Day: July 22, 2021

Missouri Teachers Plotted With CRT Advocate To Hide Radical Teaching

BY RICK MORAN

SEE: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/07/22/missouri-teachers-plotted-with-crt-advocate-to-hide-radical-teaching-from-parents-n1463953;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

In the Francis Howell School District about 35 miles west of St. Louis, Missouri, teachers met in September 2020 to determine the curriculum the students would follow for the coming year. Advising them was equity consultant LaGarrett J. King, an associate professor of social studies education at the University of Missouri.

In addition to discussing the curriculum, King tried to impress on the teachers the importance of teaching history the “right way.”

“This is not a safe space,” but rather a ‘racialized space,’” King said. “In many ways, a safe space is a space where white people tell us how not racist they are. And this is not that space.”

A video of the curriculum planning session surfaced on Rumble and was submitted by “wokeatfhsd,” who offered this description of the video.

Watch supporters of the proposed Black History course in the Francis Howell School District (in St Charles County, MO) present their sanitized sales pitches in public. Then go behind the scenes to see how Dr. King, their consultant (paid $15K by the district), sets them up to write a Critical Theory based history curriculum and hide it from parents. Finally, there are several minutes of questions asked by teachers and counselors in the district (answered by Dr. King) as they attempt to plan how to bypass parent concerns and hide the content of the curriculum in a push for social justice. This video is clipped from the full presentation for the sake of time, but the intent and meaning of speakers’ comments has not been changed.

NRO’s Ryan Mills offered some insights into King’s thinking. It’s not pretty.

King said “the first thing we have to understand is that our social studies and our history curriculum is political and racist,” and “there is no such thing as neutral history.” He then asked the team members to question whether they are developing black history curriculums through the historical lens of the oppressor. “We have made those who have oppressed people, the oppressor, we have humanized them,” he said.

The nation’s founding “means nothing to black people,” he said, calling history “psychologically violent” but one-sided. He also seemed to justify violence in the name of racial justice.

“All of our wars were about freedom, violence,” King said. “But yet, when black people say, ‘Hey … we need to take over, man. We need to burn this place down, we need to do this, we need to do that.’ ‘Oh no, you should do non-violence to achieve freedom.’ It’s silly. It’s prejudice.”

Would you want this man developing curricula for your kids?

One white teacher on the call said she had been teaching about white privilege for a decade.

“Kids are way more open,” she said, “but then they go home and they tell their parents, and then their parents get upset. I don’t advertise to my students when I’m teaching U.S. history that sometimes I would consider myself the anti-U.S. history teacher.”

Well…if the shoe fits…

Another white teacher said, “Sometimes I think we have deferred to letting that stop progress. We let noise keep progress from moving forward.”

All that “noise” from nosey parents. They should just sit down, shut up, and let us brainwash their kids in peace!

While the district’s teachers have privately discussed their efforts teach students through a decidedly progressive social justice lens, school leaders have publicly denied this is occurring. At a recent school board meeting, superintendent Nathan Hoven said the district has not adopted critical race theory into the framework of its curriculum. “We are not and have no interest in advancing any political agenda,” he said.

“While we support the work and many of Dr. King’s contributions, we vehemently disagree with any suggestions that teachers or staff hide the work we’re doing from parents and taxpayers,” the district told National Review in a statement provided by spokeswoman Jennifer Jolls. “We always strive to make decisions that we believe are in the best interests of students, and do so in a way that is transparent and accessible to all stakeholders.”

This is happening all over the country. It’s by no means a “conspiracy” in the traditional sense of the word. It’s Orwell’s “groupthink.” The symptoms of groupthink, identified by psychologist Irving Janis, match the madness in the desire to teach CRT.

Type I: Overestimations of the group — its power and morality

  • Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk-taking.
  • Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions.

Type II: Closed-mindedness

  • Rationalizing warnings that might challenge the group’s assumptions.
  • Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil, biased, spiteful, impotent, or stupid.

