The Minnesota 8th District Congressional race has been labeled as a choice between the science of healing vs. the science of killing, or between conservation and exploitation.
A year ago Stewart Mills signaled his candidacy with an open video "letter" to Rep. Rick Nolan. It promoted the need and right to own an assault rifle as a constitutional symbol of American freedom. Now with the Ebola outbreak, this NRA and its wider coalition doctrine is pitted even more squarely against government involvement in health, both at the preventive and care level.
We don't have a surgeon general because the NRA effectively blocked his confirmation. The American Medical Association and NRA have been feuding for years over such things as the NRA's opposition to a physician's right to ask patients about guns, its killing of a CDC study on gun deaths, and medical consensus that our 30,000 annual gun deaths should be treated as a public health problem. This partisan austerity anti-government stance has cut in funding of the NIH and CDC such that the NIH director recently noted that we otherwise should have had an Ebola vaccine by now.
The market principle works well in profitably selling guns. But longstanding economic theory and empirical evidence demonstrates the market, which is reactive and not preventive, does not work this way in health care. Countries that long ago instituted universal care are organizationally better prepared for Ebola than the U.S. The insurance, pharmaceutical and gun industries record big profits while we underfund the only entity left to develop Ebola vaccine. Ebola exposes how attempts to use market-forces alone in health care have again failed the U.S.
What is most needed is the candidate most capable of working together with others to solve multiple serious problems. This is Rick Nolan.
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Dick Peterson
Nisswa
