Surviving the Medical Meltdown

  SURVIVING
THE
MEDICAL MELTDOWN

SURVIVING THE MEDICAL MELTDOWN

Copyright © 2015 Dr. Lee Hieb

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THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION
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, NIV
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Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-938067-02-0
eBook ISBN: 978-1-938067-03-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hieb, Lee D.

Surviving the medical meltdown : your guide to living through the disaster of Obamacare / Lee Hieb.

      pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-938067-02-0 (pbk.)

1. Medical care – United States. 2. Medical policy – United States. 3. Medical economics – United States. I.
Title.

RA395.A3H543 2014

362.10973 – dc23

                    2014031613

To Ernie Rillos, MD, 1956
–
2009
Former Navy Corpsman, Orthopaedic Surgeon, and Friend

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I: THE COMING COLLAPSE

1 How We Got Here

2 The Coming Doctor Shortage

3 Why Your Doctor Is Out of Date

4 The Final Government Takeover

5 What the Meltdown Will Look Like

6 The Role of Insurance

PART II: GETTING PREPARED

7 Addiction

8 Diet: What Science Really Tells Us

9 Preparing Yourself: Exercise

10 Preparing Yourself: Sleep

11 Preparing Yourself: Supplements

12 Preparing Yourself: Hormone Replacement

PART III: LIVING THROUGH THE MELTDOWN

13 Be Your Own Corpsman: Introduction to Personal Survival

14 Finding a Physician When Physicians Are Scarce

15 Be Your Own Corpsman: Storing and Stockpiling Medicines

16 Stockpiling and Distributing Supplies

17 Real Emergencies That Can’t Wait

18 Wound Management

19 Rashes

20 Colds and Flu-Like Illnesses

21 Bites

22 Sprains, Strains, and Broken Bones

23 Back and Neck Pain

24 Foot Pain

25 Ear Infections

26 Sore Throats

27 Abscesses, Boils, and Zits

28 Dental Care

29 The Future of Medicine

Appendix A: Further Reading and Other Resources

Appendix B: Emergency Kits and Supplements

Appendix C: Recipes and Formulae

Appendix D: Sample Home Medical Record

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
here are many people who contributed to the writing of this book. Ralph Weber was a great help in understanding and discussing insurance options. The members of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and particularly Dr. Jane Orient, have helped me to appreciate the meaning of individual liberty and the importance of limited government, free markets, and medical ethics. And of course I thank my sons, Mason and Nathan, for their enlightening Socratic discourse.

INTRODUCTION

Y
ou may have thought about surviving an economic or political collapse – how you would eat and how you would defend your family and property and things like that. But have you thought of how you would obtain medical care at times of economic collapse?

Over the years, surgeons have traditionally congregated in surgeons’ lounges and discussed interesting or difficult cases. In the last decade, I have found my life as a surgeon has changed considerably, and now, while sitting around with my colleagues, I take part in discussions about surviving the bureaucratic nightmare of Obamacare and Medicare, managing our practices to avoid financial collapse, investing in precious metals, buying weapons and ammunition, food storage, and other survival issues. Physicians are smart people, and most of us feel bad times are coming. I have taken steps to move back to my rural hometown, downsize my debt, and relearn some of the self-reliance of my pioneer ancestors. But along with that, I have thought about medical care for my family and myself, and for my community, in times of national crisis.

If we experience the kind of economic collapse experienced by Argentina and Russia in the last decade, Zimbabwe or the Weimar
Republic before that, where will we get medical supplies and expertise? I began thinking of my father’s small-town practice and how self-sufficient he was. I thought about my Navy training and experience and the difficulties of rendering emergency medical care in isolated places with minimal supplies and no trained medical specialists for assistance. From that consideration, I have planned for my own and my family’s medical security. This book will help you do the same. The goal of this book is to help you to:

1.
Recognize the signs of the impending collapse of the medical system.

2.
Prepare yourself and others to be as healthy as possible.

3.
Be more self-sufficient when medical issues do arise.

4.
Learn to navigate the difficult world of health insurance when finding a physician.

5.
Create a medical stockpile for times when supplies are not available.

PART 1
THE COMING COLLAPSE

1
HOW WE GOT HERE

A
merica has been the great experiment in individual liberty. Our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution were intended to create a government with one purpose – to safeguard the God-given rights of its citizens. But nearly from the time of this country’s founding, certainly in the last one hundred years, Americans have strayed from the principles in those founding documents and have asked the government to do more than protect the rights to life, liberty, and private property – they have asked government to insure their safety.