Type III: Pressures toward uniformity

  • Self-censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus.
  • Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.
  • Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group, couched in terms of “disloyalty”
  • Mindguards— self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information.

See anyone we know?

It’s apparent that, because the movement to teach this ideology is nationwide, only parents can stop it. Informed and concerned parents are the only ones who can save their children from being indoctrinated with these rancid ideas.

 

YouTube Removes Video on Vaccine Parental Rights

Was Biden Involved? YouTube Removes Video on Vaccine Parental Rights

BY TYLER O'NEIL

SEE: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/07/22/was-biden-involved-youtube-removes-video-on-vaccine-parental-rights-n1463781;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

The Biden White House has bragged about working with Big Tech to silence misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines, mentioning a “disinformation dozen” people. On Tuesday, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield expanded the misinformation alarm from the “disinformation dozen” to “conservative news outlets.” Meanwhile, YouTube had deleted a video that mentioned the COVID-19 vaccine — but focused on Washington, D.C.’s new legislation that threatens parental rights.

On Friday, Family Research Council (FRC) President Tony Perkins interviewed Mary Holland, president and general counsel of Children’s Health Defense. While Holland and her organization oppose many vaccines, she focused on the issue of parental rights in her interview with Perkins. On Monday, YouTube removed the video for “medical misinformation.” FRC appealed the decision that very day, and on Tuesday, YouTube rejected the appeal. Perkins had interviewed Holland on Washington Watch, a program broadcast on nearly 800 Christian radio stations as well as Christian TV.

“Big tech is teaming up with big government to crack down on speech that they dislike. I am deeply troubled by the cabal that is being formed between big tech and big government,” Perkins said in a statement on Thursday. “Big tech has shown itself hostile to conservative views, but now tech giants like YouTube are allowing social media to be weaponized by the Left to eliminate all counter views. This is indeed chilling.”

Recommended: Here’s What You Need to Know About Facebook’s Sneaky Campaign to Root Out ‘Extremism’

“While YouTube claims the interview with Mary Holland contained medical misinformation, there was no discussion whatsoever of medical advice,” Perkins argued. “The substance of the interview was focused on parental rights, consent, and notification. These days, apparently anything is a target if it remotely mentions a vaccine and doesn’t carry the registered trademark of the CDC. There are no open discussions allowed if Biden administration talking points are not followed.”

FRC published a transcript of the interview and shared the interview on Rumble, YouTube’s competitor. Perkins began the segment by announcing that the Parental Rights Foundation and Children’s Health Defense had filed a lawsuit against Washington, D.C., arguing that the D.C. Minor Consent for Vaccinations Amendment of 2020 is unconstitutional. The amendment allows minors between the ages of 11 and 18 to obtain vaccinations without parental knowledge or consent if the health care provider believes the minor is capable of meeting the informed consent standard.

Holland described the law as “very dangerous,” arguing that “parents won’t know what vaccines their children get.” She warned about the “active concealment required by this law that the parents who filed a religious exemption will not know that their children got vaccines.”

Perkins emphasized the threat to parental rights. “This would appear to me, as you’ve described it, Mary, intentionally designed to deceive parents,” he said. He noted that “there have been some health complications for some” who got the COVID-19 vaccines and he added, “a parent doesn’t know and all of a sudden their child could be deathly ill and they don’t know why.”

Holland noted that there have been over 9,000 reported deaths and more than 400,000 reported injuries from vaccine complications. The Children’s Health Defense website cites the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) for these numbers, which appear to include every recorded vaccine, not just COVID-19.

“The COVID shots, in particular, are very serious medical intervention. But every vaccine, like every drug, carries potential benefits and potential risks. That’s why parents have to play a role in these decisions,” Holland argued. “These are minors. It is inconceivable to me that an 11-year-old can adequately research and understand the potential benefits risks of a COVID shot. This is nonsense.”

