Government health care is not concerned with patients. Politicians’ interest is primarily focused on the productive—in the U.S., about one-third the population. Government has no income other than what it confiscates from the productive. So, promises of “affordable health care” depend on the able while devouring life from them. In other words, parasitism.
Some people seem oblivious to this. A man wrote on Twitter, “I’m a socialist and proud of it.” Whatever he may feel about being a socialist, pride is not a virtue possible to a looter and a parasite. Blood lust is.
State planning demands obedience. This attracts a particular kind of creature. Like that man. Like the people in Belen, New Mexico who organized a meeting to discuss health care.
The organizers would not allow opposition expressed to government health care. They became angry when questioned. After the meeting they spoke to one of the dissenters using coarse language. They put obscene notes in other dissenters’ vehicles and smiled nastily at those who complained about such conduct.
Such creatures abound in government health care. It is common knowledge, for instance, that those in state-run sanitariums, asylums, and senior care centers are sickeningly abused. Little is done about it. The government is in charge.
Interfering with impunity in other people’s lives and property is characteristic of those who advocate government health care.
Wal-Mart recently announced its support of socialized medicine. It wrote, “[T]he best way to lower costs is by managing the supply chain [meaning the medical professions] and encouraging efficiencies of scale [meaning medical rationing].”
“Managing” those who aren’t employed by you is a euphemism for violating others’ individual rights. Those who took over Sam Walton’s extraordinary achievement are helping to destroy what made it possible. They are evading the importance of individual rights, which protects private property and promotes innovative thinking.
They’re not the only ones evading facts. The AARP declares “need is a right,” while seeking to deny rights to those they plan to force to fill those needs.
Need is not a right. No one has a right to other peoples’ work and effort wrested from them by force—legalized or not.
How would you feel if you had studied for years, worked and scraped and saved in order to become a doctor and offer a high value—then are told that politicians will command your life and property?
The AARP says force is a proper means of dealing with individuals. They say might makes right.
So does Mr. Obama. He declared that he will set doctors’ fees based not on how many patients the doctor treats, not on his specialty, not on how many hours he works, but on the patient’s improvement. Surely, even the lightweight intellect Mr. Obama can grasp the shocking ignorance revealed by such a statement. Surely, he knows that results of medical care—characteristically replete with numerous variables—are not as predictable as sunrises. If he does not, why should we trust him?
Mr. Obama is no businessman. In a free-market, the patient judges a doctor’s performance, not a politician. If the patient is dissatisfied with the doctor’s performance, he can sue for mal-practice. He can seek out another doctor. He can persuade others to boycott the doctor and drive him out of business. He can write to newspapers describing the doctor’s performance. He can complain to whatever associations the doctor is a member of.
Government health care offers no alternatives. The state dictates. The doctor must obey. And so must the patient. Like the doctor he is frozen into a system that is riddled with irrational requirements. Politicians dream up the requirements. Their cohorts enforce their boss’s dreams. Some of the cohorts no doubt are quacks.
Politicians are unconcerned. Their interest is in the able. It is the able that make life worth living. It is the able that stand with the facts of reality against fallacies and falsehoods. It is the able that politicians seek to control. What will you do when politicians deny them individual rights and destroy them?
What will you do if government health care is enacted across the board and you discover one day you need surgery? What will you do when you lie helpless on a table being prepared for the surgeon’s knife? Will you wonder whether the surgeon agrees with his political bosses and if he does, is he one of their quacks? And if he does not agree, how deep is his resentment toward those who allowed politicians to meddle in medicine?*
*The paragraph was suggested by the remarks of Dr. Hendricks, a character in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
