Imagine, if you will, that you are living in a changed America, or in President Obama’s words, an America that begged “re-making.” In this now-changed America, hope is in big government and her closest ally, big science.
Now imagine that you and your spouse give birth to a child in this brave, new America, in a hospital linked by law to the federal citizens database. Immediately upon your child’s birth, a hospital clerk assigns your newborn with a “Unique Health Identifier” (UHI), a specially coded number, which is then put into a national electronic database, along with your newborn’s fingerprints and any other identifiers the bureaucrats in D.C. have demanded.
Sex. Weight. Length. Race. APGAR score. Health appraisal at birth, including any disfigurements or handicaps, identifying traits or birthmarks, and DNA markers. Information about the child’s parents, such as names, age, race, number of prior pregnancies, number of prior births, number of prior abortions, education attained, occupations, finger prints and criminal records, if any, are also stored. Almost anything can be included in the database for future government needs, whatever those might be.
Imagine that all constitutional safeguards for an individual’s privacy are deemed to have been complied with, when compiling this database, because healthcare is an interstate activity that the Feds can regulate and government access to the information improves the “general welfare.” Imagine that it is even required that your newborn, before leaving the hospital, be fitted with a surgically implanted microchip, the way babies are now, in many states, required to be vaccinated and blood-typed. The implanted microchip can then be accessed with a scanner by anyone who has a scanning device, with or without parental consent.
Imagine an America where your Unique Health Identifier (UHI) is required for every access to a nationally controlled healthcare system. Imagine an America, where you must give your UHI, via a scan of your surgically implanted biochip, to pick up your prescription at the pharmacy and even when you buy over the counter medications. The number could eventually be required to purchase alcohol and tobacco products, perhaps even to track quantities of bakery goods, chocolates, trans-fats, beef, and even birth control products — or anything else the nanny bureaucrats decide to monitor.
Sound farfetched? Like a plot from a conspiracy-theory movie? Like something from a sci-fi novel?
Think again.
The plans to make these very things a reality right here in America are being made in this administration, under the leadership of the president’s science guru, John Holdren.
For the past several months, I have been working with an appointed member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), the sub-committee on health and technology. My contact on the health and technology sub-committee was privy to conversations, which when related to me, literally caused shivers down my spine.
Every single detail in my opening paragraphs of this article were actually discussed in this committee and seen as a good for the future of American society. Only a scientifically controlled populace, according to these gurus of population and health control, can survive. These scientists see their mission as one of absolute control over even the most private aspects of human life.
Not since the aftermath of WWII — when the ends of the scientific-progressive state were revealed to the world in vivid pictures of the Nazi death camps — have progressives dared to raise their heads in America to such a degree as they are now, under the leadership of Obama’s science guru, John Holdren. Holdren, early in his career, declared himself a Malthusian scientist and has, regretfully, never recanted, nor substantially altered his worldview. In Holdren’s mind, as revealed in confirmation testimony, only his numbers have been off in the past, not his conclusions on the necessity of scientific control as a societal good.
Unfortunately, some of the groundwork for Holdren’s scientist-controlled America was lain in the 1996 passage of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Part of HIPAA legislation was the requirement for the development of the Unique Health Identifier (UHI) for individuals. As detailed by this White Paper by Department of Health and Human Services:
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) outlines a process to achieve uniform national health data standards and health information privacy in the United States. Enacted with the widespread support of the industry and bipartisan support in the Congress, the law requires that the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) adopt standards to support the electronic exchange of a variety of administrative and financial health care transactions.
In 2003, privacy rules were enacted that purportedly protect the individual’s right to healthcare confidentiality. However, a provision of these privacy rules includes a powerful, blanket waiver, which can be used at the discrimination of a “Privacy Board,” acting under HHS. All privacy rules can be disregarded for research or other “necessary” purpose:
If the covered entity receives appropriate documentation that an IRB or Privacy Board has granted a waiver or an alteration of the Authorization requirement
In other words, American citizens will continue to have the right to privacy and confidentiality between themselves and their healthcare providers, if and only if, the Department of Health and Human Services deems that right justified. If, on the other hand, the HHS deems the open availability of an individual’s or groups of individuals’ healthcare information to be necessary to the “general welfare,” then a waiver will be granted without the citizen’s consent or even his knowledge. And this is perfectly legal.
Making something legal, of course, does not make that thing moral or ethical.
A scientist, like John Holdren, along with the support of PCAST and its sub-committee on health and technology, would seem to be nudging Americans towards sublimating their individual needs to the collective, especially in terms of population control and the various side issues, like preventing the births of those they deem unsuitable for their brave new America.
According to my source on the health and technology sub-committee, ultimate biological control of the population is the end goal of the federal healthcare initiative, now being force-fed by the president and the Democratic Party congressional leaders.
Members of this sub-committee were even heard discussing how women’s menstrual periods could be state monitored. How people’s defecation might be monitored and used to detect broad health concerns through electronic toilet management systems. How sexual habits could be state-monitored by managing the sale of all birth-control technology through the use of the UHI.
Insanity seems too mild a word to describe the kind of mind that would want to create this sort of world. These people make Dr. Frankenstein seem like a child playing tiddlywinks in his backyard playpen.
Yet, without passage of one of the current healthcare bills, which provide for the creation of the federal bureaucracies that will be tasked with numbering the whole populace, controlling which medical therapies are given to chosen citizens, and the completion of the electronic medical records system, all of these brave-new-America visions for control will be stymied and postponed indefinitely.
Perhaps this explains why President Obama and his Party are willing to commit political suicide for the passage of this particular healthcare overhaul. Without it, they may fail in their grand plan to “re-make” America according to their scientific-state, progressive delusions.
With it, nothing else may matter.
Knowledge is power, said Frances Bacon.
And the knowledge of every detail of an individual’s health and lifestyle would be a powerful weapon in the hands of bureaucrats and their political masters.
America, the land of the free and home of the brave? Perhaps, not for much longer, if the president and his scientific-progressives have their way. For in their “utopian” world, you and I are nothing much but a number, a stock item, to be controlled for their purposes.
For as Frances Bacon also said, “The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall.”
It doesn’t take much more than a casual glance at the downfall of the others who’ve tried this mad-science controlled government scheme to see that it isn’t a winner. Both the Nazis and the Soviets, who built their own totalitarian regimes on Malthusian scientific themes did fall – albeit only after killing untold millions of their own citizens.
The scientifically controlled state as a vehicle for advancing human progress? Hardly. As human beings have tragically learned, over and over again, science without morality can indeed be the most efficient killer.
It’s not hard to believe that big government would want this kind of power over the lives of individual citizens. What is indeed difficult to believe is that this is happening in America.
The only question now is who will stop it?
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