The Freedom Bulletin

It’s not surprising that the Judge Rotenberg Center wanted to keep this video from public view. At this school for special-needs students, staff members tied down 18-year-old Andre McCollins and delivered 31 electric shocks to him over the course of 5 and a half hours. All the while, he screamed, called for help, and begged them to stop. What did Andre do to deserve this? He refused to take off his coat.

Andre and his mother are suing the center, alleging that the shocks caused him permanent psychological trauma. After viewing the video, I don’t see how anyone could think that what happened is acceptable. Lawyers for the school claim that they were just following a court-approved “treatment” plan. I don’t know whether that’s true, but there clearly is a problem if this is considered an appropriate treatment for anything. As psychiatrist Marc Whaley testified at the trial, ”There was ample evidence to show this treatment was harming that individual at that time and certainly not helping him…They’re treating him like an object.”

What is most disturbing to me is how Andre called for help, but the only authority figures around to help him were the ones who were administering the torture. The most important job of teachers, parents, and other adults who work with kids is to protect them from people who would violate their rights and harm them. I can barely imagine how powerless and betrayed a teenager would feel when subjected to torture at the hands of the very adults who are supposed to protect them, while having no one to answer their cries for help.

Massachusetts Senate President Therese Murray is calling for a ban on shock “therapy.” I agree with this idea; no innocent person should be subjected to this type of suffering.

The Center got the video sealed 8 years ago, but this week at the trial, a judge allowed Fox 25 news to film it as it was played in court. If you have a strong stomach, watch and decide for yourself. Warning, the video is disturbing.

Check out this piece in the Wall Street Journal by Pamela Hartzband and Jerome Groopman about how our society relies too much on the judgment of medical “experts” instead of trusting individuals to make their own medical decisions:

 ”Should everyone take vitamin D, and if so, how much? At what age and how often should a woman have a mammogram? Should a healthy man be screened for prostate cancer, and if cancer is diagnosed, how should he be treated? …

Democrats and Republicans share a fundamental misconception about medical care. Both assume that, as in mathematics, there is a single right answer for every health problem.”

As described in the article, people vary in whether they are “minimalists” or “maximalists” about the amount of medical procedures they prefer to undergo, as well as whether they are “believers” or “doubters” about the effectiveness of medical treatments. For example, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which recently lowered the recommended frequency of mammograms, pap smears, and prostate cancer screenings, is described as having a “minimalist” and “doubter” outlook. (In my opinion, today’s society has a definite bias towards the maximalist point of view; these recommendations are actually maximalist compared to what I would choose.)

People have different preferences in other ways too. Some are more disturbed than others about the prospect of gruesome things, such as surgery, being done to their bodies. Some people would rather wait to do a medical procedure, while others prefer to get it over with. Some people are modest and prefer not to undergo medical procedures that involve removing clothing, while other people do not care about this.

All of these preferences are equally valid. Policy makers and doctors too often ignore this, acting as if any view other than the one currently favored by the medical establishment must be based on ignorance, laziness, or irrationality. But as Hartzband and Groopman write:

“Patients and doctors can differ with experts and not be ignorant or irrational. Policy makers need to abandon the idea that experts know what is best. In medical care, the ‘right’ clinical decisions turn out to be those that are based on a patient’s goals and values.”

Read the full article at the Wall Street Journal.

It seems like things might, just maybe, be going in the right direction based on the Supreme Court justices’ questions during today’s hearing on the Affordable Care Act. Although predicting court decisions is always iffy, news sources described a majority of the justices as skeptical as they fired questions at Solicitor General Donald Verrilli. Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Ginsburg are almost certainly in favor of the law, Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas are almost certainly against it, and it is Roberts and especially Kennedy who everyone is guessing about.

Here are some of the best points, in my opinion, that were made today:

“Everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food, therefore, everybody is in the market. Therefore, you can make people buy broccoli.” ~ Justice Antonin Scalia

“Why do you define the market that broadly? It may well be that everybody needs health care sooner or later, but not everybody needs a heart transplant.” ~ Justice Scalia

“[The individual mandate] is different from what we have in previous cases. That changes the relationship of the federal government to the individual in a very fundamental way.” ~ Justice Anthony Kennedy

“You don’t know if you’re going to need police assistance. You can’t predict the extent to emergency response that you’ll need. But when you do and the government provides it.” ~ Chief Justice John Roberts, comparing the individual mandate to requiring everyone to purchase cell phones so they can call 911 more efficiently

