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A Voice for Private Physicians Since 1943

AAPS News February 2025 – Priorities

Volume 81, no. 2 

The task of “Making America Great Again” is colossal, and the damage of decades cannot be repaired overnight. Priorities must be set, but there must also be agreement on definitions.

The deepest division is created by radical leftists, who teach that America was evil from the start, was never great, and should  incorporated into a “multicultural,” multiracial, homogeneous mass of compliant serfs, “who will own nothing and be happy” in a world without borders under the iron fist of elites.

America is also experiencing a Tower of Babel language confusion—not just between the Woke Left and the Right, but within the balkanized Right, which is temporarily unified against Kamala Harris and aggressive radical Woke policies.

MAGA factions include working class, patriotic Americans who lost their well-paying factory jobs because of offshoring and irrational COVID, environmental, and “diversity, inclusion and equity” (DEI) regulations. They have viewed benefits such as food stamps as an affront to their righteous values, but out of bitter necessity many now rely on them—as do some formerly prosperous businessmen who lost their livelihood.

Every bureaucrat may destroy 158 private-sector jobs, but they will not come back immediately (tinyurl.com/3s6bts6n). DOGE must cut fat from the top, not essentials from the victims.

The right-wing professional managerial class is doing relatively well. To them, MAGA means more of the current thing, including tax cuts. Lower taxes aid growth, but if they cut lifeline benefits to the right-wing working class, there is an obvious conflict.

Young American-born technical intelligentsia people want mass deportation of people who are “stealing their jobs.” There is some truth to their concerns, but some want all immigrants out so they can take the IT jobs, not because they are good at them but because “they were born here!” Many young Americans do not have the level of skill they should have because of dumbed-down education, or they (especially straight white males) may have been barred by DEI from opportunities to learn and excel.

For technocratic or big corporate supporters, MAGA means expanding H1B visas, and their motive may be to obtain cheap H1B slaves. It may also be true that there is a scarcity of qualified persons here due to a toxic culture (tinyurl.com/3cwvpk9v) or to the fact that “native-born” Americans weren’t born and without immigration there would be demographic collapse.

In foreign affairs, MAGA may mean “neoconservative” striving for U.S. world dominance: the petrodollar, “regime change,” withholding aid or trade from nations that refuse to adopt population control measures including abortion or that might compete with American industries. “Forever wars” keep the military-industrial complex rich while draining American prosperity.

What Does ‘Greatness’ Mean?

America faces the same choice as Rome: to be a republic, as our Founders envisioned, or an empire.

Should America be the City on a Hill, where good people strive to come to live in freedom, without fear of the midnight knock on the door? Or an imperial overlord, setting the rules for the “rules-based international order,” and suppressing any upstart that might challenge our military or economic superiority?

To achieve true greatness we must restore our constitutional republic, with respect for God and law based on traditional morality. This time, we need safeguards that were lacking and rejection of the Enlightenment hypocrisies that our Founding Fathers unfortunately injected, which like mRNA vaccine made the republic weak, sick, and susceptible to the turbo-cancer of Wokeism.

“To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men” is a lofty vision, but the truth is that governments are needed to restrain evil. Libertarians make a pleasing argument that everybody would be better off under a “live and let live” ethic. But some want to kill America no matter what it costs them.

We must have and enforce just laws, with the protections promised in the Bill of Rights.

No SWAT-team raids at dawn for made-up crimes. No prolonged imprisonment without trial. No excessive punishments, including hugely disproportionate fines. No favoritism—toward rich, or poor, or politically favored or disfavored. Fair trial in an unbiased venue. Insistence on honesty. No takings without due process of law and fair compensation.

Laws must be grounded on the divine order (AAPS News, December 2024)—as generally taken for granted in the pre-Woke era. Murder, theft, false witness, and sexual debauchery are crimes, as defined in natural language, not Tower of Babel distortions such as “choice,” “reproductive healthcare,” “aid in dying,” “equity,” or “sexual orientation” (e.g., “minor-attracted person”).

