Why does red wine cause headaches? Our research points to a compound found in the grapes’
WORD OF THE DAY; ENOLOGY
The common suspects
Sulfites have been a popular scapegoat for all sorts of ailments since it became mandatory in the 1990s to label them on wines in the U.S. However, not much evidence links sulfites directly to headaches, and other foods contain comparable levels to wine without the same effects. White wines also contain the same amount of sulfites as red wines.
Your body also produces about 700 milligrams of sulfites daily as you metabolize the protein in your food and excrete it as sulfate. To do so, it has compounds called sulfite oxidases that create sulfate from sulfite – the 20 milligrams in a glass of wine are unlikely to overwhelm your sulfite oxidases.
Some people point the finger for red wine headaches at biogenic amines. These are nitrogenous substances found in many fermented or spoiled foods, and can cause headaches, but the amount in wine is far too low to be a problem.
Tannin is a good guess, since white wines contain only tiny amounts, while red wines contain substantial amounts. Tannin is a type of phenolic compound – it’s found in all plants and usually plays a role in preventing disease, resisting predation or encouraging seed dispersal by animals.
But there are many other phenolic compounds in grapes’ skin and seeds besides tannin that make it into red wines from the winemaking process, and are not present in white, so any of them could be a candidate culprit.
Tannin is also found in many other common products, such as tea and chocolate, which generally don’t cause headaches. And phenolics are good antioxidants – they’re unlikely to trigger the inflammation that would cause a headache.
A red wine flush
Some people get red, flushed skin when drinking alcohol, and the flushing is accompanied by a headache. This headache is caused by a lagging metabolic step as the body breaks down the booze.
The metabolism of alcohol happens in two steps. First, ethanol is converted to acetaldehyde. Then, the enzyme ALDH converts the acetaldehyde to acetate, a common and innocuous substance. This second step is slower for people who get flushed skin, since their ALDH is not very efficient. They accumulate acetaldehyde, which is a somewhat toxic compound also linked to hangovers.
Leftover acetaldehyde not converted into acetate can cause hangover symptoms. Compound Chemistry, CC BY-NC-ND
So, if something unique in red wine could inhibit ALDH, slowing down that second metabolic step, would that lead to higher levels of acetaldehyde and a headache? To try to answer this question, we scanned the list of phenolics abundant in red wine.
We spied a paper showing that quercetin is a good inhibitor of ALDH. Quercetin is a phenolic compound found in the skins of grapes, so it’s much more abundant in red than white wines because red grape skins are left in longer during the fermentation process than white grape skins.
Putting enzymes to the test
Testing ALDH was the next step. We set up an inhibition assay in test tubes. In the assay, we measured how fast the enzyme ALDH breaks down acetaldehyde. Then, we added the suspected inhibitors – quercetin, as well as some other phenolics we wanted to test – to see whether they slowed the process.
The chemical structure of quercetin, which may cause red wine headaches. Johannes Botne, CC BY-SA
These tests confirmed that quercetin was a good inhibitor. Some other phenolics had varying effects, but quercetin glucuronide was the winner. When your body absorbs quercetin from food or wine, most is converted to glucuronide by the liver in order to quickly eliminate it from the body.
Our enzyme tests suggest that quercetin glucuronide disrupts your body’s metabolism of alcohol. This disruption means extra acetaldehyde circulates, causing inflammation and headaches. This discovery points to what’s known as a secondary, or synergistic, effect.
These secondary effects are much harder to identify because two factors must both be in play for the outcome to arise. In this case, other foods that contain quercetin are not associated with headaches, so you might not initially consider quercetin as the cause of the red wine problem.
The next step could be to give human subjects two red wines that are low and high in quercetin and ask whether either wine causes a headache. If the high-quercetin wine induces more headaches, we’d know we’re on the right track.
So, if quercetin causes headaches, are there red wines without it? Unfortunately, the data available on specific wines is far too limited to provide any helpful advice. However, grapes exposed to the Sun do produce more quercetin, and many inexpensive red wines are made from grapes that see less sunlight.
If you’re willing to take a chance, look for an inexpensive, lighter red wine.
Andrew Waterhouse, Professor of Enology, University of California, Davis and Apramita Devi, Postdoctoral researcher in food science and technology, University of California, Davis
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
'Tried My Best,' AOC Says After Losing Bid for Top Oversight Role
"Sorry I couldn't pull it through everyone—we live to fight another day," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on social media following the vote.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) attends a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol on November 19, 2024.
(Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)
Jake Johnson
Dec 17, 2024
COMMON DREAMS
Update:
The House Democratic caucus on Tuesday chose Rep. Gerry Connolly over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for the ranking spot on the House Oversight Committee in the upcoming Congress.
The result of the secret-ballot vote, according toAxios, was 84 for Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and 131 for Connolly (D-Va.).
"Tried my best," the New York progressive wrote on social media following the vote. "Sorry I couldn't pull it through everyone—we live to fight another day."
In a statement, Connolly thanked his colleagues "for their support and the confidence they've placed in me to lead House Democrats on the Oversight Committee," which will be under GOP control through at least 2026.
"We know what the Republican playbook will be. We have seen it before," said Connolly. "They have demonstrated that they are willing to traffic in debunked conspiracy theories and enable the worst abuses of the Trump administration. This will be trench warfare. Now is not the time to be timid."
"I promise the American people that our committee Democrats will be a beacon of truth and prepared from Day One to counter Republican gaslighting," he added. "We will be disciplined. We will be laser-focused on getting results on the kitchen table issues that affect the American people the most. We will stand up for our democracy and for truth. And we will protect the tremendous and historic progress we have made as House Democrats."
Earlier:
Rep. Gerry Connolly narrowly bested Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a secret-ballot vote Monday for the ranking spot on the House Oversight Committee in the upcoming Congress—but the New York progressive still has a shot to secure the role in a full Democratic caucus vote on Tuesday.
Connolly's (D-Va.) bid for the top Democratic slot on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability—which could play a central role in investigating the incoming Trump administration in the coming years—is backed by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who has frequently clashed with Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and other progressives on policy.
The House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee voted 34-27 behind closed doors on Monday to recommend Connolly over Ocasio-Cortez for the oversight role. While full caucus votes "typically align with the steering panel's recommendations," Politiconoted, "two Democratic allies of Ocasio-Cortez... predicted the full caucus, composed of younger members who might be more likely to favor the 35-year old liberal compared to the steering panel, could sway in favor of the progressive New Yorker."
"Members said Connolly attracted staunch support from centrist Democrats after spending the last several weeks campaigning with key members," Politico reported. "He moved to lock down critical bases of support like the centrist New Democrat Coalition."
Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, is backed by the roughly 100-member Congressional Progressive Caucus as well as the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. The New York progressive also secured the backing of a majority of members on the House Oversight Committee, which is set to be controlled by Republicans through at least 2026.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) wrote on social media late Monday that "many" in the House Democratic caucus, including himself, will back Ocasio-Cortez in Tuesday's vote.
"AOC is objectively a more skilled communicator and narrative shaper than just about anyone in her party, and certainly more than Connolly."
Following Monday's steering panel vote, Ocasio-Cortez told reporters that she is "locked in" and "working hard."
"We are still in this," she wrote on social media. "This is the difficult business of hope and defying expectation. We do not give up. We run through the tape."
In private, Ocasio-Cortez—who won her seat in Congress by toppling a high-ranking Democrat—has "signaled" to her colleagues that she "might no longer back congressional primary challenges" against them, according toPolitico, which cited three unnamed people familiar with her remarks.
The race between Connolly and Ocasio-Cortez is widely seen as a proxy fight between the younger, more progressive faction of the Democratic Party and the old guard, which appears bent on maintaining control. In recent days, Pelosi has reportedly been "actively working to tank" Ocasio-Cortez's chances of winning the oversight spot by making calls in support of Connolly.
Slate's Alexander Sammon wrote in a column Tuesday that "it's a bad move" for Pelosi and other leading establishment Democrats to back Connolly over Ocasio-Cortez, "one of the best-known progressives in the country" and also "one of the best-known Democrats period."
"With Trump in office, the role of Oversight will be extremely important, especially for a party that is begging voters to believe that they are well positioned to tackle corruption," Sammon wrote. "AOC is objectively a more skilled communicator and narrative shaper than just about anyone in her party, and certainly more than Connolly. Her ability as an explainer is top-notch, and her penchant for conveying outrage and injustice is sorely lacking in the party's upper echelons."
"Pelosi's penchant for backroom sabotage was easy to cheer when she was pushing fellow octogenarian and likely loser Joe Biden out of the presidential race; it's harder to justify when an eminently qualified rising star—who, whether Pelosi likes it personally or not, is widely known to be a cornerstone of the party's future—pushes for a simple promotion," Sammon added.
AOC handed bruising defeat in fight to become top Dem on House committee
Sarah K. Burris
December 17, 2024
RAW STORY
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). (Shutterstock)
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-MD) will become the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform after beating a challenge from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
The vote, according to Punch Bowl News, was 131-84.
Reporter and Punch Bowl co-founder John Bresnahan noted that Ocasio-Cortez was "gracious" in her defeat, hugging Connolly after the loss.
If Democrats take power back at the 2026 midterm elections, the oversight committee could be critical in investigating Donald Trump's administration.
'Backroom sabotage': Nancy Pelosi accused of hijacking AOC over festering feud
Matthew Chapman
December 17, 2024 8:49AM ET
RAW STORY
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is facing likely defeat in her candidacy to lead the Democratic minority on the House Oversight Committee, after previously building momentum for the role — because Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has been working behind the scenes to thwart it.
This "backroom sabotage" is not a healthy development for Democrats, wrote Alexander Sammon for Slate — and it's a reflection not of legitimate debate over who is best to lead the committee, but a yearslong vendetta Pelosi is unable to let go of, and a reluctance to truly pass the torch to a new generation of leaders.
Pelosi "now appears to be score-settling over a feud with Ocasio-Cortez that is six years old," she wrote.
"After November’s drubbing, House Democrats signaled that they were prepared to accept a changing of the guard atop some of the important House committees," wrote Sammon, including Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) stepping aside for relatively younger leaders.
But when Ocasio-Cortez stepped up for Oversight, and began to attract support, things changed.
"Not one to let a young person ascend quietly, Nancy Pelosi entered the fray," wrote Sammon. "The patron saint of Democratic gerontocracy, 84-year-old Nancy Pelosi is supposedly retired from leadership, but this month, she actively threw her weight behind 74-year-old Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, who was just diagnosed with throat cancer. Now, Pelosi is whipping votes for Connolly, whose potential promotion would cap off this 'changing of the guard' by replacing a 61-year-old with a guy in his mid-70s. And because Pelosi suffered a fall in Germany and had to have her hip replaced, she’s essentially whipping votes from a hospital bed."
Ocasio-Cortez's outspoken progressive record has made some more centrist lawmakers uneasy, Sammon noted, but she is arguably perfect for this role: "During a second Trump presidency, Oversight will be one of the most important bully pulpits to expose and interrogate the incoming administration’s flagrant corruption," and AOC, who already serves on Oversight, has repeatedly gone viral demolishing Trump allies in that committee. "Her ability as an explainer is top-notch, and her penchant for conveying outrage and injustice is sorely lacking in the party’s upper echelons."
Connolly has extensive experience on the committee, said Sammon, with "a positive reputation for his work beating back Republican witch hunts during the Barack Obama years" — but "it’s pretty obvious which one of these representatives has a bigger megaphone to explain what’s going on. Ocasio-Cortez has 8.1 million followers. Connolly has 4,600."
Pelosi, Sammon noted, was instrumental in building the consensus to force President Joe Biden out of running for a second term — but those same tactics are "harder to justify when an eminently qualified rising star — who, whether Pelosi likes it personally or not, is widely known to be a cornerstone of the party’s future — pushes for a simple promotion."
Free Speech Coalition Vows to Defend Nonprofits From 'Unprecedented' Threat
"Presenting a strong and united front against political and ideological censorship is the only way to protect Americans' right to stand up for what they believe in under the First Amendment," said a spokesperson for Americans Against Government Censorship.
Jake Johnson
Dec 17, 2024
COMMON DREAMS
An alliance of labor unions and advocacy groups launched a new coalition on Tuesday aimed at defending nonprofit organizations from "unprecedented government attacks on free speech," a move that comes amid a Republican-led effort to empower the incoming Trump administration to shutter dissenting organizations.
Americans Against Government Censorship—whose founding members include the AFL-CIO, Oxfam America, Service Employees International Union, and Indivisible—said it was founded to combat the threat posed by bills such as H.R. 9495, which would allow the U.S. Treasury Department to unilaterally strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status if they're deemed supporters of terrorism.
The legislation, which the ACLU said provides merely an "illusion of due process" for accused groups, represents a potentially existential threat to human rights organizations, news outlets, government watchdogs, and other nonprofits that could be key to uncovering and fighting abuses by the incoming administration.
"This sweeping authority could be weaponized against any tax-exempt organization across the ideological spectrum, depending on which party is in power at a given moment," Caitlin Legacki, a spokesperson for the new coalition, said in a statement. "Presenting a strong and united front against political and ideological censorship is the only way to protect Americans' right to stand up for what they believe in under the First Amendment."