In what may be her most controversial statement during the interview, Holland suggested that children might die as a result of the law.

“Your child could die from getting four COVID shots through a school,” she suggested. If the school asks the kid to get the shot and the child says, “Oh, yeah, give me the shot, sure, so our class can get the pizza party,” the parents would not know. “Then the mom or the dad take the kid to get to the COVID shot. We don’t know what that would do. It might be within a short period of time.”

Perkins then zeroed in on another pernicious aspect of the law: that the health provider would “bill the parents’ health insurer without them even knowing what the service provided was.”

Holland’s claim that kids might die from four vaccine shots may be hyperbolic, and she did not explicitly cite VAERS for the 9,000 number during the interview, but the segment clearly focused on parental rights, not fear-mongering over the COVID-19 vaccine or spreading misinformation about it.

Furthermore, children are extremely unlikely to contract COVID-19 and they are even less likely to develop serious illnesses from the disease. It makes very little sense to push this particular vaccine on them, given their low susceptibility.

Recent news from the Biden White House makes YouTube’s action on this video seem rather fishy. FRC, in particular, has faced demonization from the Left. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) put FRC on a “hate map” with the Ku Klux Klan. A deranged man used this map to target FRC, opening fire in the building and aiming to kill everyone there and place a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich by his victims’ heads. The SPLC condemned the attack, but it kept FRC on that list under false pretenses.

Recommended: Dems Endorse Anti-Christian SPLC Report: ‘It’s Time We Extinguish All Bigoted Beliefs’

Perkins did not shy away from connecting the dots to the White House.

“Americans need to wake up and realize that the Biden administration, like totalitarian governments in China, Russia and elsewhere are using COVID to restrict the fundamental freedoms of the citizens and it will not stop here,” the FRC president warned.

Marxist Support for Palestinian Terror Fuels Jew-Hate Throughout the West

Will those committed to Judeo-Christian values react before it's too late?

BY GUY MILLIERE

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/marxist-extremist-support-palestinian-terrorism-guy-milliere/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Reprinted From the Gatestone Institute.

London. May 23. An organization called The Palestinian Solidarity Campaign organized a protest against Israel. 180,000 people turned up. Placards compared Israelis to the Nazis, and black flags of jihadist movements, accompanied by cries of "Allahu Akbar", fluttered alongside the Palestinian flags. "Israel, the new Nazi state", some read; and "Nazis are still around, now they call themselves Zionists". This kind of comparison is now common among many in Europe who also seem sympathetic to Marxism, in which there always has to be an "oppressor" and "oppressed", never a "win-win" or a "making the pie bigger." Do these new Marxists, who compare Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, to the Third Reich and the Zionists to the Nazis, really not know what the Nazis did to six million Jews, or what Communists and Marxists today, in China, Russia, Cuba, or Venezuela, are still doing to their own citizens?

The protesters in London shouted openly anti-Semitic slogans. One demonstrator, Tariq Ali, a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review, addressing the crowd, implied that the Jews deserve a second Holocaust: "They have learned nothing from what happened to them in Europe. Nothing". Another man exhibited a drawing of Christ carrying the cross, along with the words: "Do not let them do the same thing again". A few days earlier, when a convoy adorned with Palestinian flags drove through a Jewish area in North London, shouts from loudspeakers included "Free Palestine", "F**k the Jews", "F**k their daughters", "F**k their mothers" and "Rape their daughters".

In Paris, the same day, protesters shouted similar slurs. Since the French government had banned the demonstration and had asked the police to disperse all groups carrying Palestinian flags, the demonstrators numbered "only" a few thousand. The French interior ministry said the ban was necessary to avoid "ugly incidents", as when, in 2014, in the heart of Paris's Jewish district, kosher restaurants and a synagogue were attacked.

In Berlin, a demonstration had been organized a few days earlier, on May 16. As in London and Paris, protesters also denounced Israel -- and Jews. Antonia Yamin, an Israeli television journalist reporting on the protest, was assaulted with firecrackers by demonstrators who heard her speak in Hebrew.

