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Trust in our government was a mere 19 percent in 2013, according to the Pew Research Center. Not surprisingly, 56 percent of Americans think it is not the government’s responsibility to provide a health-care system. Waivers, favors, off-the-cuff rule changes and the bungled launch of the Affordable Care Act website validate that distrust. Bureaucratic incompetence and cronyism are not the only reasons we should be wary of government involvement in our medical care.
The federal government has a checkered history when it comes to medical judgments. We now cringe at the words of the revered Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the 1927 case, Buck v Bell, upholding Virginia’s sterilization law for the institutionalized “feeble-minded.” “[Carrie Bell’s] welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. … Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” In fact, Carrie’s mother was a prostitute, but not feeble-minded. After Carrie’s release, she maintained a job as a domestic worker and became an avid reader. Her “feeble-minded” daughter was on her school’s honor roll.
Let’s recall the appalling Tuskegee Syphilis Study lasting from 1932 to 1972. The U.S. Public Health Service used 400 mainly poor, illiterate, black sharecroppers with syphilis as lab animals. They were told they had “bad blood,” but not that they were actually suffering from a serious but treatable disease. All subjects succumbed to untreated syphilis so our government could track the natural progression of the disease.
The U.S. Navy sprayed the presumably harmless bacterium, serratia marcescens, over San Francisco in 1951 in a biological warfare test. Numerous residents contracted pneumonia-like illnesses resulting in at least one death. The experiments came to light in the 1977 Senate hearings on Health and Scientific Research. Two-hundred, thirty-nine populated areas, including Minneapolis, St. Louis, the Washington, D.C., National Airport and New York’s subway system, had been contaminated from 1949 to 1969 when President Nixon terminated the program.
In 1989, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sponsored study tested an experimental measles vaccine on 1,500 six-month old black and Hispanic babies in Los Angeles. The CDC admitted in 1996 that parents were never informed that the vaccine was experimental.
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