"Any trade union, church, philanthropic, nonprofit media outlet or social welfare organization could become a target if they fall out of favor with the current administration."
The coalition was launched weeks after the U.S. House passed H.R. 9495, with 15 Democrats joining nearly every Republican to push the legislation through the lower chamber.
It appears unlikely that the bill will get a vote in the Senate before the new Congress is sworn in next month, but Republicans could revive the measure once they take control of both chambers and the White House.
On its website, Americans Against Government Censorship warns that "increasingly aggressive activists have been very clear about their intent to use the full force of the federal government to target their enemies and hinder the ability of any opposition to slow or stop their policy agenda—including new efforts to target and weaponize tax status through the IRS."
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is among the Republicans pushing the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of a number of nonprofit groups that support Palestinian rights, including Jewish Voice for Peace and American Muslims for Palestine.
Americans Against Government Censorship emphasized that the powers included in bills such as H.R. 9495 "could be weaponized by any administration against any tax-exempt organization across the ideological spectrum."
"Any trade union, church, philanthropic, nonprofit media outlet or social welfare organization could become a target if they fall out of favor with the current administration," the coalition said. "At any time, this agenda would allow a sitting president—Democratic or Republican—to use their power to punish ideological opponents without fundamental due process."
Newsmax guest rips Trump for 'seeking attention' with 'frivolous' lawsuit against pollster
David Edwards
December 17, 2024
RAW STORY
Newsmax/screen grab
President-elect Donald Trump was desperately "seeking attention" when he filed a "frivolous" lawsuit against a pollster who showed him losing Iowa this year, an attorney told a conservative news network Tuesday.
In an interview on Newsmax, host Katrina Szish asked lawyer Chandelle Summer to comment after Trump sued pollster Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register.
"I don't believe there is a case there, Katrina," Summer argued. "I think this is, quite frankly, a frivolous lawsuit filed by Trump seeking attention."
"I think this particular poll hurt him badly at the time, because it was so widely published," she continued. "And there are no damages, because he won the state. He exceeded the poll numbers."
"And I just don't think you can sue for false advertising, which is what this case is."
While announcing the lawsuit on Monday, Trump accused the newspaper of "election interference."
"I'm doing this because I feel I have an obligation to. I'm going to be bringing one against the people in Iowa, their newspaper, which had a very, very good pollster who got me right all the time, and then just before the election, she said I was going to lose by 3 or 4 points," the president-elect complained.
'Open season': Experts slam Trump’s 'disgusting' lawsuit against Iowa newspaper and pollster
Donald J. Trump speaks with members of the press along the South Lawn driveway of the White House Friday, Feb. 28, 2020, prior to boarding Marine One to begin his trip to South Carolina. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)December 17, 2024
ALTERNET
On Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump announced multiple lawsuits against media organizations, including one against the Des Moines Register and now-retired pollster Ann Selzer.
As Puck News' Tara Palmeri reported Monday night, the incoming president is arguing that Selzer's late October poll that incorrectly predicted Vice President Kamala Harris would eke out a narrow victory over Trump in the Hawkeye State amounted to election interference. Trump's lawyers are basing their argument on what Palmeri called an "extremely aggressive" interpretation of a consumer fraud law in Iowa that penalizes businesses from making misrepresentations to customers.
Trump is also suing the Pulitzer Prize board over its awards to New York Times and Washington Post journalists who reported on Trump-Russia developments during his first administration, and is continuing to seek $10 billion in damages from CBS News over its editing of 60 Minutes reporter Bill Whitaker's interview with Harris during the campaign cycle.
READ MORE: 'We're going to go after the people in the media': Trump ally calls for prosecuting journalists
"As with Trump’s other recent and ongoing lawsuits against media organizations, the objective isn’t to win but rather to intimidate," Palmeri wrote. "Already, nervousness is spreading in the industry, with media companies preparing for litigation targeting journalists, including for charges like defamation or even violations of the Espionage Act."
News of the lawsuit prompted calls from various journalists, activists, commentators and legal experts on Bluesky. Writer and activist Amy Siskind referenced ABC News' recent decision to settle Trump's defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos' on-air assertion that Trump was found liable for "rape" rather than "sexual abuse" (even though Judge Lewis F. Kaplan stated that "sexual abuse" was essentially the same thing) as "emboldening" Trump to further go after his enemies in the media. She opined that the new lawsuit against the Register and Selzer in the wake of ABC News' settlement was "disgusting."
Former federal prosecutor Harry Litman warned that the lawsuit meant it was "open season" on journalists. In a post to his Substack newsletter, Litman warned that Trump had already "shifted the balance of power between the media and the presidency before even taking office."
"This is a significant and deeply troubling development, especially as Trump continues to erode other democratic norms that make it all the more important that the media perform its traditional function of reporting the facts and pushing back against abuses of power," Litman wrote.
READ MORE: Trump calls for 'dishonest' ABC News to lose license following debate fact-check
Lawyer Adam Cohen posited that Trump's lawsuit wasn't just a salvo against the Register, but also against its parent company, Gannett, which owns USA TODAY and hundreds of affiliated newspapers. He added that Gannett's decision to not endorse a candidate in the 2024 race amounted to "obeying in advance," and wryly observed that it "didn't even help them" in the long run.
Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor emeritus at City University of New York, posted to Bluesky that Trump's actions in the wake of the ABC News settlement should serve as a warning to media outlets across the United States as Trump prepares to enter the White House for a second term next month.
"If you act as his stenographer, #BrokenNews, and if you accede to his pressure, you are complicit in his totalitarianism," Jarvis wrote. "It begins."
"This is not a joke," journalist and author Keith Boykin skeeted (the term for posts on Bluesky). "He’s trying to intimidate the press with lawfare and threats of retaliation if they say or do anything he dislikes. Do not capitulate to his threats. Fight back."
'Chilling effect': ABC News employees condemn network‘s 'surrender' to Trump
George Stephanopoulos image via ABC Screengrab
December 17, 2024
ALTERNET
Earlier this week, ABC News announced it was settling a defamation lawsuit filed by President-elect Donald Trump by writing him a $15 million check for his future presidential library (and another $1 million for legal fees).
Trump's lawsuit, which was filed earlier this year, accused the network of defamation after anchor George Stephanopoulos said on the air that Trump was found liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll, rather than for the actual verdict rendered by the jury of sexual abuse. Judge Lewis F. Kaplan maintained that while rape and sexual abuse were different terms, they were essentially the same thing as the public understands them.
But following the settlement, Rolling Stone's Asawin Suebsaeng and Nikki McCann Ramirez reported that several unnamed ABC News journalists are angry at their employer for rolling over for Trump without putting up a fight. Several anonymous sources confided to Rolling Stone that they feared the settlement would have a "chilling effect" on journalism as a whole.