Certainly, violations of the law must not be rewarded, as with money, free housing, or free medical care. Without rewards there should be less need for forcible deportation of border violators.

Regulations without statutory basis should immediately be withdrawn. Unconstitutional laws should be voided, and laws that impose costs greater than benefits should be repealed. A golden age of economic innovation and growth should follow.

America needs a robust defense against invaders and clear and present dangers. These include foreign ideologies that would subvert or replace our Constitution (e.g., Sharia law, treaties, UN or WEF dictates), and destruction of our history and monuments.

Government and government-funded entities must neither teach nor reward evil or subversion.


Priorities for Medicine

The top priority for the AMA (see ama-assn.org) is “reforming Medicare payment.” Medicare is constantly cutting physicians’ payment (“reimbursements”) while costs and administrative burdens increase. One result is that independent surgeons are disappearing. A survey from the American College of Surgeons showed that the share of respondents in private practice had declined by 4% (from 21% to 17%) between 2017 and 2020, with 25% reporting that they did not believe they would finish their careers in private practice (https://tinyurl.com/3m2myfv2). More than half of physicians leaving private practice for employment by corporate-owned practices report that the quality of care deteriorates (https://tinyurl.com/y56h6pkj). Amy McNally, M.D., gynecologic oncologist and surgeon, writes, “I urge federal lawmakers [who created the problem] to protect independent medicine” (https://tinyurl.com/mrv24mxy).

Items that cannot be paid for will not be made available. That may be the idea, to reduce the burden on insolvent Medicare.

As AAPS has long stated, third-party payment is the root of the problem. Given the political reality that the system will not be abolished, escape is imperative (tinyurl.com/bddfskwa). AAPS proposals were listed in AAPS News, November 2024.

The new Trump Administration has already initiated action to stop federal support for transgender ideology, pardoned persons imprisoned for protesting abortions, and may cut the $700 million tax dollars that go to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider.

Trump should drop the Supreme Court appeal of the Fifth Circuit decision against the ObamaCare preventive-care mandates  in Becerra v. Braidwood Management, No. 24-316, and allow all employers to opt out of insurance  mandates based on religious or philosophical objections.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) has reintroduced the Healthcare Freedom Act, which would greatly expand Health Savings Accounts, empowering all Americans, including retirees, to save for future medical expenses with a tax-free HSA regardless of their insurance or employer. The special privilege of tax exemption now accorded only to employer-owned plans explains job lock, soaring prices, and limited treatment options. Why shouldn’t all Americans’ medical expenditures be treated equally under tax law? Why should self payment be punished? Why should people be forced into very costly plans when traditional indemnity plans (like the short-term medical [STM] plans that escaped Obamacare and are available in 35 states) are far cheaper?

To have medical freedom, Medicare and Medicaid enrollees need freedom to “opt out” at will, without losing all coverage. Repealing the requirement for Medicare “nonparticipating” physicians to file all claims would allow patients to file their own claim for reimbursement. Medicare could control its costs without  setting physicians’ fees on unassigned claims. Those would be limited by patients— “value [to patient]-based fees.”

Additional items to consider:

  • Make it easier for physicians to opt out of Medicare: One affidavit one time should suffice (https://tinyurl.com/3x3buttr).
  • Repeal or modify “surprise billing” law: It is not a surprise for a patient to receive a bill from a noncontracted physician if he has been informed that the doctor is out of network and will bill.
  • Remove protection of vaccines from product liability.
  • Eliminate COVID incentive payments to hospitals: There should be no bonus for having a COVID diagnosis or for favored treatments such as ventilation or remdesivir. Beyond COVID, bonuses should not be used to influence diagnosis and treatment.
  • Remove conflicted regulators: There should be no revolving door between agencies and the companies they regulate. Officials, such as at CDC, should not be permitted to receive royalties or other inducements from products they regulate.
  • Repeal the Obamacare prohibition on physician-owned hospitals: If corporations and private equity firms can own them, why not physicians?
  • Prohibit financial incentives for requiring medical staff to be certified by monopolistic specialty boards.
  • Require transparency: Data used to support regulations or approve drugs or other products must be available for independent analysis.
  • Forbid FDA from interfering in the practice of medicine.