Similar protests -- in Stockholm, Brussels, Rome, Madrid, Warsaw, Los Angeles and New York -- indicate that all over the Western world, those imbued with Jew-hate no longer hesitate to make false and delusional accusations against Israel and Jews -- sadly, a long tradition in Europe. They no longer bother to hide it. Jew-hate is out in the open now, along with a readiness to physically attack Jews.

Although the organizers of these protests described them as "pro-Palestinian", they soon became more pro-terrorism. When, on May 11 and for the next 10 days, Hamas -- on the list of terrorist organizations in the European Union, the United States, and other nations -- began firing more than 4,000 rockets and missiles at Israel, a country the size of Vancouver Island, and Israel defended itself, most demonstrators sided with Hamas.

For those who may not know, Hamas's charter in its preamble states: "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it." It adds in its Article 7:

"The day of judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (kill the Jews), when the Jews will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him."

The protesters were supporting and making common cause with an anti-Semitic Islamic terrorist organization with a genocidal aim.

Journalists from major European and American media could have pointed out these comparisons, as well as the incitement to hatred of Israel and Jews; most did not.

Nearly all of the articles published in Europe and the United States nonchalantly described the protests and the hatred shouted by protestors, without drawing any connection between the protests and the subsequent assaults.

For decades, most articles on the Middle East have portrayed Israel in a negative light, not as a democracy under constant threat. Willfully or not, they promote Jew-hate. Hamas is often described as a "Palestinian militant group," almost never as a terrorist organization. Instead, Palestinian propaganda is repeated: the Gaza Strip is described as an "open-air prison" -- which it is -- but imposed by its own leadership, not by Israel. Israel completely withdrew from Gaza in 2005. All the same, Israel is accused of imposing a "blockade" on the coastal strip -- without a mention that everything necessary for the residents of Gaza is allowed, or that what is being blockaded are deadly weapons. Also never mentioned is the extreme brutality of Hamas operatives towards their own residents of Gaza, who are all Arabs, or that the Palestinian Authority still supports and finances terrorism. The Palestinian Authority's rewards and incentives for murdering Jews are also always left out.

Judea and Samaria are usually referred to as the West Bank, but recently the United States, instead, resumed using the tainted "occupied territories". Although Jews have inhabited the area for nearly 4,000 years -- Judea is named for Jews -- Israel is portrayed as occupying territory not its own. In April 2018, the major French magazine Paris Match published on its front page a portrait of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, smiling, in front of a large photo of Jerusalem's al Aqsa mosque. The caption described him not as the head of a terrorist organization but as a "political leader" -- you know, like Churchill. Inside the magazine, in an interview, Haniyeh falsely accused Israel of "war crimes". "The Palestinians", he added, "want to regain the land that the Jews have stolen from them". For the record, Palestinians, meaning Arabs who claim the land now home to Israel, did not even exist until the twentieth century. Yet no article correcting Haniyeh's lies accompanied the interview.

In addition, on May 21, Newsweek published an article in which the most deceptive elements of anti-Israel propaganda are gathered and Israel is defined, incorrectly, as "the initiator of violence". On May 28, The New York Times published on its front page photographs of Palestinian Arab children killed in Gaza. "They were only children... they wanted to be doctors artists, leaders", the paper stressed. The accompanying article did not mention that it was the rulers of these children who began the bombardment. The article did not even discuss Hamas -- or that when Israel turned over all of the Gaza Strip to the Arabs in 2005, they could easily have made it into a "Singapore on the Mediterranean". Instead, the article falsely claimed that the Arabs in Gaza were victims of Israeli violence. The former national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, wrote in a tweet: "I am canceling my subscription to NYTimes ... Today's blood libel of Israel and the Jewish people on the front page is enough." One wonders what took him so long.