READ MORE: Trump slammed for 'completely wacko' suit against ABC News and George Stephanopoulos
“It is frightening,” one ABC reporter set to cover the incoming Trump administration said. “My fear is this sets a tone for the next four years and that the tone is: Do not upset the president... That’s not our job. I’m not the only person here who saw this as a big win for Donald Trump and a surrender [by ABC].”
Rolling Stone further reported that executives at the network were motivated to make the problem "go away" as quickly as possible. But the settlement may have emboldened Trump to pursue additional litigation against other news outlets: On Monday, Trump filed a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register and pollster J. Ann Selzer, arguing that a poll published in the final days of the election predicting Vice President Kamala Harris would win the state by three points was "election interference" (the poll proved to be an outlier as Trump won Iowa by double digits).
In her Substack newsletter The Present Age, journalist Parker Molloy cited former Buffalo News editor Margaret Sullivan's warning to all news outlets to never settle defamation cases. According to Sullivan, "settling would only encourage more people to sue," which invites more bullying of the news media by the rich and powerful.
"Sullivan cites historian Timothy Snyder's crucial insight about resisting autocracy: 'Do not obey in advance.' When institutions preemptively submit to potential autocrats, they teach those autocrats what they can get away with," Molloy wrote. "ABC News just gave Trump a blueprint for how to bend media organizations to his will."
READ MORE: 'Open season': Experts slam Trump's 'disgusting' lawsuit against Iowa newspaper and pollster
Click here to read Rolling Stone's report in full.
Billionaire newspaper owner slaps major new restrictions on anti-Trump editorials: reportRAW STORY
Patrick Soon-Shiong. Photo by NHS Confederation/Creative Commons.
Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, has reportedly implemented even more stringent rules against running editorials criticizing President-elect Donald Trump.
An internal memo signed by LA Times opinion page staffers and obtained by journalist Oliver Darcy claims that Soon-Shiong has barred op-eds that are critical of Trump unless the paper runs a separate editorial that gives the "opposite view" of the president's rhetoric and actions.
The staffers who signed the memo expressed concern that this policy could violate the paper's own ethics policy and damage the newspaper's reputation.
“We understand that Dr. Soon-Shiong has a role in shaping the tone and direction of the editorial board and Opinion section, but we are still bound by the core values and ethics of journalism, including a duty to be transparent and act in service of the public,” the memo said. “We believe we have an obligation to report these under the ethics policy, which states that ‘the primary goal always should be to protect The Times’ integrity.’”
This is not the first time that Soon-Shiong has meddled in the newspaper's editorial process, as he axed the LA Times' endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris shortly before the 2024 election.
These policies have also led to some high-profile resignations from the paper's editorial board.
We're watching the largest and most dangerous 'cult' in American historyRAW STORY
I was dying…It was just a matter of time. Lying behind the wheel of the airplane, bleeding out of the right side of my devastated body, I waited for the rapid shooting to stop.
—Former Representative Jackie Speier in her memoir Undaunted: Surviving Jonestown, Summoning Courage, and Fighting Back recounting her experience after being shot five times during an ambush during her fact-finding visit to Jonestown, Guyana where Jim Jones and his cult, Peoples Temple, had built a compound.
It, combined with everything else that was going on, made it difficult to breathe…Being crushed by the shield and the people behind it … leaving me defenseless, injured.
—Metropolitan police officer, Daniel Hodges, describing being crushed in a doorway during the January 6, 2021, attack by Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol
In both of the examples above, the individual speaking was the victim of extreme violence perpetrated by followers of a single person whose influence had spread to hundreds of people (in the January 6th case, thousands of people). In fact, Speier’s experience with the Jim Jones followers was part of the single greatest loss of American life (918 people) prior to 9/11/2001. These followings have been given an umbrella name, cult, and have involved what has been traditionally called “brainwashing.” The cult leader receives seemingly undying support as the Dear Leader or Savior. However, the term brainwashing suggests that indoctrinated members are robots without free will – behavioral scientists argue that this is not the case. It’s an oversimplification.
Rather than being seen as passive victims to an irresistible force, psychiatrist Robert Lifton argues that there is “voluntary self-surrender” in one’s entrance into a cult. Further, the decision to give up control as part of the cult process may actually be part of the reason why people join. Research and experience tell us that those who are “cult vulnerable” may have a sense of confusion or separation from society or seek the same sort of highly controlled environment that was part of their childhood. It has also been suggested that those who are at risk for cult membership feel an enormous lack of control in the face of uncertainty (i.e., economic, occupational, academic, social, familial) and will gravitate more towards a cult as their distress increases. I would argue that many of these factors are at play when we see the ongoing support of Trumpism and MAGA “theology.”
Psychologist Leon Festinger described the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance in which there is a disconnect between one’s feelings, beliefs, and convictions and their observable actions. This dissonance is distressing and, in order to relieve the anxiety, people may become more invested in the cult or belief system that goes against who they are individually. As such, cult members become more “dug-in” and will cling to thoughts and beliefs that contradict available evidence. In other words, they are no longer able to find a middle ground or compromise.
How does this apply to today’s politics?
There was a time when the two major political parties in America could exhibit bipartisanship by moving across the aisle to compromise on the issues on which they were legislating. Tried and true Republicans who favored small government, lower taxes, and national security could find a middle ground with Democrats who pushed for things like universal healthcare, higher minimum wages, and progressive tax reform. The abortion issue in America has been an area of debate between the parties as they debated elements like when life begins, is a heartbeat a heartbeat, and what to do about post-birth abortions (which is murder and not actually a thing). There were largely two sides of the issue and some areas for compromise.
This is no longer possible in today’s sociopolitical climate. Although members of the GOP still refer to themselves as a political party with principled stances, the reality is they have now morphed into a domestic terror organization and to use the umbrella term, a cult – the largest and most dangerous cult in American history.
RELATED: Neuroscientist sounds the alarm on the GOP’s 'contagious sociopaths' who live among us
Cult thinking includes ardent adherence to group thinking such as – clinically speaking, in the face of distorted thinking we ask about one’s strength of conviction by querying, ”Can you think of other ways of seeing this?” Sadly, what we are seeing publicly is ‘No’ from those who still subscribe to Trumpism/MAGA.
Here are a few examples in today’s sociopolitical environment in which cultism has contributed to a lack of middle ground.
There is no middle ground on treasonous, conspiratorial, fraudulent behavior – these are crimes and, arguably, the worst crimes one could commit against their own country.
There is no middle ground on slavery.
There is no middle ground on allowing Americans to die through inaction in response to natural disasters and global health crises.
There is no middle ground on gunning down school children or wearing an AR-15 rifle pin and throwing away a pin to remember a Uvalde victim.