“You can’t say that everybody is going to participate in substance abuse services.” ~ Justice Roberts

“The failure to buy health insurance doesn’t affect anyone. Defaulting on your payments to your health-care provider does. Congress chose for whatever reason not to regulate the harmful activity of defaulting on your health care provider.” ~ Michael Carvin, attorney for the National Federation of Independent Business and other private plaintiffs against the individual mandate

“If being born is entering the market…that literally means they can regulate every human activity from cradle to grave.” ~ Attorney Carvin

“It’s not really a health-care provision so much as a corporate giveaway. 300 million guaranteed customers for the insurance industry.” ~ Oliver Hall, a supporter of single-payer health care who protested against the individual mandate

Sources:

• Associated Press
• CBS News
• LA Times
• NY Times
• Wall Street Journal (live blog here)

Visit the Supreme Court’s website if you want to read a transcript of all of today’s arguments (PDF).

Did you know that the federal government can ban you from growing too much wheat on your farm? In the 1942 case of Wickard v. Filburn, the Supreme Court affirmed (unanimously, no less!) a federal law doing just that. Farmer Roscoe Filburn was fined for every bushel of wheat he grew that exceeded a government-set limit. According to the New York Times, this case will play a large role in the Court’s upcoming deliberations over the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (“ObamaCare”).

“To hear the Obama administration tell it, the Filburn decision illustrates just how much leeway the federal government has under the Constitution’s commerce clause to regulate the choices individuals make in matters affecting the national economy. If the government can make farmers choose between growing crops on their own land and paying a penalty, the administration’s lawyers have said, it can surely tell people that they must obtain health insurance or pay a penalty.

Opponents of the law draw a different lesson from Mr. Filburn’s case. They say it set the outer limit of federal power, one the health care law exceeds. It is one thing to encourage farmers to buy wheat by punishing them for growing their own, the argument goes. It is another to require people to buy insurance or face a penalty, as the health care law does.”

In other words, there’s a difference between banning people from making something themselves in the hope that they will have to purchase it from someone else, and actually requiring people to purchase something (namely, health insurance).

In my opinion, this isn’t a very big difference; philosophically and morally, both the Wickard decision and the Affordable Care Act’s  individual mandate are wrong. But out of these two violations of individual rights, the individual mandate is somewhat worse. Punishing people for growing something on their own land is bad enough, but the ACA would punish people for inactivity and would compel them to participate in an economic transaction that they do not necessarily wish to participate in. Additionally, while the wheat law allows people the option of going without wheat (admittedly not a very good or practical option), the ACA does not even allow people the option of declining to participate in the health care market.

Lawyer Michael A. Carvin, in a brief for the National Federation of Independent Business, made an excellent analogy:

“The uninsured regulated by the mandate are the teetotalers, not the bootleggers, of the health insurance market.”

ACA supporters almost always equate not having health insurance with receiving medical services for free and therefore becoming a free rider. Although this is true of some people, it is not true of all. Some people choose not to receive medical services at all. And some people choose to pay with their own money for each health service they receive, instead of paying for insurance. It would be just as wrong to force these people to purchase health insurance as it would be to force teetotalers to purchase alcohol.

It will be interesting to see if the Court agrees with this analogy.

As almost everyone in the world knows, Rush Limbaugh made some controversial comments about Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown law student who testified at a congressional hearing in support of requiring all health insurance plans to cover birth control pills for free.

Limbaugh said:

“What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke [sic], who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.”

And later he said,

“So Miss Fluke, and the rest of you Feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”

After almost all of the world erupted in rage at him, Limbaugh apologized.

Here’s my take: Yes, Rush made some bad word choices. It was somewhat mean to call Fluke a slut, not a perfect analogy to call her a prostitute, pointless to use the word “Feminazi,” and nonsensical to call for sex videos to be posted online. But he made a good point, which has been almost entirely overlooked: that indeed, to pay for someone’s birth control pills is to pay for them to have sex. Birth control pills are not essential, because they are only useful to people who have sex, and one can always make the choice not to have sex.*

The truth is, Limbaugh is right on this issue, and Fluke is wrong. Fluke and other proponents of free birth control are winning the public opinion war by making it seem like they are arguing for basic rights, and their opponents are trying to take these rights away. For example, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) said, ”The right to space and time our children for our own health and the ability to manage our lives — this is a basic right, and they’re going after it.”