On June 24, The New York Times published yet another biased report: "Gaza's Deadly Night: How Israeli Airstrikes Killed 44 People". The Times stated that "on May 16, Israeli airstrikes destroyed three apartment buildings, decimating several families". It never noted that Hamas had attacked Israel, that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, or that Israel invariably warns residents in advance about buildings set to be destroyed (for instance here and here), to provide time for the residents to leave rather than be injured or killed.

Europe's political leaders could have denounced the protests and incitement to hatred; instead, they spoke about Israel and the Palestinian terror organizations in the same breath, as if there were no difference between the firefighter and the arsonist. Europe's leaders rarely spoke of Palestinian terrorism -- instead, many accused Israel of "violence against the Palestinian populations".

Josep Borrell, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, recently spoke of the "warlike arrogance" of Israeli politicians, of "the dehumanization of the Palestinians by a large part of the Israeli political class and society". His apparently uninformed -- or malicious -- positions are those of the great majority of leaders of European countries. French Foreign Minister Jean Yves Le Drian went even further. On May 23, he described Israel as an "apartheid" country, thereby choosing to ignore what he must know: that Israel is home to a population of 1.8 million Arab citizens who enjoy the same rights as Jews. Israel's government replied that Le Drian had not told the truth and had promoted antisemitic hatred.

A few days earlier, on May 18, when Israel was being subjected to some of the 4,000 missiles fired at it by Hamas, French Prime Minister Jean Castex first accused the state of "colonizing Jerusalem", then announced that he was "worried about the fate of the civilian populations in Gaza". He did not even touch on what Hamas and Iran are planning for Israel's population.

American leaders, unlike many European politicians, generally show respect for the core values of democratic societies and Western civilization. Now, however, when some American politicians repeat openly anti-Semitic statements, their political party refuses to reprimand them or even remove them from committees that might lead them to further misrepresentations. After U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar made allegations that Jews buy influence with money ("It's all about the Benjamins"), Congress passed a resolution condemning antisemitism in a vague and general manner. It condemned discrimination in just about everything. On June 7, Omar sent out a tweet saying:

"We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity.

"We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban."

The tweet prompted 12 Jewish Democrats in the House of Representatives to send a letter maintaining that "there is no moral equivalency between the US and Israel and Hamas and the Taliban" and asking Omar to "clarify" her position. Her answer was a denial of the evidence, along with an arguable, "I was in no way equating terrorist organizations with democratic countries".

House leaders then issued a joint statement. saying they "welcome[d] the clarification" from Omar and that the incident was over.

"It takes considerable skill," Attorney Stephen M. Flatow commented, "to come up with the words to sound just apologetic enough to get your critics off your back, but without actually apologizing."

Then, on June 29, Omar declared that her Jewish Democratic colleagues who say that she is antisemitic "haven't been partners in justice" and "haven't been equally engaging in seeking justice around the world".

Another politician, U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, has also been repeating, falsely, that "Israel is a racist state". On June 15, she published a tweet saying, "Israel's government doesn't value Palestinian lives. It has managed a decades-long ethnic cleansing project, funded by the U.S." On June 30, she sent another tweet about Israel: "This is not democracy, this is apartheid." As of this writing, there has been no reaction from the leaders of her party.

In Europe, for years, most of the leading politicians have chosen to support the "Palestinian cause" while staying blind to the viciousness of Palestinian terrorism, the killing of Israeli Jews and the repeated thirst of Palestinian leaders for Jewish blood. These European leaders fund non-governmental organizations that -- again dishonestly -- accuse Israel of "war crimes" and other atrocities. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, now in the 16th year of his four-year term, is received in Paris and Berlin with all the respect due a lawful head of state. During each of their visits, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron maintained that they support the creation of a Palestinian state -- without ever addressing the lethal statements of Abbas or the support and incentivization the Palestinian Authority gives to murder, terrorism, and other breaches of human rights. When Israel is attacked, if they denounce the attacks at all, they immediately add that Israel's response must not be "disproportionate" and, from the U.N., that the "fighting must stop". They never talk about the relationship between the hatred of Israel -- to which they contribute -- that is rising in Europe or the Jew-hate that follows Israel-hate.

