One of the key facts about the push to nationalize our healthcare system is that it’s coming from people who have absolutely no intention to live under the system they’re trying to produce. Barack Obama even admitted as much last month, though the media has done its best to ignore the fact. Give Jake Tapper and Karen Travers credit, though, for refusing to sweep the president’s admission under the rug:
President Obama struggled to explain today whether his health care reform proposals would force normal Americans to make sacrifices that wealthier, more powerful people—like the president himself—wouldn’t face. . . .
Dr. Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist and researcher at the New York University Langone Medical Center, said that elites often propose health care solutions that limit options for the general public, secure in the knowledge that if they or their loves ones get sick, they will be able to afford the best care available, even if it’s not provided by insurance.
Devinsky asked the president pointedly if he would be willing to promise that he wouldn’t seek such extraordinary help for his wife or daughters if they became sick and the public plan he’s proposing limited the tests or treatment they can get.
The president refused to make such a pledge, though he allowed that if “it’s my family member, if it’s my wife, if it’s my children, if it’s my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care.”
That’s telling. Would the president be willing to accept limitations on the care his wife and children could receive for the sake of the greater good? Dr. Devinsky asked. No, the president would not. He evaded the question for as long as he could with a non sequitur about his dying grandmother, but when he finally came back around to answering it briefly, that was his answer: no.
And after all, he won’t have to accept the limitations of his plan—he’s the President of the United States. He’s famous, he’s powerful, he defines well-connected . . . and he’s a member of a government which routinely exempts its own members from the limitations of the laws it passes. Obamacare for thee, but not for me and mine, is indeed his attitude—he’s too important and valuable a person for that. That’s only for us ordinary barbarians.
For my part, I agree with Ed Morrissey:
If ObamaCare isn’t good enough for Sasha, Malia, or Michelle, then it’s not good enough for America. Instead of fighting that impulse, Obama should be working to boost the private sector to encourage more care providers, less red tape and expense, and better care for everyone.
But that’s not what he’s doing, and it’s not what he’s going to do; that’s how he wants it to work for him and his family, but not for everyone else. Unless, of course, they’re political allies whose support he needs and to whom he owes favors—then they can get special treatment too:
Who will decide when medical care is just too expensive to bother with? Who will be left to perish because they just aren’t worth the lifesaving effort? Well, for sure it won’t be any members of Congress or anyone that works for the federal government because they won’t be expected to suffer under the nationally socialized plan. It also won’t be Obama’s buddies in the unions who are about to be similarly exempted from the national plan, at least if Senator Max Baucus has his way.
Insisting on standards for others to which one is unwilling to hold oneself? The word for that, I believe, is “hypocrisy”—and the forces of Obamacare are rife and rank with it. As James Lewis pointed out recently on the American Thinker website, one of our leading advocates of socialized medicine makes a pretty good poster boy for it.
Senator Ted Kennedy, who is now 76 years old and was diagnosed with brain cancer in May of last year, is telling the world that nationalized medical care is “the cause of his life.” He wants to see it pass as soon as possible, before he departs this vale of tears.
The prospect of Kennedy’s passing is viewed by the liberal press with anticipatory tears and mourning. But they are not asking the proper question by their own lights: That question—which will be asked for you and me when we reach his age and state in life—is this:
Is Senator Kennedy’s life valuable enough to dedicate millions of dollars to extending it another month, another day, another year?
Because Barack Obama and Ted Kennedy agree with each other that they of all people are entitled to make that decision. Your decision to live or die will now be in their hands.
Ted Kennedy is now 76. Average life expectancy in the United States is 78.06. For a man who has already reached 76, life expectancy is somewhat longer than average (since people who die younger lower the national average); for a wealthy white man it may be somewhat longer statistically; but for a man with diagnosed brain cancer it is correspondingly less. As far as the actuarial tables of the Nanny State are concerned, Kennedy is due to leave this life some time soon. The socialist State is not sentimental, at least when it comes to the lives of ordinary people like you and me.
The socialist question—and yes, it is being asked very openly in socialist countries all around the world, like Britain and Sweden—must be whether extending Senator Kennedy’s life by another day, another month or year issocially valuable enough to pay for what is no doubt a gigantic and growing medical bill. Kennedy is a US Senator, and all that money has been coughed up without complaint by the US taxpayer. Kennedy is already entitled to Federal health care, and it is no doubt the best available to anyone in the world. . . .
There might be a rational debate over the social utility of Senator Kennedy’s life. We could all have a great national debate about it. Maybe we should do exactly that, to face the consequences of what the Left sees as so humane, so obviously benevolent, and so enlightened.
