Volume 82, no. 7 July 2026
As we celebrate the 250th anniversary (semiquincentennial) of American independence, there is a high level of ambivalence or even hostility toward the idea of Americanism.
One of its most enthusiastic promoters was the late Nino Camardese, M.D., (1926-2013), who served as AAPS president in 1993. Nino came to America from Mussolini’s Italy at age 13 and constantly expressed gratitude for the blessings of liberty. He founded the Americanism Foundation and taught principles of individual rights and responsibilities through his “Call the Doctor” radio show, writings, and frequent meetings. He tirelessly reminded us that “there is no right way to do the wrong thing,” and that “it is never too late to do the right thing.” Americanism in his view is about doing our utmost to “preserve, protect, and pass on our great heritage of freedom under our limited constitutional government to future generations” (tinyurl.com/yc3nubvu).
Americanism has been denounced as heresy by the Catholic church, including Popes Leo XIII and Leo XIV, if taken to mean adapting Catholic doctrine to American culture, emphasizing active virtues, individualism, and personal conscience. Leo XIV admonishes us to be wary of a theory of markets that shuns regulation and redistribution instead of one that recognizes the need for oversight and correction (https://tinyurl.com/nhzxswa2).
On the other hand, Bishop Fulton Sheen (1895-1979) argued that “Americanism, as understood by our Founding Fathers, is the political expression of the Catholic doctrine concerning man.” It rested upon what Ronald Reagan eventually called the “three-legged stool”—robust anti-communist defense, economic freedom, and traditional morality or self-governance. Sheen stated that the loss of God and religion in America was, in fact, the same phenomenon as the loss of patriotism and love of neighbor.
Economically, he wrote, Americanism champions a strong economic power that is the sum of discrete individuals freely exerting their right to private property and enjoying the fruits of their own labor, while simultaneously honoring the debt each owes to his nation for securing his God-given freedom.
Americanism recognizes the inalienable rights of the human person, an affirmation of the inherent dignity and worth of man. “Each person has a value because God made him, not because the State recognizes him.” Sheen warns that on the day we adopt the already widespread notion “that right and justice depend on convention and the spirit of the times, we shall write the death warrant of our independence” (https://tinyurl.com/2yx545f3).
Sheen made the case that Americanism was a better path than “the chaotic soup of failed Western ideas in philosophy, sociology, and economics espoused by Karl Marx, “the folly and half-baked nature of all the political and theological heresies of his time.”
Anti-Americanism
The Bicentennial, a mere 50 years ago, was a shared national celebration—Vietnam, Watergate, inflation, and other crises of the 1970s notwithstanding. The American story was still worth knowing and passing on. “Today, that shared stage has vanished—worse, its disappearance has arguably midwifed a political culture of perpetual dissatisfaction,” writes Robert Pondiscio (Commentary, May 2026, tinyurl.com/2f3cpvh5). We need “institutions that teach ideals before indictments” and “understand that attachment is the prerequisite, not the antithesis, of an honest reckoning.”
In 2001, a Gallup poll showed that 87% of Americans said they were “very” or “extremely” proud to be Americans, and there was only a three percentage point difference between Democrats and Republicans. Rates really began to fall in 2017, when they were about 75%, and in 2025 that number hit just 58%, with a wide partisan gap. The latest poll showed that 92% of Republicans call themselves very or extremely proud to be an American, versus just 36% of Democrats. Variation over time suggests that, for many, their affection is contingent rather than essential, depending on who happens to be in the White House.
Some Democrats in power are openly hostile. Bernie Sanders alleges that our economy is “rigged,” Ilhan Omar accuses the U.S. of “unthinkable atrocities,” and Hakeem Jeffries asserts that “systemic racism has been in the soil of America for over 400 years” (https://tinyurl.com/8ednsypk).
