Have you noticed the changes that have occurred in health care in the past decade or two? Twila Brase, RN, cofounder and president of Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom (CCHF), certainly has. She described them to a rapt audience on August 17 at an event hosted by Northeast Wisconsin (NEW) Patriots in Green Bay.
The biggest change has been the merging of insurance and the delivery of care, a trend started with the rise of HMOs in the 1970s and rapidly accelerated by passage of Obamacare in 2010. Insurance companies have merged and grown into corporate behemoths, taking over hospitals and putting small medical practices out of business. Nearly 80% of doctors now work for hospitals instead of patients.
Nurses have increasingly replaced doctors as the person who sees patients and answers their questions. Nurses lack the training to diagnose many diseases and the authority to send a patient to a hospital emergency room.
Doctors, meanwhile, are buried in paperwork to comply with an eruption of rules, regulations, mandates, and guidelines imposed by insurers, hospital administrators, and government agencies. Checklists and detailed “standard of care” guides seek to replace the independent judgement of doctors with one-size-fits-all medicine that is easier to measure and reduce costs.
Increasingly, doctors are paid to keep costs low and to prescribe expensive new drugs. Somewhere along the way, the patient’s best interest was pushed aside.
The Covid pandemic revealed how the pharmaceutical industry has taken over much of the health care industry today. The only approved therapies are new drugs and vaccines patented by Big Pharma. (Did they think we wouldn’t notice that?) Doctors and others who criticized the lockdowns and promoting safe and effective drugs, like Ivermectin, were demonized and censored.
Thankfully, there is a movement afoot to restore health care freedom. The Wedge of Health Freedom is a voluntary collaborative venture between doctors in independent practices — who have no insurance or government contracts — and Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom (CCHF), a non-profit organization. These doctors put patients first and are able to succeed in business while charging only a fraction of what insurance- and hospital-affiliated clinics have to charge.
For more information, including a map showing where some 700 participating practices are located, visit https://jointhewedge.com. Learn more about CCHF, go to https://www.cchfreedom.org/. And to get on Northeast Wisconsin Patriots’ email list, visit www.newpatriots.org.