The United States under the presidency of President Donald J. Trump was an unconflicted friend of Israel. Trump unequivocally denounced the Palestinian Authority's ties to terrorism and quickly ceased regarding Abbas as a legitimate interlocutor. Trump stressed that Israel is a democracy under attack, which deserves to live in peace.

The Biden administration has been following a different path; it has promoted and funded the Palestinian Authority, without so much as a murmur on its continuing support for terrorism. Biden, rather, seems to be promising to reward terrorism. His administration has already given Abbas, who has who has not stopped calling for Israel's destruction, $75 million and allocated an additional $100 million for aid, apparently with no guarantees that it would arrive where it was intended. The United States has additionally pledged that it will rebuild Gaza, still ruled by a genocidal Hamas, and open a consulate for Palestinians in Jerusalem.

When anti-Semites attacked Jews in New York and Los Angeles a few weeks ago, Biden said nothing. On May 21, probably regarding his silence as unacceptable, several Jewish groups sent him a letter asking for a response. Three days later, he posted a simple tweet: "The recent attacks on the Jewish community are despicable, and they must stop." Aaron Keyak, who was the "Jewish engagement director" of the 2020 Biden presidential campaign, offered advice -- but to Jews. His "solution"? "It pains me to say this, but if you fear for your life or physical safety take off your kippah and hide your Magen David. [star of David]..."

With the exception of a few Central European countries, Europe has become an anti-Israel continent. It is now unsafe for Jews -- especially those who support Israel or do not see why they should hide that they are Jews. A 2018 poll carried out in the seven main European countries showed that only 22.6% of people in Western Europe had a favorable opinion of Israel. The poll indicated that older people were more sympathetic towards Israel than younger people. A 2019 study, conducted by the European Union's Agency for Fundamental Rights, found that 44% of European Jews between the ages of 16 and 34 have experienced anti-Semitic harassment; 85% reported "that people in their countries accuse or blame them for anything done by the Israeli government", and 41% said they have considered emigration. Since 2019, the situation has not improved.

Most people in the United States are still pro-Israel. A recent poll shows that 75% of Americans have a favorable view of Israel. Although America today is also a far safer country for Jews than Europe, the recent anti-Israel demonstrations, and the physical assaults on Jews in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere, and especially the presence of outspoken anti-Semites in Congress, suggest that changes could easily take place. One hopes that Americans committed to the Judeo-Christian values of the Free World ​​will react before it is too late.

U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips, a Jewish Democratic Congressman from Minnesota, tweeted in May:

"I'll say the quiet part out loud; it's time for 'progressives' to start condemning anti-semitism and violent attacks on Jewish people with the same intention and vigor demonstrated in other areas of activism. The silence has been deafening."

On May 25, Senate and House Republicans joined together to introduce the "Preventing Anti-Semitic Hate Crimes Act". Senator Ted Cruz stated:

"Antisemitism is a unique prejudice with a unique history, which has resulted in unique horrors throughout history... This wave of abhorrent violence is directed at Jews for being Jewish, just like Hamas is firing rockets into Israel because they want to murder Jews and eliminate the Jewish state."

On June 15, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution asserting that "Anti-Semitism remains a serious and growing danger for Jews in the United States and around the world." It is, however, merely a resolution. It does not point to the causes of the danger -- presumably 2,500 years of Jew-hate combined with the newly-imported Islamic kind -- or offer any means to fight it.

Dr. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, is the author of 27 books on France and Europe.

