The public social security system constitutes one the State’s most immoral and harmful interventions into public life, responsible for the greatest number of sinister effects on a wide range of activities and rights. Social security corrupts every action it touches: from the fraudulent pyramid pension system to the obligation to pay health care services and pension plans irrespective of voluntary use; from the unfair competition it represents to innovative private medical insurance companies to the unemployment its elevated costs generate. Social security holds us all under its empire of permanent coercion. As is well known, this whole chain of injustice and nonsensical intervention is justified by the self-legitimizing idiocy of a “social right.” 

 

It is paradoxical that one of the least known, but most perverse effects of this statist system of financing and directing health care is the abolition of one of mankind’s true human rights: freedom of expression and its corollary, the right to inform others. And so, as totalitarian as it might seem, the European Union expressly prohibits informing patients and the general public about the properties of medicines the state has decided can only be sold through medical prescription. Specifically, the first section of article 88 of directive 2001/83/EC says that “Member States shall prohibit the advertising to the general public of medicinal products which: are available on medical prescription only.”

 

This ban on direct patient information has consequences that go far beyond the serious and intolerable violation of one of our most basic freedoms. It keeps millions of European citizens ignorant of the differences among pharmaceuticals or of the existence of new and better medicines for the treatment of their illnesses. The high cost of staying informed under these circumstances leads people to make decisions other than those they would normally; it leads to poor health; and, on occasion, it can even mean the difference between life and death. For example, an estimated 65,000 Europeans suffering hyper-cholesterol die each year without realizing they could have been treated with Estatinas, one of the drugs whose advertising is banned.   

 

And the saddest thing is that keeping patients in the dark is the European directive’s exact aim. The social security system cannot support the financial cost having patients demand the most advanced therapies available would mean. So, our political leaders decided the best thing is to ensure we never find out about them and thus save their system. Proof positive the industry is being gagged and our sick abandoned by politicians hoping to hide the decrepit state of a monstrous health care system based on universal coercive financing and subsidizing the purchase of medicines, lies in the third part of article 88, where it adds that the member states can also prohibit information on medicines that do not require prescriptions, but which are financed by the public health care system. This kidnapping of freedom of expression is, with all probability, one of the interventions causing more victims throughout Europe. Ending this prohibition and the system that needs it to survive is not only vital to recovering one of our fundamental rights, but to taking better care of our health and protecting ourselves from the threat that is social “security.”