Footnotes by DK:
[1] LC, or Labor Committees, is the informal name for LaRouche's cadre organization, the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC). Sometimes the singular is used ("Labor Committee")--a holdover from the late 1960s when the organization was called the "SDS Labor Committee" and operated as a faction within Students for a Democratic Society.
[2] Reference is to the fact that for a number of years LaRouche followers received their routine health care, such as it was, from doctors who were associates of the cult and hence under LaRouche's thumb (even this was only available to members who lived near the cult's national headquarters in Leesburg, Virginia--Mr. Klein was in California). Until the mid-1990s, the cult provided no health insurance, and if members became seriously ill they were on their own. Most were paid such small stipends that, in the absence of well-to-do parents who could help out, they found it almost impossible to afford an individual health insurance policy or to pay for expensive prescription medications or visits to specialists. The health plan that LaRouche eventually began to provide for his national office staff was described to me in an email from one former high-level member as "terrible--catastrophe only. You know, like $3,000, $10,000 deductible." (Ex-members say conditions were very different at the late Ken Kronberg's now-defunct WorldComp and PMR, where the LC workers--about 20 percent of the total LC membership in the Leesburg area at one point--were provided, as were the non-LC workers, with full PPO health insurance. This is one of the many reasons that LaRouche, after leaving prison in 1994, began to criticize Kronberg so savagely--Kronberg was making him look bad in comparison.)
For much of the 1980s-1990s, the primary care physician for most LCers residing in or near Leesburg was one of their fellow cult members, Dr. John E. Grauerholz. After Grauerholz died in May 2008, an ex-LaRouche follower wrote on Factnet:
When you had a health problem in Leesburg, you saw Dr. John. JG was not a practicing physician with an office and staff treating patients daily. He was a coroner. Now some of you may be thinking that this is not so odd since sports teams have company MDs to treat players. Yes, but they use experienced MDs in select specialties who complement, not replace, the players' personal healthcare givers.
Some of the stories I have been sent by ex-members about JG are pretty odd. Any female members wish to discuss how they had breast exams for lumps in the LC office? Anyone wish to REALLY discuss what happened to Allen Salisbury [a LaRouche follower who died of cancer circa 1992] and his initial diagnosis?
Would you work for a company where your health plan is seeing an MD in a restroom or cubicle and finding out he or she is a coroner? In LaRouche's Bizarro world, you do just that. Another physician in the "LaRouche NoCare network" was Donald L. MacNay, a Manassas, Virginia orthopedist and LaRouche supporter to whom Grauerholz would refer patients. But MacNay and Grauerholz began offering quack aloe-vera-based cancer treatments, and ended up in deep trouble after four patients at a MacNay-owned clinic died. MacNay pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy charges in 2000, received a 17-month prison sentence, and was subsequently deported to his native Canada. Grauerholz admitted to officials of the Virginia medical board that he had participated in the scheme, and was banned from clinical practice. He was then forced to surrender his New York medical license on grounds that included negligence and incompetence (read here), and also was stripped of his New Jersey license.
In general, the health care received by most members of the LaRouche cult around the United States has been substandard even if compared to what is provided inside prisons (LaRouche while behind bars received a colonoscopy and polyp removal--how many of his boomers have received that much?). Ex-members believe that a number of their fellow boomers are now dead because of chronic conditions (such as those resulting from the widespread stress-related alcoholism in the cult) that went untreated, or due to sudden onsets of serious illness that were inadequately treated or only treated when it was too late. However, the LaRouchian leadership was always eager to help women in the cult have abortions (including paying for the abortions and escorting the women to the abortion clinic)--to make sure they would continue to focus on raising money for LaRouche's presidential campaigns, trips around the world, and luxurious country homes without being distracted by the needs of small children.
[3] Longtime LaRouche activist John Morris was killed on a Michigan interstate during the late evening of June 16, 2008. Morris, 48, and another LaRouchian, Gary Genazio, 66, were on an organizing assignment for the LaRouche movement and ran out of gas. After pulling over, they were struck by a dump truck and both died. Ex-members say that LaRouche organizers operate on a shoestring, driving beat-up unsafe cars with bald tires from city to city at all hours of the night (and often in unsafe weather and while exhausted from lack of sleep), sometimes being so short of funds that they have to panhandle for gas money. Indeed, Morris and Genazio were not the first members of the cult to die on a highway at night (read here and here about the 1994 death of Michael Gelber, believed to have fallen asleep at the wheel). After Morris and Genazio's death, a condolence statement was posted on the website of LaRouche's Schiller Institute in which one Anita Gallagher, a convicted felon as a result of her participation in LaRouche's loan scams in the 1980s, wrote: "When I was in prison from 1993-2000, I often spoke to John when I called in for briefings. He was always correctly, relentlessly upbeat and optimistic."
[4] Xlcr4life's description of the regimen that paraplegics must follow--if they are to survive for more than a few years--is accurate. My brother, now deceased, ended up a paraplegic because of an illness he contracted in his late thirties. He only survived into his late sixties because of constant medical monitoring and the rigorous daily exercises he carried out with the help of his wife and children (if he had been in the situation of Andy Klein, he wouldn't have survived for more than a decade, at most). When I began writing about the LaRouche organization in 1979-80, the cowards of LaRouche's security staff took delight in harassing my brother on the phone simply because of his family connection to me. Thanks to former LaRouchians, I know who the source was of Security's information about my family, and I thus have no doubt that Jeff Steinberg, Joe Brewda et al were fully aware of my brother's physical condition.