There is no middle ground on jeopardizing national security and retaining and sharing classified documents.
There is no middle ground on breaking campaign finance (i.e., hush money schemes) laws.
There should be no middle ground on tolerance of crime, period.
And so many know this. Tim Scott, Jim Jordan, and Marco Rubio (the last two having gone to law school), all know this and are smarter than they are acting – which takes us back to cult dynamics – if you are a dyed-in-the-wool cultist or pretending to be a cultist – but the outcome is the same – harm to the Country and its people – there is no difference. Whether you actually have a personality disorder or are pretending to be a sociopathically or psychopathically disordered person – if the result is the same – harm to your constituents and your country – what’s the difference? As noted in the opening paragraphs, there is a voluntary submission to cultism – Rubio, for example, identified all of the reasons why the 45th President was not qualified when he himself was running for President in 2016. However, perhaps due to his own intolerance of uncertainties in his life, volunteered for Trumpism.
What can be done?
There are exit strategies for people ensnared in a cult. One factor is accountability or repeatedly seeing the adverse consequences of the group’s behavior (e.g., indictment, incarceration, job loss) which we started to see even more of this week.
But until one party and its ardent followers can admit they are in a domestic terrorist cult and as Rep. Eric Swalwell said are “unserious” people, there is no hope of unification on the horizon. The first step is getting through to people who can’t or won’t see the truth.
ALSO IN THE NEWS: Cognitive neuroscientist explains why stupidity is an existential threat to America
About the Author:
Seth D. Norrholm, PhD (Threads: neuropsychophd; X, artist formerly known as Twitter: @SethN12) is a neuropsychologist and independent socio political columnist. Dr. Norrholm has spent 20 years studying trauma-, stressor-, anxiety-, depressive-, and substance use-related disorders and has published over 135 peer-reviewed research articles and book chapters. The primary objective of his work is to develop “bench-to-bedside” clinical research methods to inform therapeutic interventions for fear and anxiety-related disorders and how they relate to human factors such as personality, genetics, and environmental influences. Dr. Norrholm has been featured on NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC’s Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, Politico.com, The New York Times, The New York Daily News, USA Today, WebMD, The Atlantic, The History Channel, Scientific American, Salon.com, The Huffington Post, and Yahoo.com.
Inside the DOGE billionaires' plan to kill Medicare
December 16, 2024
ALTERNET
I’ve shared with you the plans of Trump’s unelected multi-billionaires, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to undermine Social Security — the most popular and successful program in the federal government, into which you’ve paid your entire working life.
Today I want to share their plan to gut Medicaid.
Medicaid is less politically popular than Social Security or Medicare, because it mainly supports poor children and families who have little or no political voice.
But Medicaid covers far more Americans.
Medicaid insures nearly half of all children in the United States. It covers 1 in 5 women of childbearing age. It also pays for a large portion of the nation’s nursing home care and mental health treatment. States and the federal government share its costs, which totaled $880 billion last year.
How are the DOGE billionaires planning to gut it?
First, by turning Medicaid into “block grants,” in which states get lump sums regardless of how many people sign up for the program. Republican senator and founding DOGE caucus member John Cornyn has already publicly stated that he favors this approach.
As more poor children and needy families sign up, block grants will force states to increase their own spending on Medicaid or restrict who gets it. Given the strain on state budgets and the negligible political voice of Medicaid recipients, it will almost surely be the latter.
A second method for gutting Medicaid favored by Musk, Ramaswamy, Cornyn, and other DOGE caucus members is to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients. They claim this would save the federal government at least $100 billion over the next decade.
But the reason for the saving is that work requirements would cause an estimated 600,000 people — most of them unable to work — to lose coverage (according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office).
The third idea DOGE is considering is to cut back on the expansion of Medicaid that came with the Affordable Care Act. That expansion enabled adults in families earning up to $43,000 a year to get health care coverage. (Under it, the federal government pays 90 percent of the costs.)
Step back for a moment and consider what’s being proposed.
If the Affordable Care Act’s expanded Medicaid is cut back, hundreds of thousands of Americans in families earning up to $43,000 a year will lose their health care.
If Medicaid is turned into block grants or if work is required of people unable to work, many hundreds of thousands more will lose their only access to health care, including large numbers of children.
The presumed goal of the DOGE exercise is to reduce the federal budget deficit.
Yet Trump and his billionaires are planning to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which disproportionately have benefited large corporations and wealthy people like themselves, along with additional tax cuts and loopholes for the wealthy.
The estimated cost of extending the Trump tax cuts is at least $5 trillion — more than twice the amount Musk has stated DOGE will cut in “wasteful” government spending.
The richest man in the world and his billionaire colleagues are seeking to reduce money spent for the health care of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans, at the same time they’re seeking to reduce taxes on themselves and others who are the richest and most privileged.
Anything wrong with this picture?
Many of the Americans who will be shafted by all this voted for Trump in 2024.
They may never discover that Trump is behind this because Trump won’t have his fingerprints on the Medicaid cuts. He’ll hide behind Musk and Ramaswamy’s DOGE and the newly formed DOGE caucus in Congress.
Not even their fingerprints will be obvious because block grants to the states, work requirements, and elimination of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion will all do the dirty deed quietly.
Nor will working Americans discover that big corporations and the wealthy are reaping most of the savings from the gutting of Medicaid in the form of lower taxes. Most working Americans haven’t yet discovered how skewed the 2017 Trump tax cut has been to the wealthy and big corporations, so why should they discover it in future years?
One more thing.
Employer-sponsored health insurance — available to most salaried workers in large corporations but rarely to hourly workers or contract workers — remains untaxed.
This is one of the largest tax expenditures in the federal government.
As I said, Medicaid costs about $880 billion a year. The exclusion from taxes of employer-provided health insurance costs the federal government a very large fraction of that — the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated $299 billion in 2022; the Congressional Budget Office projects $641 billion by 2032.
It’s another well-disguised benefit for the privileged that’s underwritten by the non-privileged. Yet I’d be astonished if DOGE touched it.
Why go after the costs of Medicaid and not the costs of employer-provided health insurance? For the same reason Trump’s billionaires will happily cut taxes on themselves even as they gut health care for millions of poor kids and working-class families.
What’s considered “waste and fraud” often depends on whether one is looking downward or upward, and the billionaire DOGEs look only downward. But the biggest waste and fraud is found at the high rungs — in tax loopholes and tax expenditures used by wealthy individuals and big corporations. (Did I hear anyone say “carried interest?”)
When Trump chose Dr. Mehmet Oz, the multimillion-dollar celebrity doctor (who infamously promoted hydroxychloroquine while holding over $615,000 in shares of the drug’s distributor) to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Trump said Oz will “cut waste and fraud within our country’s most expensive government agency.”