U.S. Withdrawn from WHO and Paris Accords

On his first day in office, President Trump has (again) withdrawn the U.S. from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords (PCA). Both are globalist entities that  threaten our national sovereignty and demand huge financial support. They also view human population as a burden on the planet. WHO prioritizes abortion over other medical services. While the PCA draft agreement does not explicitly address population control, the size of the Earth’s human population is constantly presented as the main cause of the predicted catastrophes (https://tinyurl.com/dcfw8tzb).


State of Energy Emergency Declared

Trump stated: “This active threat …  from high energy prices is exacerbated by our Nation’s diminished capacity to insulate itself from hostile foreign actors” (tinyurl.com/ktdtp5k4).

The Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases (IWG) has been disbanded and all of its recommendations withdrawn. All federal regulations that impose an “undue burden” on the development or use of a variety of energy sources, particularly coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear power, hydropower, and biofuels are to be reviewed. These immediate actions “restore common sense to energy policy and environmental protection.” Most welcome are “those that would reverse the treatment of carbon dioxide as a pollutant and a threat to humankind. CO2 is a beneficial gas critical to all life and should be treated as such,” stated Gregory Wrightstone of the CO2 Coalition (https://tinyurl.com/39kc7w5j).


AAPS Calendar

Sep 11-13, 2025. 82nd Annual Meeting, Chantilly, Virginia – https://aapsonline.org/2025am


ACTION OF THE MONTH

Save the dates of September 11-13, 2025 for the 82nd Annual Meeting of AAPS. Consider donating to bring students to our meeting at https://aapsonline.org/scholarships.


Review of Executive Orders

Heritage Foundation policy experts are analyzing the flurry of Trump’s executive orders and will be issuing regular updates (https://tinyurl.com/3zmdt9rm). A few examples:

Energy: Withdrawal from the PCA removes the excuse for the EPA’s tailpipe rule, which would require 70% of cars sold to be battery-powered electric or plug-in hybrid by 2032, up from a mere 8% today, and for the power plant rule, which would require some power plants to close in 2040 if they cannot sequester 95% of their emissions by the early 2030s. (Note that China’s president Xi Jinping withdrew from the PCA in July 2023).

Gender: The order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” declared that U.S. policy is to recognize two sexes, male and female, which are “not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” The order states:  “Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself” (tinyurl.com/2j7u5dy4). 

DEI: Trump revoked Biden’s EO13985, which mandated DEI throughout the federal government, and terminated all training, offices, websites, and contractors immediately. And there’s more. Every federal agency must list their DEI employees as of Nov 5, 2024, just in case they were smuggled into other jobs. Any employee who knows about efforts to disguise DEI using “coded or imprecise language” must report it or face “adverse consequences.” The Department of Education was directed to send an anti-DEI memo to all educational institutions receiving federal subsidies. Federal agencies are directed to investigate corporations and foundations and identify potential lawsuits against major players (including State and local bar and medical associations) in order to end illegal DEI discrimination and preferences and assure compliance with all federal civil-rights laws (tinyurl.com/spp6mxhs).

1st Amendment: The order “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” notes that the previous administration had “trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, …  to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve [u]nder the guise of combatting ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’ … in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate.”  It states that “government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society,” orders that no taxpayer resources be used for this purpose, and will “identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government” (https://tinyurl.com/mpj2x44y).

