It’s an idea that’s just crazy enough to work.
Doctors at an insane asylum in election battleground Pennsylvania are registering patients to vote, the Washington Free Beacon has disclosed. And so are doctors in hospitals across the nation.
One reason: Voting is good for your health.
Another reason: To elect Democrats.
The effort is coordinated by an outfit called Vot-ER, which, not surprisingly, is run by “progressives” — meaning ex-officio Democratic operatives. A legman for Vice President Kamala Harris founded the group.
Crackpot Idea
The report notes that Penn State University’s Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute is loaded with mentally ill patients who can’t handle “activities of daily living,” the Free Beacon reported, citing the institute. As well, “some are ‘suicidal, aggressive, or dangerous to themselves or others.’”
Despite that, one priority for the giggle academy’s headshrinkers is pushing the patients to vote.
“Located in a swing state that could decide the 2024 election, the hospital asks psychiatric inpatients, regardless of diagnosis, if they would be interested in “voter registration tools” that let them check their nearest polling station and register to vote online,” the website reported:
Patients can also request a mail-in ballot with “assistance” from hospital staff, according to a pair of papers about the project, which began in 2020.
Since then, the hospital has continued registering patients — even those who are not near discharge and have not yet been stabilized — on the grounds that voting, as the institute puts it, is a “therapeutic tool” that “helps empower patients and makes them feel good.”
A top doc at the facility thinks “voting is an important part of the recovery process,” but wouldn’t answer the Free Beacon’s questions.
The facility’s website explains:
81.4% of respondents from the adult inpatient units see voting as essential. For 66.4%, voting nurtures a feeling of community connection, and a significant 55.8% view voting as a contributor to their mental health recovery journey. This resonating feedback underscores the importance of voting as a therapeutic tool and its role in fostering a sense of community, identity and purpose.
Citing the American Medical Association, the website claimed that voting is a “pivotal social determinant of health.”
Vot-ER
Backing the asylum’s efforts is the nonprofit Vot-ER, founded by Alister Martin, a Harvard Medical School emergency physician. An “adviser” to Harris, Martin “helped run the White House’s health equity portfolio.” Politicking at a patient’s bedside, he thinks, is part of his job.
“Vot-ER has helped more than 50,000 doctors register their patients to vote.” the Free Beacon reported:
Its signature product is a badge — with a QR code that pulls up an online voter registration platform — that health care workers can wear around their necks. Doctors ask patients whether they’ve registered to vote and, if the answer is no, encourage them to scan the badge.
Noting that Vot-ER is a Democratic operation, the Free Beacon explained that doctors have used the organization’s material to register patients across a panoply of healthcare facilities, including even cancer hospitals and palliative care facilities. The bedpan politics include registering the parents of critically ill infants to vote, the website revealed.
HHS, AMA Involvement
The major medical organizations are pushing healthcare workers to “ask patients whether they plan to vote.” And the U.S. Health and Human Services Department (HHS), whose No. 2 official is a man who thinks he is a woman, “encourages federally funded health centers to provide ‘voter registration activities’ to ‘underserved populations.’”
The HHS guidance is the result of a 2021 executive order instructing all federal agencies to promote “access to voting.” Vot-ER has advised the Biden-Harris administration on how to implement that order, according to documents obtained by the Washington Examiner, and, amid a tightening presidential race, appears to be targeting traditional Democratic voting blocs. …
The group even has scripts doctors can use to encourage “undocumented patients” to register their “friends and family members who are citizens” to vote. Vot-ER did not respond to a request for comment.
Vot-ER’s hard-left activities include training on nonexistent “medical racism.”
As for Martin, “he once told a patient recovering from an asthma attack to vote, since that was the ‘only way’ to ‘take the smog out of the air.’”
Critics Speak Out
The American Medical Association falsely believes that voting is a “pivotal social determinant of health.” However, critics say physicians are doing the wrong thing, particularly at Penn State’s psychiatric facility.
As the Free Beacon disclosed:
One paper indicates that “no psychiatric diagnoses were excluded” from the institute’s voter registration drive when it began in the six weeks leading up to the 2020 election, during which time nearly a fifth of the hospital’s patients had been involuntarily committed and nearly a fourth had psychotic disorders. Another paper indicates that patients were approached with voter registration tools “even if discharge was not upcoming.”
A psychiatrist at New York University’s Tisch Hospital, Jane Rosenthal, said that patients could be exploited and mightn’t have the ability to consent.
“Oftentimes these patients do not have the capacity to make a decision early on in an acute hospitalization,” she told the Free Beacon. “What are we doing ethically posing this kind of question to people who are so vulnerable?”
Psychologist Elliot Kaminetzky worries that involuntarily committed patients might “fear that not registering to vote will be seen as non-compliant, necessitating a longer stay.”
Such is the fervor to push the mentally ill to vote that psychiatrists at the Penn State sanitarium claimed that “psychiatrists had an ‘ethical obligation’ to register their patients to vote,” the website reported:
“Psychiatrists might be apprehensive … about being perceived as pushing a political or moral agenda,” they wrote. “We argue that social and political engagements naturally complement our expertise.”
H/T: Ace of Spades
Click here to learn about The John Birch Society’s program to restore election integrity.
