The WashingtonPost reveals secretive language in the healthcare bill that even many top-tier Administration officials and members of Congress did not know about:
The words were tucked deep into the sprawling text of President Obama’s signature health-care overhaul. Under the headline “Protection of Second Amendment Gun Rights” was a brief provision restricting the ability of doctors to gather data about their patients’ gun use — a largely overlooked but significant challenge to a movement in American medicine to treat firearms as a matter of public health...physician groups and researchers see the provision as part of a decades-long strategy by the gun lobby to choke off federal support for studies of firearms violence.
...Physician groups and public health advocates say the cumulative effect of these restrictions undercuts the ability of the White House and lawmakers to make the case for new laws, such as an assault-weapons ban, in the face of opponents who argue that there’s no evidence such measures are effective. Advocates for regulating guns lament that reliable statistics are limited in part because physicians and health researchers who could track these patterns are being inhibited.
Gee, will you look at that? The NRA is restricting research on gun violence and then claiming that there is no evidence that restricting guns reduces gun violence! That's convenient. I wonder why the NRA wants to do this? Could it be that they are afraid that the research would have a negative impact on their profit margin?
I mean if you really believe that guns don't cause violence, then let's research the facts, and then debate them afterwards. If you are stymieing facts, it means that you don't care about the truth, even if that truth saves the lives of thousands of gun victims. It means you don't care about lives. You care about money. And that is beyond despicable.
Here is the NRA's excuse:
NRA officials say they requested the provision out of concern that insurance companies could use such data to raise premiums on gun owners. The measure’s supporters in the Senate say they did not intend to interfere with the work of doctors or researchers.
But that excuse is pathetic, since this has been ongoing for a while:
The research restrictions began in the 1990s, when the NRA urged Congress to cut funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s division that studied gun violence. In 1996, Congress sharply limited the agency’s ability to fund that type of research.
More limits came last year in a spending bill setting restrictions on the National Institutes of Health after complaints from gun rights advocates about an NIH-backed study drawing links between alcoholism and gun violence. The provision, added by Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.), prohibits the NIH from spending money to “advocate or promote gun control” — language that researchers say does not explicitly forbid studies but sends a signal to federal research agencies to steer clear of the topic.
The NRA push has extended into state capitals as well, with Florida lawmakers last year crafting a plan to impose jail time on doctors for inquiring about their patients’ gun ownership. Gov. Rick Scott (R) signed a scaled-back version of the proposal requiring health-care workers to “refrain” from asking patients about their ownership or possession of firearms unless the providers believe “in good faith” that such information would be relevant. A federal judge this year declared the law unconstitutional and blocked its enforcement, but the ruling was appealed by the state and is under review.
The NRA is specifically targeting research that they don't like the results of. This has nothing to do with premiums and insurance companies. That's just a silly excuse they came up with, now that their hand is caught in the cookie jar. And I can't repeat often enough how revolting that is.
Now, I am not writing this to blame the administration, I believe that there were several bitter pills we needed to swallow to get a good bill passed, and then address the flaws later.
As Senator Franken, whom I respect deeply, said of this issue:
he was aware of the late addition and found it “objectionable.” But, he said, “it’s helpful to remember that we were in the position of having to get 60 votes from 60 senators. And, as a result, some things ended up in the bill for reasons I was not privy to and were certainly not to my liking.”
So the provision by the NRA was a late addition, only "several weeks" before the bill passed, and Franken supported it reluctantly for the sake of the overall bill. I'm willing to let that go, but I can't let go the inhumanity of the people who pushed for the provision.
Well, now is the time to address this particular flaw. Doctors are fighting back hard:
"This illustrates the fact that the NRA has insinuated themselves into the small crevices of anything they can to do anything in their power to prohibit sensible gun-safety measures,” said Denise Dowd, an emergency-care physician at a Kansas City, Mo., children’s hospital and an adviser on firearms issues to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Dowd called the provision in the health-care bill “pretty outrageous,” saying it risked creating a sense among doctors that “this is dangerous information to collect.”
“We ask our patients about many things, not because we’re anti-gun but because we have an obligation and an ethical duty to keep the kids safe,” she said
The last statement in particular, really highlights the bitter irony when conservatives argue that the Government should not get in between the doctor and the patients. And then they support provisions that do exactly that. These people have no principles.
More action by the experts:
The pediatricians group last week submitted a strongly worded letter to the Obama administration saying that pediatric advocates “vehemently reject” the gun provision in the health-care law. The group notes that the provision runs counter to guidelines included in other sections of the legislation that ask family doctors and pediatricians to inquire about the presence of guns in patients’ homes, along with other potential dangers, such as mold, lead, cigarette smoke and a lack of smoke detectors.
...“Gun use and gun violence is a public health issue, and it should not be out of bounds to ask questions about it,” said David Satcher, a surgeon general under President Bill Clinton, who headed the CDC in the 1990s, when the NRA began to challenge gun research. “Privacy needs to be protected, but it’s important that this kind of data be gathered.”
...“It’s a problem when you don’t have access to a high-quality stream of robust, effective research,” said Arthur L. Kellermann, an emergency-room doctor and public health advocate who published studies in the 1980s that found elevated risks of death or injury associated with gun ownership. “And it’s an even bigger problem when you gag physicians in order to keep them from talking to their patients.”
But the best part is the last- real research that shows the futility of owning a gun for self-defense:
From 1986 to 1996, the CDC sponsored peer-reviewed research into the underlying causes of gun violence. Among the findings: People who kept guns in their homes for self-defense did not gain protection. Instead, according to research published in the New England Journal of Medicine, residents in homes with a gun faced a 2.7-fold greater risk of homicide and a 4.8-fold greater risk of suicide compared with those in similar homes without guns.
...Lobbyists for the gun industry worked with Rep. Jay Dickey (R-Ark.) to redirect $2.6 million in CDC funds that had been designated for research into firearms safety. The move, which Dickey would later come to regret, unnerved scientists at the CDC and across the country.
And there it is: the reason they want to stop gun violence research