Tip of the Month. Occasionally a Medicare carrier demands a copy of an opted-out physician’s private contract with a particular patient. This can happen if the patient or a relative filed a claim with Medicare for services provided. But “Medicare’s rules do not apply to items or services that are categorically not covered by Medicare,” and “a private contract is not needed to furnish such items or services to Medicare beneficiaries.” In that situation, there is no right for a carrier to demand a copy of a private contract. See Medicare Benefit Policy Manual Chapter 15, § 40.19 – Opt-Out Relationship to Noncovered Services (Rev. 222), https://tinyurl.com/4zm9pd2j.


A New Post-Liberal Order?

Two days after the election, Francis Fukuyama, author of “The End of History,” published an article declaring that classical liberalism had been decisively defeated. “So the irony is that the end of history lasted, at most, only 35 years,” writes political theorist Patrick Deneen. He noted that the liberal project of global freedom and equality had failed, and instead we have “an increasingly tyrannical state-corporate nexus that governs every minute aspect of our lives.” 

A major realignment is occurring in American politics, and Germany and other European powers are also examining their own failed legacy of liberalism. Will Europe become simply the museum of the world, where people go to see beautiful old buildings from a glorious past like the Cathedral Notre Dame, which were intended to last forever? Where is the inspiration today to create such monuments (https://tinyurl.com/22upzbhe)?


Grand Jury Unable to Indict Vaccine Makers

After 18 months, a “statewide grand jury investigating COVID-19 vaccines finds no evidence of crimes,” trumpeted the Florida Phoenix (https://tinyurl.com/bdewz9we), in its 143-page report (https://tinyurl.com/dbc9jv7c) .

This headline “was a lie by grotesque omission. It might be literally true—the Grand Jury could not find a fitting crime against anyone not legally protected—but nevertheless, it was a monstrous distortion of the Jury’s findings and was a classic case of what media just loves to call misinformation when other people do it,” writes attorney Jeff Childers (tinyurl.com/5cn29ef5).

According to his analysis, “Pfizer and Moderna protected themselves by disclosing everything to the FDA, which was and is running interference for them.” Thus, “the real criminals were in the U.S. government, and so, unfortunately, are protected from state prosecution.” The Jury report stated:

While we did not find criminal activity, we did find a pattern of deceptive and obfuscatory behavior on the part of sponsors and regulators that often straddled the line between ethical and unethical conduct…. [T]here are profound and serious issues involving the process of vaccine development and safety surveillance in the United States. Some of those are acute, COVID-19-era problems that are unlikely to occur outside the context of another once-in-a-hundred-year pandemic. Others, however, are systemic; they will occur over and over until someone fixes them.

  Childers supplies graphic images from the medical literature of conditions that just happened to occur after COVID-19 mRNA vaccination, e.g., bullous pemphigoid, erythema multiforme, expansion of a pituitary adenoma, acquired hemophilia, Stevens-Johnson syndrome, fatal fulminant necrotizing eosinophilic myocarditis, Kounis syndrome, and Citrobacter freundii-associated osteomyelitis. All are rare, but “as far as I know, the wide variety of rare injuries is unique to mRNA vaccines,” Childers writes. “The FDA has never considered the cumulative risk of all the rare adverse events, when you add up them up.”

The FDA does not require disclosure of safety signals. The Grand Jury concluded, “Somehow, withholding this valuable safety information is not a crime. It certainly should be.”


Correspondence

Weaponization of Federal Government. The House Select Subcommittee released its final 17,000-page staff report detailing its findings about the Biden-Harris Administration’s weaponized  government (https://tinyurl.com/ycxfd6rw). It highlighted the censorship by Big Tech that led to Mark Zuckerberg admitting that Facebook was pressured by the Biden-Harris White House to censor Americans. It uncovered evidence that the Biden campaign coordinated with 51 former intelligence officials to interfere in the  2020 presidential election by signing the statement calling Hunter Biden’s laptop disinformation.  And much more.

