Dominatus (19 page)

Dublin began to protest, telling her grandfather he needed to listen to the doctor, but Alexander Meyer raised his hand in a way that communicated he yet remained the authority in his own home.

“Granddaughter, this is not a negotiation.  There was a time I was very much accustomed to getting what I wanted from this world.  Later today I will be attending the Saturday afternoon gathering at Freedom Tavern.  It has been nearly two years since I last visited that event, and given the most recent threats to those who call Dominatus their home, and the likely concerns resulting from those threats, I think it important I now do so again.”

Dublin’s silence was enough to signal the Old Man’s victory in the matter.

“And now Dr. Miller, I would ask that you walk back with Mr. Neeson here.  I believe he already mentioned wanting to interview you?”

“Yes – I believe I agreed to that yesterday.  Sure, Mr. Neeson, I’d be happy to talk to you on your way back to Mac’s.  That work for you?”

I agreed, putting on my winter coat and boots, and exiting the cabin behind the doctor, quickly trying to compose in my head some questions to ask him.  Before closing the door behind me I turned back to face the Old Man and Dublin.

“Thank you again for a wonderful meal.  I really, really enjoyed it.  I hope to see you both later today, then?”

Dublin smiled back at me, her arm around her grandfather.

“Looks that way, Reese.  I hope we can do this again soon.”

XIV.

Within just a few minutes of speaking with him, I realized Dr. Lester Miller was a remarkable man.  Born into a family raised by a single mother, with five other siblings, each day facing the challenges of debilitating poverty in the Fuller Park neighborhood of Chicago, Lester Miller always heeded the advice of his mother to “work harder than the others” until eventually it led to his ticket out of Chicago’s East Side – eventually taking him on a full medical school scholarship to Emory University in Atlanta Georgia.

That was 1993, nearly forty five years ago. Lester Miller was then just twenty two years old. He would later return to Chicago to intern at Northwestern Memorial Hospital where he quickly earned a reputation as being among the very best young kidney specialists in the region.  By 2005, Doctor Miller was heading Northwestern’s  Nephrology department, utilizing the latest innovations to combat the impacts of diabetes, hypertension, and various autoimmune disorders that damaged the kidney.  By 2009 he was undergoing a rigorous trial study of a new treatment for cancers of the kidney and liver that showed incredible promise, earning him a nomination for a Nobel Prize in medicine, an astounding accomplishment, given he was not yet forty years of age.

In 2014 Dr. Miller attended a Congressional hearing on the impacts of Obamacare, just nine weeks before the 2014 Midterm Election.  For the last year he was openly vocal regarding his concerns over the limitations the Obamacare mandates were inflicting upon medical science and possible treatments.  By 2014 those concerns had transformed into his outright warnings that Obamacare was killing Americans.  More and more the treatments available by his Nephrology department were being denied older patients or patients whose physical condition limited their chances for a sustainable recovery following treatment.  Human beings had become simple calculated outcome risks within the massive and quickly expanding government run healthcare system  - a system that within months of its implementation, was directing physicians to kill their patients as a means of saving costs.

The doctor stopped to look up into the morning sky…dark clouds were slowly making their way from the east. 

“Storm’s coming, Mr. Neeson.  By the looks of it, be here by tonight.”

“Doctor, when you say the government was directing physicians to kill their patients, what do you mean? How did that work?”

Dr. Miller gave a smile that appeared far more like a grimace.

“It didn’t work…not for the patients.  Not for any doctor who still cared.  It was like I said, the number crunchers had taken over the entire system.  Every procedure was compartmentalized statistically, everything I or anyone else did had to fall into an approved category or you were not allowed to do it.  So, if I had a man in his 60’s, obese, hypertension, perhaps a previous heart attack, and he’s now suffering from early stage liver cancer…all of that information was plugged into a system that would spit out what procedures were acceptable cost-wise.  If there was a procedure, or a drug that would benefit this man, but the statistics put him below a sixty percent full recovery scenario, that patient would be denied that procedure, denied that drug…that treatment.  The system was telling me, the physician, to let that man die.  Give him a painkiller, something to make them comfortable, and let him die.  His death was cheaper than trying to give him the opportunity for another five or ten years of life.

“Now that situation infuriated me. It infuriated a lot of us.  It was immoral.  It was cruel.  Hell, I was telling my wife it was evil.”

‘And what was her reaction?”

“My wife?  She didn’t say much at first, but after they suspended my license, she wanted nothing to do with my fight.”

Dr. Miller stopped walking again, as I sensed him reliving that time those many years ago.

“Well, after I testified to Congress in 2014, the hospital was telling me to keep quiet.  I wouldn’t do that.  I would speak out against Obamacare every opportunity I had, radio, television, newspapers, whoever wanted to hear my experiences, I was happy to share.  Felt I had a moral obligation to do it.  2015 came around, and I was working on a book about the healthcare law.  The hospital administrator calls me in, tells me he heard about my book.  Tells me not to publish.  He just got off the phone from a representative of the Department of Homeland Security…alleging I may be part of some kind of anti-government plot.  Said perhaps I needed to take a break.  Now I asked him if he was suspending me…he said no.  He was hoping it wouldn’t come to that.  So, I told him to go to hell.  I kept working, as much as I could, and by April of that year, my book was finished and I had a publisher lined up to distribute it.  By June it was out there.  I called it
Death of America – One Nation Under Obamacare. 
Within a week of its publication my license was suspended by the State of Illinois.  I appealed, but that took…took almost a year.  The appeal was overturned, but by then my wife and I were separated.  She took the two kids, and I was living in a little studio apartment about a half mile from the hospital.