FREEDOM PHARMACY, OHIO: Chucking insurance

BY MARTY SCHLADEN

SEE: https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2021/06/22/chucking-insurance/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Pharmacist Nate Hux at Freedom Pharmacy outside of Columbus, Ohio. Hux last year started the pharmacy, which operates outside the insurance system, to help patients save on generic drugs. A small number of similar operations are popping up around the United States. Photo by Marty Schladen, Ohio Capital Journal.

To a growing number of pharmacists, using insurance to pay for most generic drugs makes about as much sense as getting auto insurance to cover your oil changes.

Problem is, if you try to buy generics without using your insurance card at the vast, vast majority of American pharmacies, you’re going to pay a “cash” price that is wildly inflated by the crazy system of middlemen, rebates and cost-shifts imposed on pharmacies by the insurance system.

The result, unbeknownst to many consumers, is that your copayment for many generic drugs is often more than what the entire price would be if you could get them on a truly open market.

Consider: 

An Ohio patient recently was making a $141 copayment through her insurance for 180 pills of Celecoxib, a generic version of the anti-inflammatory drug Celebrex. When she went to a new pharmacy that eschews insurance, she was able to get it for $23.05.

That means the copayment for the drug is six times as much as what drug cost on the open market — even when you add in a dispensing fee. 

And the cash price in a pharmacy that takes insurance — which is almost all of them? About $1,165, or 50 times as much as if she could get it from a secondary wholesaler, the pharmacy equivalent of the open market.

That vast cost difference is only part of the reason why Nate Hux and a tiny number of other pharmacists in the United States are starting up pharmacies that exclude insurance companies and their middlemen: pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs. Hux said it also allows him to be a better pharmacist because it’s a cleaner system that pays him only to practice his profession.

For patients, the savings and better health outcomes can be intertwined. Particularly benefitting are customers with no insurance and the growing number who are on high-deductible plans.

“They just don’t take medicine because it’s stupid expensive,” Hux said recently as he leaned against the counter at Freedom Pharmacy outside of Columbus. “So we opened the door for them to be able to take 90% of the medicine that’s out there at a reasonable price: $15 or less for a 90-day supply. Why do we need insurance for $15 for a 90-day supply?”

After long consideration, Hux in December opened Freedom Pharmacy in a suite next to Pickerington Pharmacy, which he also owns and which operates within the insurance system. 

“We have a pharmacy living in both worlds, so we can help guide a patient to the best world for them to live in,” he said.

For patients taking some drugs, insurance is essential. 

The most expensive medicines, brand-name and specialty drugs are typically under patent and can cost thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars a month. So it makes sense to insure yourself against that expense the way you would your car against collisions or your house against fires and floods.

But as drugs go off-patent, generic versions flood in, they undercut one another and drive prices on the open market down. But most patients can’t get them on the open market.

That means they can’t take advantage of savings that have been generated by a revolution in generic drugs.

In terms of volume, generics made up just over half the prescription drugs dispensed in 2005. In 2019, they made up more than 86%.

“The bottom line is brand name medicines are becoming less and less important,” Hux said.

You often wouldn’t know that when insurers and pharmacy-benefit managers are involved. For example, the anti-HIV drug Truvada last year went off of patent. But when 11 generic versions flooded the market this spring, the cash price at traditional pharmacies was actually higher than that for the patented drug.

The increase is caused by a tangled mess of manufacturer discounts to pharmacy benefit managers, non-transparent reimbursements by PBMs on which pharmacies often lose money, and their need to make money on cash prices to offset those losses.

But the bottom line is that a person can to go to Blueberry Pharmacy — a shop outside of Pittsburgh that doesn’t use insurance — and buy a generic version of Truvada for $25 a month. In a traditional pharmacy, an uninsured customer would face a markup on a baseline price of $2,100.

That’s what motivated Blueberry owner Kyle McCormick to open his insurance-less pharmacy last year.

“As I saw how inexpensive these medications are, there’s no way you’re not going to have a cost increase with insurance,” he said.