Was America “conceived in liberty,” the title of Murray Rothbard’s 5-volume series on the American War of Independence, as Abraham Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address? Or was it conceived in bondage and dedicated to inequality, as portrayed by writers at the New York Times, who launched the 1619 Project in August 2019? This Project asserted that America was founded when the first slave ship docked in Jamestown, Va. It tries to place the origins of capitalism in the system of plantation slavery. It “completely inverts the intellectual history of where capitalism comes from,” writes Phillip Magness. Free-market capitalists throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, including Adam Smith, were outspoken abolitionists. And most slavery advocates considered themselves anti-capitalists (https://tinyurl.com/2s3dj7th).
At the Bicentennial, our nation was distinguished from the politics of the moment; there was patriotism without blindness, and critique without contempt, writes Pondiscio. Love of country enables reform—and survival.
Enemies target memory, to make the people hate their fathers, mock their inheritance, despise their country, and doubt its civilization. A people ashamed of its own story will surrender before the first chain is locked around it. (https://tinyurl.com/4ckmhj6n).
Historical Notes
The “shot heard round the world” really was; some suggest that it started a world war.
Inspired by the American cause, the 19-year-old Marquis de Lafayette, one of the richest young aristocrats in France, risked everything to fight for it. Benjamin Franklin, America’s chief diplomat in France from 1776 to 1785, secured vital military, financial, and diplomatic support. France and Spain laid siege to Gibraltar for 4 years, pinning down British ships and troops. Spain never signed an alliance with Americans, but Britain could never use the south as a back door because Bernardo de Gálvez, the young Spanish governor of Louisiana, locked down the Mississippi; funneled guns, money, and supplies to the Americans; took British forts at Baton Rouge, Natchez, and Mobile; and stormed Pensacola in 1781. Galveston, Texas, is named for him (https://tinyurl.com/3zx36jwa).
Cuban officials, particularly Francisco de Saavedra, helped secure vital funds from Havana (tinyurl.com/mryacjax).
Not all Europeans were supportive. Washington had to fight Hessian mercenaries, but Prussian army officer Baron von Steuben reformed the Continental Army into a disciplined and professional fighting force.
Others who saw a chance to challenge the biggest empire on earth included Indian freedom fighters like Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan, his son and successor. The last battle of the American Revolutionary War took place as British and French naval forces met at Cuddalore on the Bay of Bengal off the coast of modern-day India (https://tinyurl.com/mr3cfj5x).
American colonists lit the torch of freedom for the world.
Flashback: The Dogma of Our Times
In a Freeman Classic (June 1956), Frank Chodorov wonders “what history will think of our times.” Consider how much things haven’t changed 70 years on (https://tinyurl.com/3xmew5ce).
It’s a good guess that history will select collectivism as the identifying characteristic of the 20th century. Society is seen as a transcendent entity, greater than the sum of its parts. The individual is necessary only as a replaceable part of a machine.
This idea has insinuated itself into education, jurisprudence, sociology, and economics. And philosophy, or what goes by that name, has made truth itself an attribute of Society.
The State puts the myth to work. The State is not a modern invention, but in times past one hardly thought of its interventions as the warp and woof of life. The integration has gone so far that we can say “we owe it to ourselves” or “we are the government.”
Our Founders feared that the government would become a threat to our freedom; now freedom is held as a gift from government. Statism is a form of paganism—worship of something made by man, based on pure dogma. For the remnant who believe that only man is made in the image of God, the myth of collectivism must fade in the light of liberty.
“[C]ollectivism moralizes dependency and pathologizes independence. The individual becomes selfish, antisocial, disruptive, anything except sovereign…. If America forgets that it was built for individuals, not managed populations, it will become just another place people dream of leaving.”
Dan Burmawy, https://tinyurl.com/27shxkb3
Nominating Committee Report
The following slate will be presented at the annual meeting: President-elect: Janis Chester, M.D., Dover, DE
Secretary: Lawrence Huntoon, M.D., Ph.D., Eden, NY
Treasurer: Tamzin Rosenwasser, M.D., Venice, FL
Board of Directors: Michael Ciampi, M.D., South Portland, ME; Erika LeBaron, D.O., Manassas, VA; Walter Lesley, M.D., Temple, TX; Gil Robinson, M.D., San Antonio, TX.
