Apparently there’s no turning back from America’s suicidal shift into Socialized Medicine. The foundation is laid and the plumbing is on order. The “stimulus” bill has proven to be the ultimate power grabbing utensil.
Republican Senators are questioning whether President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill contains the right mix of tax breaks and cash infusions to jump-start the economy.
Tragically, no one from either party is objecting to the health provisions slipped in without discussion. These provisions reflect the handiwork of Tom Daschle, until recently the nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department.
Tragic indeed - that the left and the right are virtually indistinguishable variants of the same poisonous philosophy. Both consider Government as the supreme agent of egalitarian engineering. Both favor the collective over the individual. Both consider self-sacrifice as their moral standard. Both see man as his brother’s keeper. Both are willing to force their moral tenets on citizens. Both are willing to mandate human misery and trample mounds of human corpses if necessary in order achieve their vision.
Senators should read these provisions and vote against them because they are dangerous to your health. (Page numbers refer to H.R. 1 EH, pdf version).
They are, in fact, dangerous to our health, but they should be opposed as measures outside the role of a proper government precisely because they require the violation of individual rights on a tremendous scale.
The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (445, 454, 479). Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors.
What would be beneficial is for individual interaction with the health care market to remain private and determined solely on the voluntary judgment of the involved parties. My medical history is the business of myself and those which I choose to interact with.
But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”
And another bloated, inappropriate and menacing arm of the Government is born. By what right does the Government deem the appropriateness or cost-effectiveness of my private health concerns? America justly discarded such guiding notions in 1865, but collectivist-statism has smuggled them back in. The only moral and practical guide for private decisions is the rational judgment of the individuals involved.
What penalties will deter your doctor from going beyond the electronically delivered protocols when your condition is atypical or you need an experimental treatment? The vagueness is intentional. In his book, Daschle proposed an appointed body with vast powers to make the “tough” decisions elected politicians won’t make.
The stimulus bill does that, and calls it the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research (190-192). The goal, Daschle’s book explained, is to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs. He praises Europeans for being more willing to accept “hopeless diagnoses” and “forgo experimental treatments,” and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system.
Could the threat to our standard of living by Socialization be any more clearly identified than in this sentence?
Diminishing innovation is an inevitable result of socialized medicine that proponents typically dismiss, but here stagnation is explicitly favored over progress in order not to “drive up costs” - a result which history and economics prove as inherent to government intervention in any economic segment. Only in a socialized scheme would experimental treatments drive up cost for anyone other than the patient seeking them. In response, the statist solution to the problem enabled by their unjust system is to prohibit costly medical innovations, which also coincides with their egalitarian notions that no individual should “have access” (earn the right to consume) to better care than others - quite the irrational death-cocktail they’re serving.
The stimulus bill will affect every part of health care, from medical and nursing education, to how patients are treated and how much hospitals get paid. The bill allocates more funding for this bureaucracy than for the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force combined (90-92, 174-177, 181).
We’ve digressed to a nation which, due to the devastation of altruism, spends more looted wealth on regulating when, where, how and with whom individuals endeavor to raise the quality of their lives - a system of voluntary trade to mutual benefit - than towards the military infrastructure dedicated to the rightful defense of our sovereignty.
Unless we discard self-sacrifice as a virtue, discover the supremacy of the individual, and assume reason as our guide, America has seen her brightest days.
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