Government imbecility.

• Author: Singleton, Marilyn M.
• Position: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act - HEALTH BEAT

NOT SURPRISINGLY, 56% of Americans think it is not the government's responsibility to provide a health care system. Waivers, favors, off-the-cuff rule changes, and the bungled launch of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act website validate that distrust. Bureaucratic incompetence and cronyism are not the only reasons we should be wary of government involvement in our medical care.

The Federal government has a checkered (at best) history when it comes to medical judgments. We now cringe at the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the 1927 case, Buck v. Bell, upholding Virginia's sterilization law for the institutionalized "feebleminded." Declared Holmes: "[Carrie Bell's] welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. ... Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Bell's mother, in fact, was a prostitute, but not feeble-minded. After Bell's release, she maintained a job as a domestic worker and became an avid reader. Her "feeble-minded" daughter was on her school's honor roll.

Let us also recall the appalling Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932-72). The Public Health Service used 400 mainly poor, illiterate black sharecroppers with syphilis as lab animals.

They were told they had "bad blood," but not that they actually were suffering from a serious but treatable disease. All subjects succumbed to untreated syphilis so our government could track the natural progression of the disease.

In 1951, the Navy sprayed a presumably harmless bacterium, Serratia marcescens, over San Francisco, Calif., in a biological warfare test. Numerous residents contracted pneumonia-like illnesses resulting in at least one death. The experiments came to light in the 1977 Senate hearings on Health and Scientific Research. Some 239 populated areas, including Minneapolis, Minn.; St. Louis, Mo.; Washington D.C.'s National Airport; and New York's subway system had been contaminated from 1949-69 before Pres. Richard Nixon terminated the program.

In 1989, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-sponsored study tested an experimental measles vaccine on 1,500 six-month-old black and Hispanic babies in Los Angeles, Calif. The CDC admitted in 1996 that parents never were informed that the vaccine was experimental.

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