The Lifespan of Empires and of Liberalism
In his 1976 book The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival, (http://tinyurl.com/4n3tx77h), John Glubb writes that the final stage is always characterized by an influx of foreigners, internal division, materialism, a welfare state, weakening religion, and a defensive mindset. The stages are: pioneers, conquests, commerce, affluence, intellect, and decadence. The expected lifespan is around 250 years, and to support this, he cites Assyria, Persia, Greece, the Roman Republic, Romanov Russia, mad Britain. Others disagree with some of his numbers and cite others, such as the Republic of Venice (690 years), Byzantium (1,000 years), the Han Dynasty (400 years), and the Ottoman Empire (623 years).
Woodrow Wilson said the Great War would “make the world safe for democracy.” After the war destroyed the old world order, liberal democracies were created to replace it—a New World Order. Most of them collapsed within a decade. Germany’s lasted 14 years in the Weimar Republic. Portugal’s young democracy was ended by a coup in 1926. Sweden had ten governments between 1920 and 1932. Norway’s largest party, the Labour Party, joined the Soviet Comintern for four years (1919-23), and in Denmark the King dissolved the leftwing government in 1920. Turkey’s new republic was a one-party state. Liberal democracy lasted for one year in Greece, eight years in Albania, and three years in Bulgaria. Britain had no election for ten years between 1935 and 1945. Liberal democracy is “the god that failed twice,” writes Frank Wright (https://tinyurl.com/y73cp74b).
What shall America learn from this history?
The top-down revolutionary destruction of the old order called liberalization ushered in a massive and continued increase in the intrusion of the State into everyday life. Before World War I, an Englishman would see nothing of the State beyond his visit to the Post Office. After liberal democracy came the education, health, and legal bureaucracies that now govern the details of our procession from birth to death.
The total propaganda system of liberal democracy is so successful that it is invisible because it is everywhere. But now Reality is radicalizing people against the system that “liberated” us into a nihilistic void (ibid.).
AAPS Calendar
Sep 24-26, 2026. 83rd Annual Meeting, Alpharetta, GA – https://aapsonline.org/2026am
Pharmacies Must Fire Insurers
Last week a supermarket pharmacy chain—Ahold Delhaize, the parent of Giant, Stop & Shop, Hannaford, and Food Lion—agreed to pay $40 million to settle False Claims Act allegations (https://tinyurl.com/bdsut7bp). The charge: they reported inflated “usual and customary” prices to Medicare Part D, Medicaid, and TRICARE, and in doing so made the government overpay on prescription after prescription.
“U&C” is insurance jargon for the normal, everyday cash price—what a walk-in pays with no card, no plan, no middleman. If a pharmacy accepts insurance, that price must be high. It’s not greed. It’s survival. Insurers reimburse pharmacies at the lower of their U&C or their contract rate. So the instant one posts honest, low, transparent prices, it has capped its own ceiling. Every claim defaults to its low number. Meanwhile the reimbursement model itself is garbage: pharmacies eat zero-dollar and below-cost reimbursements every single day. The only way they stay open is the occasional script that pays well enough to cover the pile of losses. Listing real prices kills the high payers—but the pharmacies are still contractually bound to absorb the losses. So transparency, under an insurance contract, means they only take losses.
Discount cards are a separate program—a workaround. The catch is they charge the pharmacy fees that wipe out most of whatever profit was left. Ahold did exactly what Walgreens and Kroger tried: list a high U&C for insurance, then run a separate “prescription savings program” with the real, lower prices on the side. DOJ’s position is that the savings-program price was the U&C, and burying it is fraud. Walgreens paid $100 million. Kroger settled for $17 million.
Ahold was a whistleblower case. A single pharmacist who filed under the False Claims Act’s qui tam provision walked away with $6,083,587. If you work at Amazon Pharmacy, you may want to take a hard look at that U&C.