Consider what happens in the Netherlands to elderly people. The Netherlands legalized “assisted suicide” in 2002, no doubt in part for compassionate reasons. But also to save money. . . .
There’s only so much money available. The Netherlands radio service had a quiz show at one time, designed to “raise public awareness” about precisely that question. Who deserves to live, and who to die?
But nobody debates any more about who has the power to make that decision. In socialist Europe the State does. It’s a done deal. . . .
In the socialist Netherlands Kennedy would be a perfect candidate for passive euthanasia.
Has anyone raised this question with Senator Kennedy? I know it seems to be in bad taste to even mention it. But if ObamaCare passes in the coming weeks, you can be sure that that question will be raised for you and me, and our loved ones. And no, we will not have a choice.
One set of standards for the rich and the powerful, and another for the rest of us. One set of medical options for those who write the laws (and those who influence them), and another for those of us who live under them. That’s liberalism? It seems to me there’s something seriously wrong with that.
Which is why, to my way of thinking, Rep. John Fleming (R-LA) is a hero of the fight over Obamacare. Rep. Fleming, a physician, is the author and sponsor of House Resolution 615, which he describes this way:
I’ve offered a bill, HR 615, to give them a chance to put their “health” where their mouth is: My resolution urges members of Congress who vote for this legislation to lead by example and enroll themselves in the public plan that their bill would create.
The current draft of the Democratic bill curiously exempts members of Congress from the government-run health care option: The people’s representatives would get to keep their existing health plans and services on Capitol Hill—even though the people wouldn’t.
If members of Congress believe so strongly that government-run health care is the best solution for hardworking American families, I think it only fitting that Americans see them lead the way. . . .
Congress has the bad habit of exempting itself from the problems it inflicts on the American people. From common workplace protections to transparency and accountability measures, lawmakers always seem to place themselves and their staffs just out of reach of the laws they create.
Americans don’t know that there is an attending physician on call exclusively for members of Congress, or that Congress enjoys VIP access and admission to Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Bethesda Naval Medical Center.
It is past time that we make the men and women making the laws be exposed to the same consequences as the American public.
Public servants should always be accountable and responsible for what they are advocating, and I challenge the American people to demand this from their representatives.
We deserve health-care reform that puts a patient’s well being in the hands of a doctor, not a bureaucrat.
I think he’s right on. If it’s good enough for us, it’s good enough for the members of Congress, the employees of the Executive Branch (all the way up to the POTUS and his family), and the judges and staff of our courts. If you agree, you might want to go to Rep. Fleming’s official website and sign the online petition in support of HR 615. Well done, Rep. Fleming; trust a doctor to know a boil when he sees it, and know how to lance it—even a spiritual one.
I'm sort of being driven crazy by the lunatic fantasy that, right now, our health-care decisions are in our hands, and not in the hands of bureaucrats. They are just in the hands of for-profit, HMO bureaucrats and insurance-company bureaucrats. There are multitudes of cases of people not receiving life-saving care because they are deemed, by the private sector, to be undeserving of such care. This is not something that Obama causes, or nationalized health care causes.
The only valid argument against nationalized medicine, right now, is that it will cost more (and this is not certain, in that it doesn't cost more in any of those nations where it is nationalized elsewhere in the world). And given that we pay twice as much as any other industrialized country for health care, and given that our standard of health is the lowest in the industrialized world, it would be almost impossible to do a worse job than the private sector has already done.
Though, I take that back. The government is, I believe, always up to the challenge of doing the worst possible job.
The truth is that elites do not have to tolerate the health care you and I get right now, and poor people have no health care at all, or precious little. Elites will never have to deal with whatever health plan we come up with, ever. That's the benefit of being an elite, I think. You get to make rules and then not live by them. You can't pretend that somehow Obama invented this dynamic. Free-market Republicans in congress don't have to make do with my crappy private HMO healthcare either.
What I want is not to die younger and pay more than someone in any other industrialized society. The private sector has failed massively to provide me with even this basic request, so frankly, I think all alternatives are on the table. The main force behind my thinking is "Our current system is the worst in the industrialized world. Please, for the love of God, change it for the better."
Agreed. This is why we need to move it out of the hands of bureaucrats, rather than to feed it the hair of the dog, which will only make it worse.
And actually, you misstate the argument against nationalized medicine: not that it will cost more, but that "there is exactly one thing that government can do to control costs in health care: it can insist on paying below cost"–and that more people will die as a consequence.