side effects from pain-killers such as morphine or the effects of dehydration can cause patients to become semi-conscious and confused.

Once a patient is put on Pathway, the guidelines recommend that doctors stop giving medications and invasive procedures, such as intravenous drips. The problem for some patients is that they have been “wrongly” diagnosed to Pathway, and this becomes a “self-fulfilling prophecy”; they believe they are about to die, so they die.

Experts also worry that too many doctors are not regularly monitoring patients for improvement in their condition once they start on Pathway. The patient is administered drugs through a syringe driver that continually infuses them over 24 hours until the patient is “terminally” sedated.

The Pathway scheme, which was designed to reduce the suffering of cancer patients in their final hours, has now accounted for about one in six of all deaths in the UK between 2007-08, twice as many as in Belgium and the Netherlands, according to research by Clive Seale, professor of medical sociology at Bart’s and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry.

Palliative care experts point out that death forecasting is an inexact science and when patients are sedated it becomes that much harder to determine if their condition is improving. The UK’s unusually high percentage of deaths by continuous deep sedation (CDS) suggests the possibility that the NHS may be administering the Pathway scheme as a subtle form of euthanasia.

A Department of Health spokesman said, “The Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) is an established and recommended tool that help[s] … [m]any people receive excellent care at the end of their lives.” The concern over the NHS Pathway scheme is not about how many people received excellent care; it’s about the Pathway of death for those who did not.

Historically, immigrants to the United States have undergone health screening upon arrival at our borders or shores, to prevent catastrophic epidemic outbreaks in America. Writing about the history of Ellis Island in the academic publication Medicine and Health Rhode Island, prolific health science writer Dr. Stanley M. Aronson notes:

The immigrants, each with their names and geographic sites of origin inscribed on a piece of paper attached to their shirts, climbed a flight of stairs before entering the huge inspection hall. During this brief transit, they were carefully observed for visible signs of lameness, excessive physical weakness, pathologic lesions or mental aberration. Medical inspectors wrote appropriate chalk marks on the immigrants’ shoulders (e.g., G for goiter, L for lameness, X for mental deficiency). The immigrants were then channeled into twelve narrow aisles at the head of which was a vigilant uniformed public health physician who conducted what has sometimes been called the six-second inspection. Since twelve examining physicians were expected to certify the health of some 5,000 immigrants per day, the medical inspections were brief. The eyes and scalp were rigorously examined for signs of trachoma, scalp infection or lice.

Imagine, if you will, the anxiety, the inner turmoil, the dread experienced by each immigrant as he or she lined up for the rapid inspection, knowing that any hint of a number of organic illnesses or emotional states, deemed to be unsuitable for a future American resident, might be the basis for disqualification, shipment back to the old country and disruption of the family.

The 1903 published guidelines for examining physicians stated that certain diseases constituted unequivocal grounds for exclusion and therefore for shipment back to the old country. These dangerous and loathsome illnesses were first, trachoma, a highly contagious eye infection and one of the major causes of blindness today, especially in tropical regions. Early symptoms of trachoma included redness of the eyes with some discharge; and so mothers, fearful that their children might be rejected for admission, blindfolded them for the duration of the ocean voyage, many weeks, in the naive hope that this would cause their eyes to appear clear and unaffected. The second major ailment was pulmonary tuberculosis. A stethoscope was sometimes employed, but most of the time the diagnosis was reached by the nature of the cough and the degree of weight loss. Other excludable diseases included leprosy and various venereal diseases….

More recently, vigilance against the Asian bird flu has been prominent in the news. Mainstream media have given this subject extensive coverage, profiting from the readership that their scare-mongering inspires. The Center for Disease Control warns:

The avian influenza A (H5N1) epizootic (animal outbreak) in Asia and parts of Europe, the Near East, and Africa is not expected to diminish significantly in the short term. It is likely that H5N1 infection among birds has become endemic in certain areas and that human infections resulting from direct contact with infected poultry and/or wild birds will continue to occur. So far, the spread of H5N1 virus from person-to-person has been rare , limited and unsustained. No evidence for genetic reassortment between human and avian influenza A virus genes has been found; however, this epizootic continues to pose an important public health threat.

There is little pre-existing natural immunity to H5N1 infection in the human population. If these H5N1 viruses gain the ability for efficient and sustained transmission among humans, an influenza pandemic could result, with potentially high rates of illness and death….

Note how seriously our government and media respond to something that might happen. Why then is there no concern about something horrific that is happening? The flood of illegal aliens across our southern border spreads throughout our country, wherever day laborers and domestic workers find opportunity. With them they bring tapeworms and tuberculosis. They undergo no health screening as they slip across the Rio Grande at night. But our media deem it politically incorrect to caution the public about these dangers.

Owned by the Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon, the Washington Times is less restricted. They have acknowledged the incursion of tapeworm disease:

Parasitic infection plagues states along Mexico border
By Joyce Howard Price
February 8, 2007

Federal researchers say neurocysticercosis, a brain infection caused by a pork tapeworm, is a “growing public health problem in the United States,” especially in states bordering Mexico, where the disease is endemic.

Neurocysticercosis is the “most common parasitic disease of the central nervous system,” according to a study jointly conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and California public health officials, who reported that “international travel and immigration are bringing the disorder to areas where it is not endemic,” such as this country.

“Neurocysticercosis is the primary cause of epilepsy in endemic areas. This brain worm is very serious,” Victor C. Tsang, chief of the immunochemistry laboratory in the Parasitic Disease Division of the CDC said in a telephone interview….

“Recent data indicate cysticercosis is an important cause of death in California,” Mr. Tsang and other authors wrote in a recent report on the disease published in the European medical journal Acta Neurologica Scandinavica….