Believe that, and you should believe in hydroxychloroquine.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
How white supremacy prevented America from having single-payer healthcare
Thom Hartmann
December 17, 2024
ALTERNET
Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
In the wake of the assassination of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, Americans are wondering out loud why we’re getting ripped off by giant insurance companies when every other developed country in the world has healthcare as a right and pays an average of about half of what we do — and gets better outcomes.
As I point out in The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, and brought up with Joy Reid on her program last week, America is:
— The only developed country in the world that doesn’t recognize healthcare as a human right,
— The only country with more than two-thirds of its population lacking access to affordable healthcare and a half-million families facing bankruptcy every year because somebody got sick,
— The only country in the developed world where over 40% of the population carries $220 billion in medical debt,
— And the only country in the developed world that has, since its founding, enslaved and then legally oppressed and disenfranchised a large minority of its population because of their race.
These things, along with UnitedHealth’s $370 billion in revenue and $32 billion in profit, are connected.
Roughly 60 percent of Americans would have had to take out a loan or otherwise borrow or beg for money to deal with a single, unexpected $1,000 expense.
Yet annual family medical copays and out -of-pocket deductibles averaged $6,575 in 2023, when the Kaiser Family Foundation did a comprehensive survey of Americans. This strikes minorities particularly hard, which, it turns out, is not an accident.
The simple fact is that, were it not for slavery, white supremacy, and the legacy of “scientific racism,” America would have had a national, single-payer healthcare system in 1915, just 31 years after Germany put into place the modern world’s first such program.
At the center of the effort to prevent a national healthcare system — or any form of government assistance that may even incidentally offer benefit to African Americans — were Frederick Ludwig Hoffman and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, which promoted his “science based” racial theories to successfully fight single-payer health insurance.
Racism is the main reason that America doesn’t consider healthcare a human right and provide it to all citizens, in contrast to every other developed country in the world. Racist whites, particularly in the South, have worked for over a century to make sure that healthcare is hard for Black people and other minorities to get.
And their biggest ally, their founding spokesperson in the post–Civil War era, their biggest champion right up to the 1940s, was a man that most Americans have never heard of.
In 1884, 19-year-old Frederick Ludwig Hoffmann left Germany for America after failing at a number of job attempts and being rejected for the German Army because he was “physically deficient” and frail, standing five-foot-seven and weighing a mere 110 pounds. He arrived in New York with $4.76 in his pocket, speaking “not a word of English” but determined to prove wrong his mother’s assessment that he was a “good-for-nothing.”
From this humble beginning, Hoffmann went on to become one of America’s most influential statisticians and analysts of public health, making numerous consequential discoveries about how industrialization was killing American workers.
He dropped the last n in his last name, became so fluent in English that his accent was nearly indistinguishable, and married into an upscale Georgia family. By 1920 he was an American citizen, vice president of America’s largest insurance company, and a national authority on the now-discredited pseudoscience called scientific racism.
In 1908, his article “The Mortality from Consumption [tuberculosis] in the Dusty Trades,” published by the US Department of Labor, produced the first national efforts to reduce lung damage in the workplace. He also published the first work (1915) linking tobacco to lung cancer.
From this, he became vice president of the National Tuberculosis Association (today known as the American Lung Association) and later demonstrated the connection between exposure to asbestos and the disease that killed my father, mesothelioma (a bit of data that asbestos companies worked to keep hidden for the next 80 years).
But Hoffman’s most controversial lifelong obsession was with the relationship between disease, race, and society.
On one of his first trips to Georgia, he wrote, he came across a book by Dr. Eugene R. Corson, a Georgia obstetrician, titled The Vital Equation of the Colored Race and Its Future in the United States. It was apparently an updated or shortened version of Corson’s widely read “The Future of the Colored Race in the United States From an Ethnic and Medical Standpoint,” published in 1887 in the New York Medical Times.
This was just after the failure of Reconstruction, and a widespread topic of speculation, particularly in the South, was whether Black people would soon outnumber white people in that part of the country.
The Ku Klux Klan and others calling for wholesale slaughter and suppression of Black people claimed that they were more likely to have larger families because they were “more prolific,” code for “excessively sexual,” a charge that had persisted from the earliest days of slavery and led to the murder of Emmett Till (among others).
However, the “scientific” racists of the day, like Corson, thought differently. Corson led a movement suggesting that people of African ancestry, now lacking “the protective womb of slavery,” would die out for the simple reason that the Black race was “inferior to whites.”
Corson promoted the Klan’s argument that “the simpler the organism, the simpler the genesis and the greater the prolificness.” But, he said, white people would prevail because they were less likely to die of disease, citing Herbert Spencer’s Theory of Population Deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility.
While Black people might have more children, Corson wrote, white people would still outnumber them because Black fecundity “is more than compensated for by the ability [of white people] to maintain individual life.”
Enslaved people from Africa had found themselves in a civilization “of which [they are] not a product” and thus were less likely to be successful in “the struggle for existence.” Therefore, Corson wrote, Black people “must suffer physically, a result which forbids any undue increase in the race.”
The discovery of this theory, called the racial extinction thesis, electrified Hoffman, and he spent the rest of his life promoting it, while campaigning to stop any sort of movement toward a national health insurance program that might prevent or slow down the extinction of Black people in America.
In August 1896, the American Economic Association published a book that represented a turning point in Frederick Hoffman’s life and sealed the fate of single-payer health insurance in America. It was Hoffman’s magnum opus, summarizing decades of compiled statistics on Black versus white mortality, proving, according to Hoffman, once and for all, that for Black people, “gradual extinction is only a question of time.”
In Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, Hoffman set out not only to repeatedly make and statistically prove the above claim, but also to prove that anytime white people tried to help Black people, particularly by offering them healthcare services, the result was disaster for both.
Noting that “the Negro has failed to gain a foothold in any of the northern states,” Hoffman wrote, “he is in the South as a permanent factor . . . with a tendency to drift into the cities, there to concentrate in the most undesirable and unsanitary sections . . . and the evil effect will be more felt by the cities which are thus augmented in population of an undesirable character.”
In great detail, Hoffman spent about 300 pages documenting, with exhaustive tables and statistics, the fact that Black people were more likely to die as a result of everything from malaria to tuberculosis to childbirth.
And it was all because of their race, Hoffman argued:
“The decrease in the rate of increase of the colored population has been traced first to the excessive mortality, which in turn has been traced to an inferior vital capacity. . . . This racial inferiority has, in turn, brought about a moral deterioration . . . sexual immorality . . . diminished social and economic efficiency . . .”
And that represented a danger to white people, Hoffman wrote.