We fired insurance. We don’t accept it. We aren’t bound by anyone’s contract rate, we don’t report a U&C ceiling to a pharmacy benefits manager (PBM), and we don’t bleed our prices through discount-card fees. It’s the only honest way left to price a prescription lower than the ridiculous insurance prices.
Forest Park Pharmacy, https://tinyurl.com/ykaykzxn
Dr. Morgan Wins on Appeal
When Dr. Courtney Morgan opened an affordable walk-in clinic in Victoria, Texas, he was victimized by an armed surprise search of his clinic based on an administrative subpoena, without a real search warrant, by the Texas Medical Board and a law enforcement officer. Dr. Morgan sued in federal court.
Such a warrantless raid is now recognized to be a Fourth Amendment violation, but the court’s issue in awarding damages is whether it was clearly recognized at the time the raid was conducted, such that the officials should have known. The defendants claim qualified immunity.
The district court granted summary judgment to the government officials, and on appeal the case went up to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. A lively oral argument was held on March 31, and our General Counsel Andrew Schlafly argued this case for the physician.
Appeals are not easy to win, particularly against the government, but the Fifth Circuit rendered a spectacular victory to the physician (https://tinyurl.com/ypeu3rbp). It held it was clearly established law at the time that an “administrative search cannot be pretextual.” The Court found a disputed issue of material fact as to whether the search was pretextual in order for the law enforcement officer to obtain evidence for charging the physician criminally. The physician was indeed subsequently subjected to criminal charges, which were fully dismissed. The Court held that Dr. Morgan is entitled to a jury trial against the law enforcement officer to prove that the search was pretextual, and to recover the damages he suffered from it.
Medicare/Medicaid Fraud
In the 2026 National Health Care Fraud Takedown, the U.S. Department of Justice has charged 455 people for allegedly billing $6.5 billion in false claims. In an Arizona case, a corporate executive allegedly took $1 billion in taxpayer funds after billing for wound grafts, charging more than $1 million per patient. In Virginia, the co-owner of a mental health company was charged with a $49 million Medicaid fraud scheme that targeted the homeless “by offering them illegal bribes in the form of hotel stays in exchange for using their Medicaid numbers to bill for crisis stabilization services that they did not need or receive.” A California hospice owner allegedly bought dead Medicare beneficiaries’ information from a funeral home employee and billed for hospice services not received.
CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz says it is necessary to prosecute those who “steal from American patients,” and CMS will start “deploying advanced data analytics to expose fraud networks [and] freeze suspicious payments” (tinyurl.com/2xhzzyyz).
Who are the victims of the theft, and who is the initial perpetrator? All American workers have Medicare taxes deducted from their earnings on the false promise that they are buying insurance for their old age (see AAPS News, June 2011). Most are dependent on this and other entitlements that have unfunded liabilities of some $75 trillion—not mere billions.
At 250, Consider Amendment of All Amendments
Almost from its inception, America has drifted from its foundational ideal of individual inalienable rights to one increasingly ruled by the idea that the alleged rights of collectives or groups—such as rights to healthcare, housing, education, etc.—are allowed to violate individual rights in the process of being enforced. How about a singular, clarifying, constitutional corrective to phase out the welfare state, say over 25 years. Impossible? Or necessary, if America is to survive (https://tinyurl.com/mr3uvnss)?
Tip of the Month. An alarming decline in access to rural care provides opportunities for independent practice there. More than 100 rural hospitals have closed in the last decade nationwide, and another 700 are in financial jeopardy. In Pennsylvania alone, 18 rural hospitals are at risk of closure, and 6 rural hospitals have closed in the past five years. Meanwhile, the number of independent physicians in rural areas dropped by 43% between 2019 and 2024. This is despite the fact that 20% of Americans—a total of 66 million people—live in rural America. Only 9% of physicians currently practice there, and more are needed.
