A great example of how out of control the right and their monied benefactors in the health-care lobby have gotten came to me late last night in the form of a well-meaning question from a high-school friend on how the health-care reform currently being discussed in Congress would or would not impact vaccinations.
“Aren’t they going to do away with our freedom to choose what healthcare is right for our families?” I was asked, prompting an hour-long dive into the two health-care bills up for consideration in the House and Senate to figure out what the issue was.
It didn’t take long for me to get suspicious. Typing “health care reform” and “vaccine teams” into the Googler, it spit back out at me a page of items consisting almost entirely of links from right-leaning news websites reporting on how the reform will fund “state vaccine teams to conduct ‘interventions’ in private homes.”
There’s nothing about any vaccine teams in HR 3200, I discovered after accessing the full text of the bill on the house.gov website and doing keyword searches for “vaccine” and “vaccination” and coming up empty.
The issue appears to be in the language of Senate bill, which you can find easily on the web doing a search for “health care reform” and “Senate,” from reading the breathless news reports of the right-wing blog media.
The idea that there are vaccination teams, I have come to surmise, anywhere in the bill, come under language in Section 324 in the whatever-it-is that details how states can qualify for grants to “improve the provision of recommended vaccinations for children, adolescents, and adults through the use of evidence-based, population-based interventions for high-risk populations.”
Pretty innocuous-sounding to me. And it gets better. The “interventions” include:
– (A) providing immunization reminders or recalls for target populations of clients, patients, and consumers;
– (B) educating targeted populations and health care providers concerning immunizations in combination with one or more other interventions;
– (C) reducing out-of-pocket costs for famiies for vaccines and their administration;
– (D) carrying out immunization-promoting strategies for participants or clients of public programs, including assessments of immunization status, referrals to health care providers, education, provision of on-site immunizations, or incentives for immunization;
– (E) providing for home visits that promote immunization through education, assessments of need, referrals, provision of immunizations, or other services;
– (F) providing reminders or recalls for immunization providers;
– (G) conducting assessments of, and providing feedback to, immunization providers; or
– (H) any combination of one or more interventions described in this paragraph.
The frenzy being whipped up by the right and their friends in the health-care lobby has to do with section (E) above. I read one gripping account of a vaccine team barging into a home to vaccinate an 11-year-old for genital warts that, hey, you’d have to consider highly objectionable, if what they were saying was true, and what could become the law of the land would authorize on behalf of the interests of the state – cue menacing-sounding movie music here.
“(P)roviding for home visits that promote” – key word there, “promote” – immunization through education, assessments of need, referrals, provisions of immunization, or other services.”
You have to be reading something that isn’t there to interpret “intervention” as “people barging into your home” and “provisions of immunization” as “vaccinating my 11-year-old for genital warts.” “Intervention” is providing information to people on the benefits of immunzations, and “provisions of immunizations” is “we can set up an appointment at the health department if you want us to.”
If this hadn’t been a friend asking the question, I wouldn’t have spent more than the minute it took me to search the Googler for “health care reform” and “vaccine teams” and come up with CNSNews and NewsMax and blogs sponsored by health-care industry lobbies.
The Forces of No have teams of hobbits combing through the reform bills line by line looking for the slightest provocation that can be used to scare yet another subgroup into thinking that reforming the health-care system is not anywhere near being in their best interests.
Funny thing – we’re paying to be misled on all of this, too, through our premiums, a third of which goes to overhead, lobbying, campaign contributions and bureaucratic inefficiencies in the private-sector health industry.
So we pay more per-capita, on an order of 10 percent more, than anybody else in the world for our health care, we’re #50 in the world in life expectancy – the average American lives seven months more than the average Cuban, which spends four cents on the dollar what we do on health care – and we’re supposed to jump up and down all excited and happy at the prospect of more of the same.
There’s a reason we voted for change last year.
– Column by Chris Graham
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