When my mother was alive, she had a number of ailments that required many hospital stays. Some of those hospitals were considered first-tier, top-of-the-line institutions. In every one of them, most of the doctors and some of the nurses actually cared about their patients. In every one of them, there was a core group of lazy, punch-the-clock, don't-give-a-damn, union-protected hacks who made patients miserable.
If Congress and the Obama administration get their way, the hacks will prevail.
It shouldn't be necessary to explain the following, but far too many Americans never make the connection between the expansion of bureaucracy and unionism and the explosion of incompetence and laziness that accompanies them. One trip to the Post Office, the Motor Vehicle Bureau, our public schools, or any other institution where workers are virtually immune to being terminated, reveals the utter lack of quality in service — that most Americans have come to expect.
Nationalized health care will be no different.
Doctors are the last line of defense, but in the end they, too, will descend into terminal mediocrity. It's already happening. My wife has seen a surgeon who routinely double-books patient appointments, one who has no time to treat patients properly. And that's before that doctor's Medicaid payments are reduced the 21% when yet another health care bill, kept separate to hide the true costs of national health care, is enacted. That's before many doctors make a choice so obvious it completely eludes the progressives in Congress: quitting the practice of medicine altogether.
Fewer doctors treating more patients is the essence of mediocrity.
But Democrats will press ahead, because they are the essence of arrogance. They will press ahead because they can't even begin to imagine their worldview is utterly bankrupt, despite decades of historical evidence that government-run anything is invariably inept, overly-expensive and grossly incompetent. Only a progressive can substitute utopian theories for real-world evidence — based on the ultimate conceit that drives every one of them:
The only reason socialism failed is that the wrong people were in charge.
Make no mistake: that's what this is really all about. It's about people suffused with a self-anointed sense of superiority determined to hold an entire country hostage to their thinking. And if there is one prevailing idea that animates the 2700-page tome of corruption known as the health care bill it is this: the ends justify the means.
It is literally impossible to catalogue all the lies the Obama administration, Democrats in Congress and a compromised media have told the American public in the effort to get this bill passed. It is also impossible to calculate the bribes, the kickbacks and the "special favors" granted to certain members of Congress in order to do the same thing.
Nancy Pelosi insisted the bill must be passed "so the American people can see what's in it." Only an arrogant twit would get such an obvious sequence exactly backwards. Yet most Americans are no longer surprised by Ms. Pelosi's shortcomings. They are even less surprised by a Congress which votes on something without its members reading it.
But most Americans are seething. They have seen "hope and change" for a year now and by every indication, from polling data to a Congressional switchboard overwhelmed with callers, they are thoroughly disgusted. Most Americans are now aware that the lofty rhetoric, the grand ideals and the "post-whatever" promises made by Obama and company were nothing more than subterfuge for engineering a wholesale re-making of the country.
One done by those who have nothing but contempt for capitalism, individual freedom and American exceptionalism.
Progressivism is a self-terminating concept. When incentive is destroyed — in the name of "social justice" no less — it's only a matter of time before the givers stop giving to the takers. When the gougers have no one left to gouge and the re-distributers have nothing left to re-distribute, it all comes crashing down. The three most progressive states in the country — New York, California and Michigan — where self-entitled public unions and bloated bureaucracy are crushing taxpayers, all teeter on the verge of bankruptcy.
And the "givers" are moving out in droves.
Once again, for the clueless who think health care is a "right:" good luck exercising that right if there aren't enough doctors around. Better luck forcing someone to become a doctor — which is the only realistic alternative when real world behavior inevitably trumps utopian theory. Do progressives really think someone will endure years of medical school for no other reason than gaining the ability to treat terminal ingrates, who believe they're entitled to be treated? For 21% less money than most of them are making now?
Would you take a 21% pay cut for the "good of society?"
Let's cut government by 21% instead. Let's get rid of all the hacks who think the American public should shut up, pay up, and take their government-run medicine, whether we like it or not. Next November, let's derail this giant federal locomotive heading over the cliff. And if this Congress manages to pass any of the progressive monstrosities such as health care, immigration "reform" or cap and trade, let them know it's a political death sentence. Make it clear to those running for election that tossing the progressive agenda on the ash heap of history is Job Number One. We did it to Prohibition and that took a Constitutional Amendment.
The progressives want to re-make America? So do I. I want to live in an America where talent and ambition are rewarded, not punished. I want to live in a country where people have to live with the consequences of their own behavior. Genuine freedom is every bit as much about penalizing failure as it is about rewarding success.
A story in my local paper is symptomatic of everything that's wrong with the current mindset. It seems people who took government funds to avoid foreclosure on their homes were upset — are you ready for this — because their credit rating was lowered as a result. They thought it was "unfair." Such an attitude would be ridiculed for the combination of self-entitled, consequence-free nonsense it truly is in "my" America.
I want my country delivered from such people. I hope you do, too.
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