“So I had the appeal overturned, and two days back at the hospital and I’m being called in for a discipline review by the hospital administration.  Takes them about thirty minutes to suspend me from the hospital while they review the possibility of terminating my employment there.  And whose sitting in on my discipline review?  DHS.  It was unbelievable.  I felt like I had entered some kind of alternative universe.  Had some friends, colleagues, telling me to pull the book, apologize, beg for mercy.  I wouldn’t do that.  The book was circulating well…the word was getting out.  And that was what made me the enemy of the government.  By the next week my employment was terminated and the hospital administration submitted a request to the state to have my license suspended – again.  And, it was.  So, I had no job.  No family…wife wouldn’t let me see the kids.  No home.  But the book was selling, so I had a bit of money from that.  Or so I thought, took DHS about a month to freeze all my accounts.  They shut down the publisher.  All the books were removed.  Any mention of it online was scrubbed.  The book, and pretty much me I suppose, no longer existed.”

I shook my head in amazement.

“Just like that like?  A doctor who had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine, a few years later your entire career is wiped out?”

Dr. Miller nodded.

“Yeah, just like that.  I tried to tell people then, everything, and I mean everything, changed in this country after Obamacare.”

“So what then – where did you go?”

“Well, I was contacted by a senator a few days later who had staff monitoring my situation.  We set up a time to meet in person.  I told him my experiences, he said he agreed with everything I said and wanted to bring me in for another hearing.  This one would be publicized big time – big media coverage.  And I was to be the only testimony.  There were a handful in Congress still fighting the Obamacare mandates.  They had been receiving horror stories from other physicians, patients, and they were still willing to try to put a stop to it.  My story was going to be a big part in doing that.”

“So did they hold the hearing?”

“No, two days before I was preparing to go to Washington D.C., I got a message from one of the senator’s staffers, a very brief message.  She said the Senator had been found dead in his home…suicide.  Single shot to the side of his head.  There was no evidence of a break-in, nothing in the home had been stolen.  No note was left, just his body lying on the kitchen floor.  The hearing was cancelled.  She also told me it would probably be wise to stay as far away from Washington D.C. as possible.  And that’s what I did.”

“You said the Senator was found dead on the kitchen floor?”

Dr. Miller’s eyes indicated he knew the reason for my question.

“Yes, just like Mac’s friend.  In the kitchen, single gunshot to the head.”

“And where did you go then?”

“Made my way to Washington State and spent a few years just outside Spokane giving medical examinations to migrant workers in a private community clinic at the back of a hardware store.  That was around 2017…2018.  My wife had remarried by then, what few messages I sent to my kids were never returned.”

“That must have been tough.”

Dr. Miller stopped walking again and turned to fully face me, the muscles in his jaw flexing.  Though his overall appearance was that of a kind and amiable looking older looking black man, there was also the hint of just-under-the-surface anger, and a willingness to push back hard when forced to do so.

“Oh, I’ll tell you this Mr. Neeson.  I had thoughts come to me here and there, thoughts of going back and screaming at her, my wife, for her leaving me for my principles.  Calling her a coward, a slut, and worse.  It’s a strange thing life, how quickly it can change from one thing to another just like that.” 

The doctor snapped his fingers for emphasis as he spoke.

“But, in the end, my heart told me I was put on this earth to help people.  It’s what drove me.  It’s what made me speak out against the government takeover of our healthcare system.  I wasn’t the only one, there were others too.  But they were all silenced through intimidation, administrative bullying, whatever.  You’d hear stories of resignations, traffic accidents, and suicide of course.  So people, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, they just stopped fighting back.  Stopped questioning, and put their heads down, filled out the forms, checked off the boxes, placed the patients in this category or that category, and let a whole bunch of them die.  We no longer treated a whole section of patients, we just accommodated their death.  Expedited it, to save on resources.  These people were what the system started to call ‘expendables’.  And the number of expendables as part of the overall population became larger and larger.  Now that’s evil, Mr. Neeson.  They always call it ‘for the good of society’, but what we were doing in forcing people to die when we could have treated them, prolonged their lives, that’s real verifiable evil.  Hell, I haven’t even started talking about the babies, the late term abortions…”

The doctor’s voice trailed off as his gaze once again returned to the darkening clouds slowly making their way toward Dominatus.

“Please explain what you just said Dr. Miller, about the babies, the abortions.”

Dr. Miller looked at me again before his eyes closed and he let out a long, pained sigh.

“I had a friend who had devoted her life to pediatrics.  She had been a mentor to me during my early years, a wonderful physician.  Wonderful doctor.  By the time she was in her 50’s she ran her own clinic, a beautiful facility in Chicago.  She was making a very good living.  Very successful.  She had recognition, friends in high places as they say, donated to politicians, attended the gatherings of the city’s elite.  Her position afforded her the opportunity to be on the inside of city’s power structure. 

“And, she was a very vocal advocate of a woman’s right to choose, a defender of abortion rights…or what she and others like her called reproductive rights.  Now her clinic did not offer abortion services, and I always felt that personally, she would not do so.  But, after Obamacare, the fight against the Catholic Church regarding contraception mandates, you see that is where all of the eventual New United Nations mandates really started.  It was with Obamacare.  That was the Trojan Horse for what was to come.  Obamacare was the vehicle for everything else that followed in this country.  The breaking down of personal freedoms that also meant the breaking down of the nation’s freedom, the real push for globalization…I have always looked back on Obamacare as the thing that really started that whole process.

“So my friend, my mentor, she is paid a visit by a representative of the mayor’s office in Chicago.  This is 2013, summer of that year.  He informs her they want her clinic to begin providing abortion services, that her high profile would be a valuable asset in the ‘normalization program’ that the mayor’s office wants to initiate…a program that she was told also had the approval of the Obama administration.