WASHINGTON — Allow me a word of encouragement to our president.
Mr. Obama, you are doing just fine. You wanted to set a new tone
in Washington, and you have. You wanted an open debate on
healthcare, and you have it. Admittedly, the tone is astoundingly
rancorous, and not incidentally your approval ratings continue to
decline. Then too, support for your healthcare reform is
dropping, especially among independents. Yet I believe you can
take heart. You have roused the interest of the American people
in you, the Democratic Party, the Congress, and healthcare. That
is good news, at least for us conservatives. Again, you are doing
fine. Ever larger numbers of Americans are alarmed by you, your
party, the Congress, and your healthcare monstrosity. Mr.
President, you are doing fine. Keep it up. Let me know if there
is anything I can do to help.
Truth be known, what else were we to expect from the new
administration? In the Senate our president was the most
left-wing member by a lot. That is a fact, clearly visible to
those who followed his voting record. He is also the least
experienced major-party presidential candidate in over a century.
As for his experience before he entered upon his brief political
career, he has never been in the private sector where he might
have gained knowledge about profit margins, the difficulty of
maintaining a workforce, or the burden of even a slight tax
increase. His sole experience has been a fleeting period teaching
law and the anomalous experience of being a community organizer,
that is to say, a rabble-rouser who organizes needy people to
pester governments and corporations for cash or services.
This campaign for healthcare reform has been an ongoing chaos.
From all I have been able to tell, the Obama White House is a
chaos too. The other day I heard of a highly placed White House
staffer, with glittering credentials, who sits in a cubicle
answering 300-400 urgent e-mails a day. That only reinforces the
reports that this White House is nearing a state of “burn out.”
The word circulating about the Democrats is that they are
“desperate” over the state of the Obama healthcare plan. They
have reason to be and my guess is that things will get much
worse. Democrats, what were you thinking of when you nominated
the most left-wing and inexperienced candidate in the 2008
Democratic field?
Out on the campaign trail where the Prophet Obama is thumping for
healthcare reform, he should be very much at ease. Campaigning is
the one aspect of politics he does well. But here too we see
desperation. The other day he accused his critics of engaging in
“scare tactics.” He objects to their claim that the bill is
exorbitant, though that claim is reinforced by the nonpartisan
Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that puts the price tag at over
a trillion dollars. He says he will shave off $500 billion from
that sum by cutting waste, fraud, and abuse, though the CBO
estimates the savings at only 1% of the trillion dollar cost
increase. He says his reforms will not fall heavily on the
elderly or the disabled, though his own healthcare advisors have
written that reforms should fall heavily on these
groups. We can quote them. Call it smear tactics if you will.
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who is health-policy adviser at the Office
of Management and Budget and a member of the Federal Council on
Comparative Effectiveness Research as well as being White House
Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s brother, propounds discrimination
against the elderly and other less than robust patients. In the
medical journal Lancet he wrote in January, “Unlike
allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious [an
irrelevancy] discrimination; every person lives through different
life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds
receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now
was previously 25 years.” As for the less than robust, in a
Hastings Center Report he has written, that medical care
be withheld from those “who are irreversibly prevented from being
or becoming participating citizens….An obvious example is not
guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.” Thus the
state should decide when and if you get treatment. Does that not
have a grisly ring to it?
Dr. Emanuel veers from the grisly to the delightfully frivolous
in his pontifications on cost cuts. Savor this one from the
Journal of the American Medical Association in May of
2007: “Too much money spent on health care reduced [sic] the
ability to obtain other essentials of human life as well as some
goods and services not essential to life but still of great
value, such as education, vacations, and the arts.” Yes, he said
“vacations and the arts.” So once we have Obamacare, and you are
sitting around waiting for a hip replacement or a CAT scan,
remember that tax revenues are being better spent on vacations or
perhaps the performance art of that lady who smothers chocolate
on her naked body. On second thought, she may be sitting nearby
also awaiting a hip replacement. Remember, chocolate stains.