The participation of freed Black people in the contemporary labor pool and in society overall, he wrote, “in the course of years must prove not only a most destructive factor in the progress of the colored race, but also in the progress, social as well as economic, of the white race brought under its influence.”
Slavery had actually been good for Black people, Hoffman believed, and the abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War was only going to speed up the demise of that race.
“Nothing is more clearly shown from this investigation,” he wrote, “than that the southern black man at the time of emancipation was healthy in body and cheerful in mind. He neither suffered inordinately from disease nor from impaired bodily vigor.”
But with abolition, formerly enslaved people were “tending toward a condition in which matters will be worse than they are now, when diseases will be more destructive, vital resistance still lower, when the number of births will fall below the deaths, and gradual extinction of the race will take place.”
While Hoffman pioneered linking causal conditions such as asbestos and carcinogen exposure to sickness, he was so blinded by racism that a modern reader of his book constantly finds himself shouting, “But these things are also true of poor whites! These are caused by discrimination and poverty!!”
At the time, though, the vast majority of white Americans agreed with him. He was echoing the white cultural and scientific consensus of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when he wrote:
“Given the same conditions of life for two races, the one of Aryan descent will prove the superior, solely on account of its ancient inheritance of virtue and transmitted qualities which are determining factors in the struggle for race supremacy. The lower races, even under the same conditions of life, must necessarily fail because the vast number of incapables, which a hard struggle for life has eliminated from the ranks of the white races, are still forming the large body of the lower races.”
And, according to Hoffman and the other white “scientific racists,” the problem wasn’t just physical inferiority. The deepest “problem of the Negro,” Hoffman wrote, was moral:
“All the facts prove that a low standard of sexual morality is the main and underlying cause of the low and anti-social condition of the race at the present time. . . . The conclusion is warranted that it is merely a question of time when the actual downward course, that is, a decrease in the population will take place. In the meantime, however, the presence of the colored population is a serious hindrance to the economic progress of the white race.”
For those well-intentioned white people who wanted to help out the people who were a mere generation or two away from slavery, Hoffman and his colleagues had one simple bit of advice: Don’t even try.
In 1980, David Koch famously ran for vice president of the United States under the banner of the Libertarian Party, an organization founded a few decades earlier by big business to give an economic rationale and political patina to their simple theory that economics were more important than democracy, and the quality of life of working people should be decided in the “free marketplace” instead of by unions or through democratic processes via government regulation.
In this, Koch and his Libertarian friends were echoing Frederick Hoffman.
In his 1896 book Race Traits, Hoffman laid out his “scientific” assertion that when government steps in to help people, it invariably ends up hurting them instead. Not only should there be no government assistance given to help African Americans recover from three centuries of property theft, forced labor, and legal violence, but it is scientifically wrong to even consider the idea.
White people and government programs to better the lives of Black people, Hoffman wrote, deserve “the most severe condemnation of modern attempts of superior races to lift inferior races to their own elevated position.”
The damage done to Black people by offering them any sort of help, government assistance, or even a minimum wage, he wrote, is “criminal” behavior for a “civilized people.”
Hoffman pointed to Native Americans to prove his point:
“Few races have made such a brave struggle for their own preservation; few races can boast of so high a degree of aboriginal civilization. . . . An iron will can be traced upon the countenance of nearly every Indian of note.”
But it was government help, Hoffman wrote, that destroyed the American Indian.
It wasn’t “adulterated whiskey nor the frightful consequences of sexual immorality, spread around the forts and settlements of the whites,” that was “sufficient” to destroy Native Americans. It was charity.
“The most subtle agency of all,” he wrote, sounding like Ronald Reagan or David Koch, “governmental pauperism, the highest development of the theory of easy conditions of life, did what neither drink nor the poisons of venereal disease could do, and today the large majority of the tribes are following the Maories and Hawaiians towards the goal of final extinction.”
White Americans rationalized their brutality toward Native Americans and African Americans by saying that it was simple evolutionary biology: only the strong survive, and when the weak are allowed to propagate, it weakens the overall human race.
“Easy conditions of life and a liberal charity are among the most destructive influences affecting the lower races,” Hoffman concluded, “since by such methods the weak and incapable are permitted to increase and multiply, while the struggle of the more able is increased in severity [by the increase in taxes and regulation].”
And it’s not just charity.
“All the facts prove,” Hoffman wrote, “that education, philanthropy, and religion have failed to develop [among Black people] a higher appreciation of the stern and uncompromising virtues of the Aryan race.
“Instead of making the race more independent, modern educational and philanthropic efforts have succeeded in making it even more dependent on the white race at the present time than it was previous to emancipation.”
Free education — as any Libertarian can tell you — is more dangerous to the souls of people than slavery. And free healthcare is even worse.
Sounding like a modern-day acolyte of Ayn Rand, Hoffman wrote:
“Instead of clamoring for aid and assistance from the white race, the negro himself should sternly refuse every offer of direct interference in his own evolution. The more difficult his upward struggle, the more enduring will be the qualities developed.”
And, like Ayn Rand, David Koch, and Ronald Reagan, Hoffman believed that these were eternal truths independent of race:
“No missionary or educator or philanthropist extended aid or comfort to the English peasant class during its darkest days, to the earliest settlers on the coast of New England, or the pioneer in the forests of the far West. . . . [I]t is extremely rare to find a case where easy conditions of life or liberal charity have assisted man in his upward struggle. Self reliance . . . must be developed, and thus far have not been developed by the aid of charity or liberal philanthropy.”
This libertarian ideal is still pervasive in our modern fragmented healthcare system, and in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 it resulted in thousands of daily American deaths, disproportionately hitting racial minorities.
The “compulsory health insurance” (what today we’d call Medicare for All) movement of the early 20th century was as much (and possibly more) about getting paid sick leave as it was about covering doctor visits and hospitalization, because healthcare was so cheap that an unpaid week at work was a bigger hit to the wallet.
But workers wanted both.
The most successful effort of the era came out of an organization that a small group of progressive economists put together in 1905 and 1906, known as the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL).
Their initial efforts were directed at paid sick leave, workers’ compensation insurance, child labor laws, and workplace safety standards. To that last end, they were actively using the kinds of statistical analysis that Frederick Hoffman had both used and popularized to do everything from laying out his theories on race to showing an association between tobacco use and lung cancer.
Hoffman joined the AALL to promote their efforts…at least that was his claim.
A charitable reading of his motivations was that his statistical research on workplace phosphorus poisoning and lung disease overlapped with their efforts, and they were an organization that, at that time, was held in high regard. He did, after all, consider himself — and was, in a very real way — a major force for reform in public health and workplace safety arenas.