Greg Lopes, spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, the PBM industry group, last month insisted that the middlemen working for the insurers (often as part of the same corporation) bring value to all types of drug transactions.

 “America’s pharmacy benefit managers, PBMs, have a long history of supporting generic drugs to lower prescription drug costs for patients,” he said. “The key to lowering prescription drug costs is through enhanced competition among brand-name drugs from generic and biosimilar medications.”

Be that as it may, the current system of manufacturer discounts is forcing arbitrary list prices ever higher and increasing the pain for many patients, critics say. It’s felt by the uninsured as well as the increasing numbers of those who are on high-deductible plans and who have to pay coinsurance, said Robert Popovian, a former Pfizer vice president who, as both a pharmacist and an economist, now works as a consultant and analyst.

Referring to coinsurance — where you have to pay a percentage of the bill — Popovian used the example of Delta Dental, a prominent insurer. When you have a procedure, say getting a crown, you pay a percentage of a price that Delta negotiated with your dentist, Popovian said.

Not so with coinsurance for prescriptions.

“Pharmaceutical benefit is the only benefit within the health care system that patients end up paying their coinsurance based on a retail price rather than a negotiated price,” Popovian said.

The same is true for the uninsured and those who have to pay full freight until they meet their deductibles. Their payments are based on list prices manufacturers are inflating to make up for non-transparent discounts they’re providing pharmacy benefit managers, Popovian said.

It’s a problem with which Chris Johnson has long been familiar. He opened his non-insurance Medsavers Pharmacy in Austin, Texas, in 2005. 

Being in a state that long has had the highest rates of medically uninsured, he knew what those people faced at the pharmacy counter.

“The uninsured were getting screwed and they were getting screwed not because the pharmacies were doing it to them, but because the contracts the pharmacies were signing with the PBMs,” he said. “The contracts actually forced the pharmacies to raise the prices on the uninsured patients to maximize their insurance reimbursements and I felt like there was something ethically, incredibly wrong with that.”

Johnson said he’s done a brisk business. But most of the dozen or so pharmacies in the country operating outside the insurance/PBM sphere when he started have fallen by the wayside for reasons unknown, he said.

Now the only insurance-free pharmacies the Capital Journal could find were Johnson’s in Austin, Hux’s near Columbus, McCormick’s near Pittsburgh and Genscripts, which operates five locations in Oklahoma.

However, two of them have opened their doors since 2020 and they might represent a way forward for independent pharmacies. 

One reason independents are important is that they’re the only game in town for many small communities, and their loss could create pharmacy deserts in some areas.

Even so, independents are the only class of pharmacies to close stores faster than new ones opened between 2015 and 2019, according to data from the National Community Pharmacists Association.

“There are still new pharmacies opening and trying to make their way with many focused on different types of revenue sources and services,” said Kurt Proctor, NCPA’s vice president for strategic initiatives. 

“I think it’s a very viable business model,” he said of pharmacists operating at least partly outside the insurance/PBM sphere.

For Hux, the financial advantages for customers are undeniable. But he said he has an even bigger reason for pursuing a non-insurance model.

At Freedom Pharmacy, he charges patients what he paid for a drug and then tacks on a dispensing fee of $8 or $12, depending on whether it’s a 30 or 90-day supply.

“That’s what a pharmacist is worth per prescription to make sure they’re vetting the prescription properly, to make sure the patient understands how to take the medication properly, to make sure there are no drug-drug interactions, to make sure we call the physician if there’s a dose problem,” Hux said. “Those are all things that go into every prescription that we do.”

Opting out of the insurance/PBM system fundamentally changes the economics — and Hux said it saves him from scrambling every day to fill ever more prescriptions.

“All of our profit comes from our services, like checking and vetting out the prescriptions, screening the doses,” he said. “I can tell you this: The things that you get paid for are what you become good at.”

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SEE ALSO: https://freedomrxohio.com/

AND: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOpJJCcXg4NzrjTguimxIVg/videos