Correspondence
AMA Talking Points. The AMA posted: “With the increase in conflicting information about vaccines, some patients may be confused about how to keep their families and themselves healthy.” It offers colorful guidance on how to talk to patients about vaccines (https://tinyurl.com/u3r9f27p). It claims that “vaccines are among the most closely monitored medical products in the world, used safely for more than 200 years. Before any vaccine is approved, it goes through years of testing [obviously untrue for COVID-19]. And scientists and doctors monitor them to make sure they stay safe and effective.” Is this misinformation?
Lawrence R. Huntoon, M.D., Ph.D., Eden, N.Y.
Don’t Follow This Road. I’m writing from France, from inside the wreckage, watching the most talented continent in human history vote, year after year, for its own anesthesia. America—you are the control group. You’re the thing the rest of us point to when we need to remember what’s still possible. Do not become us. For God’s sake. If America picks the European path, the engine of human progress switches off—not in a century, in a few years. Socialism doesn’t merely slow you down. It rots everything it touches. It rots the economy. It rots incentives. It rots the culture. It rots the spirit.
Brivael le Pogam, https://tinyurl.com/26nt5cj2
Socialism Is the First Phase of Communism. It is critical for the public (especially the younger generations) to learn the extensive and long-documented historical facts exposed in The Soviet Story (https://tinyurl.com/k6w3sux8). The film features interviews with Western and Russian historians, Russian writer Viktor Suvorov, Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, members of the European Parliament, and participants as well as survivors of the rampaging Soviet terror machine. “Only by understanding the genocides of the past can we hope to prevent others from occurring in our lifetime.” The revolution likely kills the most capable 10% of the population immediately. You won’t want your children to view the horrific footage of the mass casualties.
Dianne N. Irving, Ph.D.
The Egalitarian Trap. Egalitarianism (the lie of the socialists) is a poisonous ideological deception that works to promote the vicious rather than the virtuous. In “Screwtape Proposes a Toast” by C.S. Lewis, the Devil laments the increasing scarcity of “tasty” personages such as Hitler, but notes that the quantity of damned souls was increasing. “Every dictator or even demagogue— almost every film star or crooner—can now draw tens of thousands of human sheep with him.” The principle by which demons lead is the falsehood that all men are equal. The demons are to work towards an education system where “dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be ‘undemocratic’…. A boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval’s attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON THE MAT.”
Lewis warned that a nation whose children are raised to be subliterate will ultimately fall. Say goodbye to Lincoln’s “last, best hope of earth.” Individualism and liberty itself are anathema to the demons (https://tinyurl.com/dpbn4vv2).
John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D., Brownwood, TX
Revolution against Reality. Our morally degenerate society, which worships the false god of Equality, is ruled by imposters, as in the play The Balcony by Jean Genet. But the State we are in is not just a performance. It is one that is served by the making of belief, and this involves the subtraction of the memory of what was. When there is no past but the idea of it presented by the present, the play becomes reality, the spectacle all there is.
At this point, the forced forgetting is becoming obvious. The police do not catch criminals, the army does not defend the borders, and the church does not teach the religion of Christ but that of the so-called Liberal State. Reality is becoming so obvious that attempts to contain it by penalties and propaganda are insufficient. This means that a power secured by the policing and production of mass belief is in its terminal crisis. The war on reality is not yet over, but it has certainly been lost. We can all see who is now standing on the balcony of the bordello, and we shall no longer accept the rule of vile imposters in costume, reading out a script before a backdrop of obscene corruption.
Frank Wright, https://tinyurl.com/bdb7j3kf
The Key to Rights. A single word separates freedom from exploitation: persons. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) by Eleanor Roosevelt states: “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.” Article 17 provides that “everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others” and that “no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.” This was the most contentious provision. Property was the very instrument through which personhood had been denied: to make people ownable, the law first had to place them outside the class of those entitled to own. In these days of digital identity, biometric surveillance, biopiracy, and programmable currency, the UDHR concept of personhood is essential for preserving individual sovereignty.
Robert W. Malone, M.D., https://tinyurl.com/j4e4rc7m
