Vin Suprynowicz

On June 3, the little twice-a-week “Pahrump Valley Times” re-ran an article from its parent publication, the daily Las Vegas Adelson-Journal, reporting the health of older folks in Nevada is about as bad as it can get.

On June 10, I sent in a somewhat lengthy letter-to-the-editor in response. The editor replied, asking if I’d be willing to change my references to “Health Nazis” to “socialists.” Although “Health Nazis” is in common usage where I hang out — referring to those who go beyond “education and persuasion,” seeking coercive government mandates to convince people their ever-increasing raft of “recommended” inoculations (etc.) are in fact “mandatory” (especially for kids wishing to attend the government schools) — I OKd the moderate watering-down.

As eleven days have passed without the letter appearing, I now post it below:

To the editor:

The June 3 Pahrump Valley Times — on the front page, no less — declared “Nevada senior citizens’ health near bottom.”

I had not realized our emaciated oldsters are so near death they can barely crawl to the phone to call for help -– apparently suffering from a lack of proper nutrition and medical care at a level only slightly better than such notoriously impoverished corners of the Hookworm Belt as Holmes County, Mississippi. (Are we at least still doing better than the chronic alcoholics of that “Workers’ Paradise,” the former Soviet Union?)

In fact, reading further, we learn the report in question actually found “a low prevalence of falls among seniors and a low rate of preventable hospitalizations.”

A visit to the official Web site of the cited report’s authors ( http://www.americashealthrankings.org/NV ) also reveals Nevada has a low infant mortality rate, and that “Since 1990, cancer deaths decreased 11 percent from 211.8 to 188.1 per 100,000 population.”

As opposed to such real (and encouraging) statistics, this report called the rate of Nevada seniors who “self-reported” excessive drinking to be “high” at 9.2 percent. Couldn’t our oldsters just be more willing to tell the truth? “Self-reporting” isn’t very scientific. But unlike ginning up advocacy press releases, of course, science can require real work.

“America’s Health Rankings” are a lobbying tool. The author, UnitedHealthFoundation, is affiliated with the American Public Health Association, a Washington-based group that lobbies for more tax money and legal power to ban self-medication and medical liberty and to promote (even mandate) ever more vaccinations.

In keeping with those goals, the group reported seniors in Nevada (and a bunch of other states) have “poor health” based not on anyone going door to door to count who was sick in bed, but instead through a simple sleight-of-hand in which they define “poor health” as a population among which a lot of folks have declined to buy expensive health insurance (made more expensive by the kind of “coverage mandates” these “public health professionals” doubtless favor); where there’s a “low rate of high school graduation” (honest; you can check), and where low tax rates result in “low per capita health funding.”

Really! They condemn us as “sick” -– without even stopping by to check our pulse or temperature -– because we have low taxes!

Nevada seniors may be spry as all get out, benefiting from (relatively) low tax rates which allow them to buy the fresh fruits and vegetables they need for good health, but some oldster hooked up to a bunch of tubes in a hospital in Boston (Massachusetts was ranked “number one” in “healthy” taxation!) would be judged by this outfit to be “in better health” because for years said Massachusetts resident was saddled with high taxes, doubtless reducing his or her ability to afford a healthy diet and opportunities for exercise.

Nevadans paying for medical care out of their own pockets, obviously, don’t count with these characters. Paying your own doctors’ or hospital bills doesn’t contribute to “per capita health funding,” the way they measure things. But Massachusetts does a heck of a job squeezing out tax revenues to finance the kind of “public health professionals” who put together propaganda like “America’s Health Rankings” . . . and that’s what counts!

In fact, this story appears to have been picked up from the PV Times’ parent publication, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, whose reporters are infamous for regurgitating such statist health propaganda “press releases” without seeking comment from a single skeptic. Also note the interesting timing: If such a report were released the week before the presidential elections, or the week before the high-school football championships, it would be lucky to merit four paragraphs back by the Classifieds. Instead, the clever publicists release it over the Memorial Day weekend, when most papers are starved for “news” . . . and look what happens.

By the way, the study also bemoaned — and down-graded Nevada seniors for — a comparatively low rate of flu vaccinations. Given that those vaccines are mostly admitted by their manufacturers to have an efficacy rate of less than 50 percent at preventing ANYTHING –- as well as given the growing (but still widely suppressed) evidence of the long-term undesirable side effects of this nation’s “public health” agencies loading us up from the time we’re in the cradle with toxic vaccine “adjuvants” and mercury-based preservatives at an unprecedented rate, maybe the headline should have read: “Despite — or because of — defying Health Nazi edicts, Nevada senior citizens doing just fine.” 🙂

Vin Suprynowicz, Pahrump