It seemed innocuous enough at first. Who better than the federal government to keep watch over our food supply? And it makes sense that government requires its citizens to exercise prudent precautions such as wearing seatbelts or motorcycle helmets. Doesn’t it?

Well, the problem is that government cannot make us safer, but it can make us infinitely poorer in the attempt. As Thomas Jefferson so presciently opined, “If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy.” Although Jefferson had no inkling of Medicare or – God help us – Obamacare, he perfectly described government-run health care in all its ugly forms.

In 1965, Lyndon Johnson, as part of his Great Society programs, instituted Medicare and subsequently Medicaid. Since then, the cost of medical care has skyrocketed, taxpayers have been milked dry, people have become more and more unhappy about the care they receive (we now have a patient bill of rights, not needed before Medicare), and in general, it is harder and harder to get the care we need. Although ignored by the pundits, the reasons are very straightforward once we deconstruct the effect of government on the practice of medicine, which is fundamentally the same as the effect of government on… well, anything! Government produces nothing. It only regulates and appropriates.

To get an idea about how government makes everything in medicine scarcer and more expensive, let’s look at the pharmaceutical industry. The government does not invent any new medicine; it only makes it harder for others to invent treatments by overregulating researchers. Whereas drugs once were brought to market quickly, limited only by the time it took to do safety studies and marketing (as with each new generation of iPod and iPhone), now it takes on average fifteen years of a major pharmaceutical corporation’s time to get through the government morass. That carries a huge price tag. And the delay is not due to more “thoroughness” but to more stultifying paperwork that FDA regulators confuse with actual research and thinking about drug safety and efficacy. Although the proposition is that this makes us safer, consider this: When the FDA says they are saving thirty-five thousand lives this year by passing a new drug, in actuality their institutional stall cost roughly thirteen years times thirty-five thousand lives
not
saved. And if you were a drug executive and your promising new drug hit a snag at the thirteenth year of this nightmarish series of wickets, would you be more or would you be less apt to be honest about the drug’s problems? Like a little kid who is too severely punished for a small infraction of the house rules, drug companies are likely to minimize small problems rather than face the loss of fifteen years of financial investment. In a free market, drug companies can quickly assess whether the drug
has problems and, if so, move on to a different and better product. And when the FDA denies the sale of a new drug because it is “too similar” to another drug on the market, it is simply insuring one industry’s monopoly and denying the opportunity for price controls through competition. If the same oversight given to the pharmaceutical industry were applied to the computer or phone industry, we would be using old, 1950s-style, rotary-dial, plug-in phones, calculators still attached to mainframe computers, and punch-card technology; and they, too, would be overly expensive.

When government pays for something, it regulates. And it regulates. And it regulates. It spawns offices of bureaucrats whose job is to write regulations. The rest of the universe may tend toward entropy, but government by its very nature tends toward more and more organization and detailed regulation. When you go to your doctor or buy insurance, you are paying for the effect of the 150,000-plus pages of Medicare regulation. Your doctor and your hospital or clinic must be in compliance with volumes of Medicare rules or face financial ruin and potential jail time. And of course, you can’t get paid by Medicare or insurance companies (who piggyback on Medicare’s requirements) without consulting several tomes in order to choose numerical codes for everything you do for a patient. Then, to “prove” you actually saw and treated the patient, you end up writing long-winded, mostly useless (think of those padded essays you wrote in college to get the necessary page length) patient notes that include the bullet points and catchphrases nonmedical bureaucrats use to determine your pay level. For example, if I see you in my office for a fractured leg, it will be difficult (read: impossible) to weigh you because you cannot bear weight on your broken leg. But if you just tell me your weight – accurate or not – I get a point counted toward my payment. Not that your weight has a damn thing to do with my fixing your broken leg, but it is a “fact” that the bean counters at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid services can count. The more beans counted, the more I get paid, whether or not those “beans” bear any relationship to the medical problem at hand. William Bruce Cameron once said,
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
¹
How true this is. But it is expensive. To be in compliance with the rules, to avoid being charged with a crime, and to get paid, I had an office filled with seven employees and even then hired an external billing service, which took roughly 10 percent of my collected income. Without Medicare, I could have run the office with two employees and no billing service, charging cash at the window, just as generations of physicians did with much lower fees. It is estimated that every time a “third party” is billed, it costs $58 in overhead staff time and paper and fees. And that is a fixed cost regardless of the actual bill, which might have been $20 before all this added expense.