“In Hispanics and Latinos, neurocysticercosis accounts for 13.5 percent of [U.S.] emergency-room visits for seizures,” federal and California investigators wrote in their report in Acta Neurologica Scandinavica published late last year. “The growth is mainly due to immigration from endemic developing countries,” they reported….

Bottom line — the illegal immigrants who come here and take jobs in agriculture, domestic service, and fast food restaurants put us at risk for this brain disease. Also, they burden our health care system (and our tax dollars) with their own medical care for cysticercosis. And this is a pathogen that would not be spreading in our country if it were not for illegal immigration.

Tuberculosis, once thought to be well under control in the United States, is also on the rise as the illegals bring new drug resistant strains into our population. An article at About: Lung Diseases states:

Illegal Immigrants May be Bringing Tuberculosis Into U.S.
Government officials believe illegal immigrants are responsible for spreading tuberculosis to the U.S. Most illegal immigrants come from countries where health care is inadequate, and/or the immigrants lived in poor areas where they do not or can not seek proper health care. This puts them at risk for developing and dying from curable diseases, such as tuberculosis….

Tuberculosis is on the rise, affecting over 50 million people in over 30 countries. The toughest tuberculosis to control is multidrug-resistant tuberculosis….

The respected business publication Investor’s Business Daily discussed this problem in a widely excerpted article:

Give Us Your Sick
24-JUN-05

The Border: Among the consequences of illegal immigration we can now add the reappearance of infectious diseases long thought eradicated or under control.

In an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Reuben Granich, a lead investigator for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reports the emergence in the U.S. of a particularly virulent, multidrug-resistant form of tuberculosis known as MDR-TB.

“Evidence of it has surfaced in 38 of 61 California health jurisdictions, and it could ‘threaten the efficacy of TB control efforts,’ Granich said. The infected were said to be four times as likely to die from the disease and twice as likely to transmit the disease to others.

“Reluctant to label the infected as ‘illegal’ or even ‘undocumented’ aliens, the report notes that of the 407 known cases of MDR-TB, 84% were ‘foreign-born’ patients, mainly from Mexico and the Philippines who’d been in the U.S. less than five years. The percentage of TB cases among the ‘foreign-born’ jumped from 29% in 1993 to 53% as of last year….

We find this report in The Journal of the American Physicians and Surgeons:

Volume 10 Number 1 – Spring 2005
Illegal Aliens and American Medicine
By Madeleine Pelner Cosman, Ph.D., Esq.

The influx of illegal aliens has serious hidden medical consequences. We judge reality primarily by what we see. But what we do not see can be more dangerous, more expensive, and more deadly than what is seen….

What is unseen is their free medical care that has degraded and closed some of America’s finest emergency medical facilities, and caused hospital bankruptcies: 84 California hospitals are closing their doors. ‘Anchor babies’ born to illegal aliens instantly qualify as citizens for welfare benefits and have caused enormous rises in Medicaid costs and stipends under Supplemental Security Income and Disability Income….

By default, we grant health passes to illegal aliens. Yet many illegal aliens harbor fatal diseases that American medicine fought and vanquished long ago, such as drug-resistant tuberculosis, malaria, leprosy, plague, polio, dengue, and Chagas disease….

Madeleine Pelner Cosman, Ph.D., Esq., is a medical lawyer who formerly taught medical students at the City University of New York. She has written an outstanding report on the impact of illegal immigration to the American health care system. Her findings are extensively documented with impeccable professional references and scholarly papers — there is no political agenda here, just findings based on research and facts. The report is available in PDF format here. We urge our readers to study it.

Summarizing her findings, Cosman concludes:

We must choose either to surrender medicine to illegal aliens, or to fight illegal aliens. Surrender to illegal aliens is surrender to collectivist America: land of moral ambiguity and home of pacifist appeasement. Fighting against illegal aliens is fighting for individualistic America: land of moral strength, and home of responsible liberty.

As we fight to reclaim medicine, so we defend our nation.

Do not shrug this off as a problem for California and other southwestern states. Now we are all paying for it. In 2005 the government worked out a plan to use federal tax revenue to reimburse health care providers for the mandatory treatment of illegal aliens. From a report by CNN News:

U.S. to pay medical bills for illegal immigrants
Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Health care providers can charge the government for emergency care provided to illegal aliens beginning Tuesday.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued final guidance Monday that sets up a system for reimbursement. Lawmakers set aside $1 billion over four years for the program, created by Medicare legislation passed in 2003….

Two-thirds of the money will be distributed to health care providers based on a state’s percentage of undocumented aliens. The remaining third will go to providers in the six states with the largest number of arrests of undocumented aliens.

The states receiving the highest amounts in the current fiscal year are California, $70.8 million; Texas, $46 million; Arizona, $45 million; and New York, $12.25 million….

Last year the talking heads drummed up the specter of the black plague, salivating over the fear-driven media ratings as they asked over and over, “Should we be worried about the bird flu?” (When there is no factual news to frighten us with, they ask a rhetorical question repeatedly until it assumes the stature of real news in the minds of the American public.) But faced with a real and demonstrated danger that we should be warned about, they are frozen in the silence of political correctness.

We must control our borders. We must permit only legal, and consequently health-screened, immigration. It is not a question of meeting labor force requirements. It is not about being compassionate to foreigners who seek opportunity. It is a medical issue of life or death, of survival for our own legal citizens.

Previous articles in our Illegal Immigration series:

The Crider Case
Illegals Deadlier Than War On Terror
Going By The Numbers
The Price of Lettuce