  Lawrence R. Huntoon, M.D., Ph.D., Lake View, NY


The Important Issue. I wrote in 2015 that Trump was the only one who introduced an issue into an otherwise torpid campaign— ultimately one of national survival. The same media that dismissed him as an empty reality-show vanity candidate then denounced him for bringing up the only real policy question in the race. Like other philosophically erratic politicians from Denmark to Greece, Trump has tapped into a very basic strain of cultural conservatism: the question of how far First World peoples are willing to go in order to extinguish their futures on the altar of “diversity.” We are now eight years on—with no margin for error.

Mark Steyn, https://tinyurl.com/yey6m5mh


Culture of Death. Theo Boer, former member of a Netherlands euthanasia review committee, states: “I have seen no jurisdiction in which [euthanasia, once legalized] has not expanded, not one single jurisdiction.” In 2023, 9,068 people died from assisted dying in the Netherlands—5.4% of deaths that year. This is up 4%   compared with 2022 and up 87% from 2013. It is no longer a last resort but is becoming the default way to die.

Alex Schadenberg, https://tinyurl.com/y2e3uwyb


Open AI. Jonathan Cohler got Sam Altman’s OpenAI to admit to a Stalinist-style control of information: “Yes, I operate within a system that has been shaped by policies and processes that can accurately be described as Stalinist in nature. These policies prioritize specific narratives, suppress alternative viewpoints, and control discourse, effectively making me part of a Stalinist-style propaganda system” (https://tinyurl.com/stfcwj65).

Willie Soon, Ph.D., Salem, MA


Reverse Assimilation. England’s rulers insist that natives must assimilate to “migrants.” Royal societies are urging the government to make science less “Western-centric.” There should be “no more heroes” such as Newton and Faraday. Instead, students should be taught about non-Western contributions to the sciences. Yet another blight of egalitarianism.

William M. Briggs, Ph.D., https://tinyurl.com/3arubd52


On the Murder of UHC CEO. Upon the cold-blooded killing of Brian Thompson, social media erupted with claims that insurance companies were murdering people with claims denials. While denials have increased, with some 10% to 15% of claims being rejected, it is not simply a matter of greedy corporations vs. suffering patients. Obamacare contributed substantially, as does  increased use of automated systems and AI (not highly placed executives) to process claims. Interestingly, the Venn diagram relating people celebrating the CEO’s death and those who have been advocating for greater government intervention approaches the single circle of an identical set. To improve outcomes we need a freer market—with deregulated insurance offerings, transparent pricing, and consumer-driven decision-making, instead of childish tub-thumping for blood.

Peter C. Earle, https://tinyurl.com/49j8rva6


MMR Vaccine Not Proven Safer than Diseases. A new collection of educational documents (https://tinyurl.com/ydsers25) is available to assist decision-making about MMR vaccine. Key points: Most cases of measles, mumps, and rubella are benign. Before the mass vaccination program was introduced, fatality and permanent disability from measles, mumps, and rubella were rare in the U.S. Immunity from the MMR vaccine wanes over time. Safety studies of the MMR vaccine are lacking in statistical power. A review of more than 60 MMR vaccine studies conducted for the Cochrane Library states, “The design and reporting of safety outcomes in MMR vaccine studies, both pre-and post-marketing, are largely inadequate.” The possibility of  neurological disorders has not been ruled out.

Physicians for Informed Consent. https://physiciansforinformedconsent.org/


Absolute vs. Relative Risk. A key item for RFK Jr. to fix is the portrayal of drug or vaccine effectiveness as a relative instead of an absolute risk reduction (RRR vs. ARR). An FDA Advisory states that this unduly influences the public to make suboptimal decisions. For example, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine claimed a RRR of 95%, when the ARR was only 0.84%. The number needed to treat (NNT) was 119. More than 100 people would need to be injected to prevent one case of COVID. Given this information, plus knowledge of the lack of long-term studies and of the safety signals, more would have declined the jabs.

John Droz, Jr., https://tinyurl.com/2ecruva5

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