|
Pulse of the Twin Cities Login |
|
If you do not have an account yet
Create One.
|
|
|
Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
|
|
|
|
Hatching a New Governor
Wednesday 01 November @ 14:39:36 |
 BY LEO CASHMAN
When Mike Hatch was attorney general, he didn’t do “business as usual” or take the path of least resistance. Hatch made a difference. He preserved health freedom, took on HMO corruption, inefficiency and unfair denial of health claims. These actions weren’t just nice-sounding campaign bites, they were major initiatives.
 The Health Freedom Issue
The health freedom movement in Minnesota was spawned in the mid-1990s by consumer concerns over vexing dental board and medical board actions. Skip Humphrey was our attorney general back in those years; under Humphrey’s watch, the Dental Board pursued the state’s most prominent mercury-free dentist, Dr. Gary Jacobson. The Medical Board pursued Jacobson’s close friend and colleague, Dr. Keith Sehnert. An author and speaker, Sehnert was the state’s most prominent holistic physician. The attack on Sehnert was clearly an attack on holistic medicine; there were no patient complaints against him and no allegations of patient harm, yet board pressure forced him into early retirement. The medical board pursued another holistic practitioner, Helen Healy, the state’s most prominent naturopathic medical doctor, despite a lack of patient complaints and despite any allegation of harm to patients. Her offense? By being a naturopath in Minnesota, she was guilty of “practicing medicine without a license.”
Freedom activists such as myself learned that the state attorney general’s office is about the only check and balance against the otherwise unchecked, unlimited power of the state licensing boards. We met with Skip Humphrey in 1997 asking him to intervene as only he could—to make these biased board actions go away.
But Humphrey was totally unwilling to challenge such board cases; he was essentially a rubber stamp to health board actions, however inimical they were to our basic freedoms.
Mike Hatch was quietly very different from his predecessor; without fanfare. Hatch checked the actions of the health boards. In one pivotal case, he reviewed an assortment of charges against a holistic doctor (who prefers to remain unnamed here, as he is still practicing), and concluded that the board’s demands had constituted a violation of the practitioner’s freedom of speech; Hatch also saw restraint of trade violations in some of the board’s demands. He made the board drop its unlawful demands. In short, Hatch remembered that he was the people’s attorney, not just a servant to every agency’s whims. The presence of a Hatch check and balance on the health boards changed the whole culture of how the health boards conducted themselves during the past eight years.
Private Mercury Lessons
After listening to parents of autistic children and being educated by them as to the causes of autism, Hatch had a series of private meetings with Dr. Mark Geier, M.D. and his son David Geier. The Geiers, noted researchers and speakers, made detailed presentations on how thimerosal, a highly toxic mercury compound that has been used in most vaccines during the 1990s, is strongly implicated in the phenomenal surge in autism seen in Minnesota and around the country during the 1990s. In the privacy of the AG’s office, the Geiers’ audience consisted of Mike Hatch and some of his top staffers, including Lori Swanson, who is currently running to succeed Hatch as attorney general. These private meetings with Hatch took place at a time when Pawlenty’s Department of Health was turning a cold shoulder on the Geiers, despite their detailed research, which had been published in respected scientific journals.
The children caught up in this autism explosion were not born autistic. Some children happen to have had far more difficulty than normal in coping with the toxic insults of the ever-expanding childhood vaccination schedule of the 1990s. (see http://www.Safeminds.org for details). Their autism occurred following their vaccinations, and the autism curve closely parallels the ever-increasing number of mandatory childhood vaccines that children received during the 1990s. Indeed, the autism explosion skipped over the Amish community in the U.S., which does not vaccinate, and it skipped Europe and the rest of the world, which did not get caught up in the vaccination mania.
Hatch took the evidence of mercury’s damage to susceptible children, studying it very diligently. He learned from the science and from the parents’ many sad, insightful stories. But could he take on a target so big, so powerful as a negligent big Pharma? The book Evidence of Harm, by New York Times health writer David Kirby, has a brief mention of the Hatch– Geier private meetings (p. 359). It says that “by late August (2004), Hatch began interviewing law firms to represent the state for possible action against Eli Lilly and the vaccine manufacturers. But by late August, he still seemed reluctant to make a move, according to Dallas attorney Andy Waters. Waters said Hatch was under pressure from Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty not to proceed (though the two rivals were barely on speaking terms).”
Nancy Hokkanen, a mother of an autistic child who organized the logistics of the meetings with Hatch, remembers the Hatch-Pawlenty difference. “Mike Hatch took the time to investigate the parents’ documentation showing mercury is harming Minnesota’s children. But when I gave Heidi Holste, Governor Pawlenty’s health aide, a one-inch stack of medical studies and investigations of mercury, her response was, ‘I’m not going to read all this.’”
Fighting the Blue Crosses
A.J. Paron-Wildes, of Stillwater, was another mother in on some of the Hatch-Geier meetings. Her son, Devin, suffered severe neurological damage after his MMR shot. Paron-Wildes founded and presides over a grassroots group known as BEAT (Biological Education for Autistic Treatment). But her first dealings with Hatch go back six years. “Mike has been a godsend to us,” she says. “Blue Cross Blue Shield was playing major games with delaying his (Devin’s) treatment. Blue Cross was denying all children mental health claims until Mike Hatch stepped in … He was the only one we could find for help. We’d called the University of Minnesota, the Department of Commerce and other state agencies; his office was the only one who would set up a meeting with me,” she recalls.
“When I came for the meeting, Mike Hatch came out and sat down with me, face to face. I had no idea I’d be sitting down with him, face to face. I was embarrassed … my papers were disorganized. Personally, he went through my paper work and organized it and figured it out. Then he spent a lot of time with me, wanting to know what it was like—what was my struggle, what was our goal and what did we need for our son … Blue Cross had broken me down through the processes we did—I didn’t think we had any hope of getting anywhere. He not only comforted me, he assured me he was going to do his best to resolve the issue.”
Assisted Lori Swanson and other staffers, Hatch’s office sued Blue Cross. It ended up settling out of court. “They changed the system so that the other autistic families do not have to go through what we had to, with them,” Paron-Wildes explains. “And the other insurance companies followed suit. It was a pivot point of changing how insurance companies looked at autism and covered autism.”
“Hatch was the only one that was strong enough to stand up to them (Blue Cross). They were untouchable … Truly, I’d have to say, when it comes down to what is right for the families of Minnesota, versus big business and industry, Mike’s gonna do what’s right for the families—even if its not the best political move for him.”
|
|
 |
|
|
Comments -
Post Comment |
|
The comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for its content.
NO comments yet! Be the first!
|
|
|
