Image via Soylent Green
Editor’s Note: This isn’t even meant to be funny; it’s just an exercise in replacing certain words in a news story about a militia with others about healthcare and considering the results.
Federal agents from the Internal Revenue Service, Bureau of Investigation, and Ted Kennedy Memorial Health Rationing Board swarmed a makeshift health clinic in Michigan yesterday, arresting eight doctors who were audaciously planning to treat patients without government authority.
Agents moved quickly against the group, known as Primum Non Nocere (Latin for “first, do no harm”), because its members were planning to treat patients sometime in April, prosecutors said. Authorities seized Band-Aids in the raid but would not say whether they found any medicine.
The arrests have dealt "a severe blow to a dangerous organization that today stands accused of conspiring to levy war against nationalized healthcare," said Attorney General Eric Holder.
Authorities said the arrests underscored the dangers of homegrown anti-national healthcare extremism of the sort seen before 2009, when 2,375,000 people who had health insurance died versus the 45,000 people who died with none.
In an indictment, unsealed today, prosecutors said the group began training to treat patients without federal authority before pResident Barack Obama was elected in 2008, each spending about a decade and hundreds of thousands of dollars learning to diagnose and treat patients without some dweeb in the District of Criminals with a six-figure-salaried desk job, thanks to a friend in Congress, telling them how.
Frank Burns, 54, of Clayton, Mich., and one of his sons were identified as the ringleaders of the group. Burns, who was known as "Doc," organized the group in whitecoat fashion, and members were assigned secret names, prosecutors said. Ranks ranged from "attending physician" to "intern," according to the group's Web site.
"It started out as a Hippocratic Oath thing," said Mary Burns, his ex-wife. "You go to a medicine cabinet. You put a Band-Aid on someone’s cut without permission from the Health Rationing Board. You take your chances. I think Frank started to take it a little too far when he decided to treat hangnails."
Prosecutors said Burns had identified certain people near his home as potential patients. He and other members discussed luring the people to the Primum Non Nocere offices, using real medicine to treat them, saving a dying patient after a traffic accident, or convincing patients they should tell family members about the care they’d received, according to the indictment. After such actions, the group allegedly planned to spread out into the community and offer their services at discounted rates in a competitive standoff with the law.
"It is believed by the Primum Non Nocere that this engagement would then serve as a catalyst for a more widespread uprising against nationalized healthcare," the indictment said.
The charges against the eight include seditious conspiracy, plotting to levy war against U.S. health care financing law; possessing medical equipment during a crime of doing no harm; teaching the practice of medicine; and attempting to use a weapon of mass benevolence -- homemade tongue depressors. The defendants were sent to Gitmo, the former prison for Islamic terrorists now serving as a holding cell for people who violate national healthcare policy.
Primum Non Nocere says on its Web site its name means "First, do no harm" and describes the words as part of a secret language that, thanks to Obamacare, fewer will now be privileged to know. The group quotes several medical manuals and declares: "We believe that the greatest mistake in the treatment of diseases is that there are physicians and now bureaucrats who run them; one knows how to keep people alive, the other knows how to use Microsoft Excel."
The site features a picture of 17 men in white coats, all holding large stethoscopes, and includes videos of men armed with patient charts running through an emergency room. Each wears a shoulder patch that bears a staff entwined by two serpents in the form of a double helix and surmounted by wings.
Actually, she's Nurse Wretched.
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