A less charitable motivation is posited in Daniel T. Rodgers’s 1998 book Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Rodgers wrote:
“On the AALL social insurance committee, he became the [Prudential] company’s mole. . . . Hoffman took credit for blocking the drafting of any resolutions at the AALL’s social insurance conference in 1913. During the framing of the association’s model health insurance bill, he dragged his feet, obstructed, pressed in vain for company initiatives in the medical insurance field, and informed his employers — more and more certain that public health insurance was ‘distinctly pernicious and a menace to our interests.’”
Despite Prudential and Hoffman’s efforts, government-funded health insurance was gaining popularity in America (and being adopted across Europe).
In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt made a third-party bid for the presidency, forming the Progressive Party (with its Bull Moose logo), and called for “the protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance.”
Jane Addams (Hull House founder), dressed in suffragette white, seconded Roosevelt’s nomination to wild cheers and applause; Roosevelt rallies routinely drew tens of thousands of people, and more than 200,000 people showed up in Los Angeles to support him and the party.
Roosevelt’s endorsement of “social insurance,” including health coverage, both reflected and reinforced a growing national sentiment, and in 1915 the AALL called for every state to support a program of health insurance. Prudential hadn’t yet gotten into the business of insuring health (they would in 1925), but they could see the writing on the wall.
In 1916, the AALL endorsed health insurance provided through a network of local and statewide mutual companies and called for those policies to also provide a small death benefit to cover funeral costs, which would have competed directly with the funeral coverage that was Prudential’s main cash cow.
Hoffman wrote to the company, “We, of course, cannot compete with Compulsory Insurance, including a death benefit of, say $100.” He then resigned “in disgust” from the AALL and begin a campaign, sponsored by Prudential, to stop state-funded health insurance.
Hoffman and Prudential weren’t alone in their concern: the Insurance Federation of New York told their members:
“This is only the entering wedge; if once a foothold is obtained it will mean attempts to have such State Insurance of all kinds...”
The AALL produced model legislation that was taken up in 1916 by eight states, including California and New York, the former via a ballot initiative and the latter in the New York legislature. In addition to calling for policies that would pay all costs of healthcare, the AALL’s legislation called for up to 26 weeks of paid sick leave.
Picking up steam, the American Medical Association endorsed the AALL’s model legislation as well. The battle was joined.
Hoffman’s Prudential-sponsored campaign to prevent any state from adopting a statewide nonprofit health (and death benefit) insurance program went into overdrive through 1916–1920. He traveled to Germany several times to chronicle, in minute detail, the failings of the kaiser’s system that had been operating since 1885.
Prudential, in 1905, had been swept up in New York’s Armstrong Investigation, and so, as historian Beatrix Hoffman (no relation to Frederick) wrote, “[b]ecause of their industry’s public image problems, insurance executives knew their opposition to compulsory health insurance would be perceived as brazen self-interest.”
They needed a front man, and the guy who was famous for discovering the causes of numerous public health crises was perfect. Thus, Frederick Hoffman became the most well-known face of a massive, multiyear effort to stop the AALL’s campaign. He was remarkably effective.
In the years between 1916, when he resigned from AALL, and 1920, when nonprofit state-funded health insurance finally died, Hoffman wrote numerous pamphlets trashing the German single-payer government health system, “exposing” corruption in the British efforts at a National Health Service, and arguing that America’s healthcare system would be thrown into chaos and crisis if the AALL’s programs were adopted.
His work was widely distributed, as historian Daniel Rodgers noted: “The Prudential saturated the state capitols with his pamphlets.”
His 1917 pamphlet Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance, and the subsequent More Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance, published two years later, were his most widely cited and most consequential writings.
Historian Beatrix Hoffman wrote that the Facts pamphlet “resembled Race Traits and Tendencies in its impressive presentation of statistics and graphs alongside passionate polemics.” Frederick Hoffman refuted every figure the Progressives used in defense of their plan, from “Misleading Data on German Longevity” to “Misleading Estimate of Cost” and “Disregard of Actuarial Methods.”
Appealing to the Daniel Boone mythos of rugged, independent individualism that didn’t require assistance from government, Frederick Hoffman wrote in More Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance:
“The ever-present menace to democracy and liberty is the perversion of the legislative function [toward providing health insurance].”
Hoffman’s writing and speeches shook America’s political systems, particularly as this German-born “man of science” warned of the dire consequences to American liberty and democracy represented by universal health insurance.
In 1918, John R. Commons — one of the AALL’s cofounders — wrote that almost all the nation’s anti–compulsory health insurance propaganda “originates from one source; all of the ammunition, all of the facts and statistics that may come across, no matter who gives them to you, will be found to go back to the Prudential Insurance Co. of America, and to Mr. Frederick L. Hoffman.”
Prudential paid to transport Hoffman all across America, from media events to congressional hearings to a trip to England to document the horrors of their National Health Service system, which had gone into effect in 1911.
He wrote from London, in a widely read paper, that because of the British National Insurance Act, “The fine spirit of the English working classes, at one time the finest people of that type in the world, is gone, entirely gone.”
Historian Beatrix Hoffman wrote:
“His agitation was tireless, his influence widespread. . . . His reputation as an expert allowed Hoffman to participate in the deliberations of the health insurance commissions of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Connecticut, and to successfully persuade commission members to vote against the plan.”
In 1920, in large part because of Prudential’s efforts and Hoffman’s warnings, California’s voters resoundingly turned down a voter initiative in that state to provide health insurance, and, although New York’s Senate passed the bill, it died in committee in the Assembly.
While the AALL continued to campaign for state-funded health insurance until their dissolution in 1946, they never again gained enough traction to get their proposal before any state legislatures or the US Congress.
Having succeeded in killing state-funded health insurance, Hoffman, in the later 1920s, turned his attention back to his theory that Black people would eventually die out, joining the Eugenics Research Association (whose work was later used by Hitler to justify racial separation and his “final solution”).
In 1929, Hoffman asserted, in the African American publication Opportunity, that “the white race is almost solely responsible . . . for the health progress which the South has made during the last generation” and that Black people moving in large numbers into cities would “lead to a thoroughly unwholesome state of affairs which unquestionably will express itself in course of time in a lower birth rate and a higher death rate.”
Hoffman’s influence lasted long past his death in 1946 (which satisfied his stated desire to live long enough to see FDR out of office). As late as 1984, according to reporting in the Wall Street Journal, Prudential was still collecting premiums from African Americans that were “in some instances more than a third higher” than those paid by whites.
We even see an echo of it in the opposition of southern white racist Senators to Medicare in 1965, arguably leading to the 20% hole in that system that requires MediGap policies to fill.
Were it not for “scientific racism,” America would have long ago joined the rest of the developed world with a competent and efficient national healthcare system. Instead, we’re stuck with for-profit health insurance giants sucking our blood like giant leeches attached to our backs.
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