[If you do not vote in Missouri, then suggest this legislation to your own state legislators.]
The Missouri Health Care Freedom Amendment, Proposition C will appear on the August 3, 2010 statewide ballot in Missouri as a legislatively-referred amendment. The proposed measure aims to block the federal government from requiring people to buy health insurance and bans punishment for those without health insurance. [Read the full text of the amendment here.]
We urge all Missouri citizens to vote as their civic duty. Here is some additional information about this amendment.
The act prohibits any federal law from interfering with an individual’s health care freedom. If approved by Missouri voters, no federal law could force a patient, employer, or health care provider to participate in any government or privately run health care system.
The ballot will say, “Shall the Missouri Statutes be amended to: – Deny the government authority to penalize citizens for refusing to purchase private health insurance or infringe upon the right to offer or accept direct payment for lawful healthcare services? – Modify laws regarding the liquidation of certain domestic insurance companies?.”
As Senator Jane Cunningham (R-Chesterfield), the bill’s sponsor, says, “This legislation simply protects the rights of Missourians to choose their own health care products and services without fear of facing fines or imprisonment. It doesn’t reject any federal health care option, nor take away an individual’s choice to participate in the federal health care plan. The measure expands options, not limits them.”
We think voting for this is a good idea because the recently passed federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is laden with language and funding for the psycho/pharmaceutical industry, which has a vested interest in seeing every man, woman and child in America labeled with some mental disorder and prescribed harmful psychiatric drugs.
Already, the mental health industry defrauds the government up to $40 billion per year. If we divide that $40 billion by the roughly 300 million citizens in the U.S., we are, each and every person in America, already paying over $100 per year more than we should for health care. This new federal health care law gives the mental health industry more patients and more funds, inevitably leading to more fraud.
For some time there has been growing concern that the medicalization of behavior is a principal driver of increased health care costs in the mental health care industry. The medicalization of unhappiness, for example, is a driver for the prescription of harmful and addictive antidepressant drugs. Estimated direct costs associated with various medicalized conditions (including ADHD, sadness, anxiety and behavioral disorders) in the U.S. were approximately $77 billion in 2005.
This act will help prevent Missourians from being forced to suffer fraudulent and abusive psychiatric treatment and drugs mandated by the federal government.