In actuality, Fluke and her allies are arguing a very aggressive position, one that violates the freedom of others. These people are outraged at the fact that there is some opposition to forcing all people to purchase health insurance that covers a discretionary product (birth control pills) preferentially to medically necessary products. Fluke does not just demand that she have access to birth control, or that she be able to make her own decisions about her life or her body. She does not even demand that health insurance plans cover birth control just as they would any other health service. Instead, she demands that all health insurance plans be required to cover birth control with no co-pays, co-insurance, deductibles, or cost-sharing measures of any kind; in other words preferentially to chemotherapy, antibiotics, heart surgery, casts for broken bones, and all other health services that actually treat a medical problem.

In other words, she demands that I be required to pay for a health insurance plan that does not work for me and that I cannot afford because it covers discretionary products that I will never use. Unwilling to make any sacrifices in her budget to accommodate her desire to be sexually active, she demands that I make sacrifices in my budget to accommodate her desire to be sexually active. Anyone who falls short of supporting this extreme position, advocating, for example, something as modest as allowing companies to charge a $10 co-pay for birth control pills as would be required for any other medication, is characterized as a misogynist who wants to control women’s bodies and lives. This is ridiculous. I am not trying to control anyone’s body or anyone’s life; I am simply trying to control my own money.

In summary, Fluke is advocating injustice, unfairness, and outright aggression against every American by advocating that we all be required to pay for something that we do not necessarily want and will not necessarily ever use. Maybe Fluke shouldn’t have been called a slut. But that doesn’t change the fact that on this issue, she is completely, utterly wrong.

Here are a few more random points that, in my opinion, people haven’t been paying enough attention to in the birth control debate:

1. Fluke complained that birth control can cost someone $3,000 over the course of law school, or $1,000 a year. Apparently she mentions this because she thinks it’s a huge burden, but this is not an unmanageable price, especially if you consider that according to some sources, the price is actually as low as $9 per month. Unlike some medications that give people with cancer their only chance at life, birth control is reasonably priced even without insurance.
2. Birth control is not a women’s issue. It really, really annoys me that commentators unanimously, casually, and without thought, refer to this as a “women’s issue.” It is not. Sex and reproduction (and sex without reproduction) have to do with both genders equally. People of both genders have an interest in being able to have sex without making a baby, and men do not want to become parents against their will any more than women do. It is demeaning to women to suggest that somehow they should be more associated with reproduction than men are.
3. Why is there such an outrage about co-pays for birth control pills, but no outrage about co-pays for any other medication? For example, my dad, who takes statins for his cholesterol, wondered why no one is marching on Washington to demand free statins. Unlike birth control pills, statins are actually needed to treat a medical condition.

One of the only sensible articles I have seen about this issue is this one by Cathy Cleaver Ruse of the Family Research Council. I highly recommend it.

* Yes, birth control pills are sometimes used to treat medical conditions, and in these cases, they should be treated the same as any other medically necessary product or service. In this blog post, whenever I refer to birth control pills, I am referring to those used for birth control purposes.

Judge Richard J. Leon made an excellent ruling today, declaring that for the federal government to force cigarette companies to display graphic, anti-smoking propaganda violates the First Amendment:

“The government’s interest in advocating a message cannot and does not outweigh plaintiff’s First Amendment right to not be the government’s messenger,” Judge Leon wrote.

His ruling largely echoed arguments he made in a preliminary injunction he issued in November. The significance of Wednesday’s ruling is unclear, since the Obama administration has appealed the injunction.

Read the rest at the New York Times.

Yet another example of someone who did nothing wrong and hurt no one being punished by government: Dan Allgyer, owner of a small dairy farm that sold raw milk across state lines, was forced to shut down his business after a federal judge granted the FDA’s motion for summary judgment and issued an injunction to force him to stop selling milk.

Karine Bouis-Towe, who helped open grassfedonthehill, the suburban D.C. buyers club that bought Allgyer’s milk, requiring that it be transported across state lines, issued this statement: “Dan and Rachel Allgyer have determined that they will discontinue service to our group and close down the farm. Dan has served many of us for more than six years and he is very saddened to have to make this decision but the stress and strain that his family has been under for the past few years due to the case and now the decision has given them no other choice.”

It should be noted that the entire federal effort was based on allegations of “mislabeling” and transportation across state lines. The feds never alleged that Allgyer’s milk was tainted and it was never found to be so.

Read the rest at the Houston Chronicle.