The Reality of Obamacare: Power Over The People

Sunday Paper - August 16th, 2009

At a recent townhall meeting on healthcare, Obama gave his word (which isn’t worth all that much as we’ve thus far witnessed) that he wouldn’t be “pulling the plug on grandma.”  Simply stating I promise not to kill anybody certainly isn’t the best approach to winning friends and influencing people.  The real controversy however, stems from the fact that because grandma is lacking in QALY (quality adjusted life years - according to people like Rahm Emanuel’s brother Ezekial Emanuel, MD and other like-minded physicians - depicted above) she WON’T ever get plugged in in the first place.

Political commentator, National Review Online contributor, and author of the best-selling book America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, Mark Steyn delves further into the topic:

Anyway, there he was reassuring the crowd that provision for mandatory “end-of-life counseling” has “gotten spun into this idea of ‘death panels.’ I am not in favor of that.” Well, that’s good to know. So good that a grateful audience applauded the president’s pledge not to kill them. He has no plans, as he put it, to “pull the plug on Grandma.”

The problem with government healthsystems is not that they pull the plug on Grandma. It’s that Grandma has a hell of a time getting plugged in in the first place. The only way to “control costs” is to restrict access to treatment, and the easiest people to deny treatment to are the oldsters. Don’t worry, it’s all very scientific. In Britain, they use a “Quality-Adjusted Life Year” formula to decidethat you don’t really need that new knee because you’re gonna die in a year or two, maybe a decade-and-a-half tops. So it’s in the national interest for you to go around hobbling in pain rather than divert “finite resources” away from productive members of society to a useless old geezer like you. And you’d be surprised how quickly geezerdomkicks in: A couple of years back, some Quebec facilities were attributing death from hospital-contracted infection of anyone over 55 to “old age.”…

Read more at National Review Online - August 15th, 2009

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTAxYzFjODdiN2E3OWUyNzY1MDU1ODM1ZjZjYmY3YjM=

(continues below)


 

And for as Steyn puts it, the “few remaining suckers” still buying the Obama as messiah myth, Steyn eloquently lays out the Obamacare “end-game.”

The end-game is very obvious. If you expand the bureaucratic class and you expand the dependent class, you can put together a permanent electoral majority. By “dependent”, I don’t mean merely welfare, although that’s a good illustration of the general principle. In political terms, a welfare check is a twofer: you’re assuring the votes both of the welfare recipient and of the vast bureaucracy required to process his welfare. But extend that principle further, to the point where government intrudes into everything: a vast population is receiving more from government (in the form of health care or education subventions) than it thinks it contributes, while another vast population is managing the ever expanding regulatory regime (a federal energy-efficiency code, a government health bureaucracy) and another vast population remains, nominally, in the private sector but, de facto, dependent on government patronage of one form or another – say, the privately owned franchisee of a government automobile company, or the designated “community assistance” organization for helping poor families understand what programs they’re eligible for.  Either way, what you get from government – whether in the form of a government paycheck, a government benefit or a government contract – is a central fact of your life.

A lot of the developed world has already gone quite a long way down this road. If you want to know what Obama’s pledge to “save or create” four million jobs  would look like if the stimulus weren’t a total bust, consider what “good news” means in an Obama-sized state: A couple of years back, I happened to catch an intriguing headline up north. “The Canadian economy is picking up steam,” reported the CBC. Statistics Canada had just announced that “the economy added 56,100 new jobs, two-thirds of them full time.” That’s great news, isn’t it? Why, the old economy’s going gangbusters, stand well back.

But I was interested to know just what sectors these jobs had been created in. And, upon investigation, it emerged that, of those 56,100 new jobs, 4,200 were self-employed, 8,900 were in private businesses, and the remaining 43,000 were on the public payroll. “The economy” hadn’t added those jobs; the government had: that’s why they call it “creating” jobs. Seventy-seven per cent of the new jobs were government jobs, or “jobs”, paid for by the poor schlubs working away in the remaining 23 per cent. So the “good news” was just more bad news, just a further transfer from the vital dynamic sector to the state.

In Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, government spending accounts for between 72 and 78 per cent of the economy, and, as I wrote here earlier this year, that’s “about the best a ‘free’ society can hope to attain this side of complete Sovietization.” But, if you’re not on welfare, working in the welfare office or working for a “green solutions” company that’s landed the government contract for printing the recycled envelopes in which the welfare checks are mailed out, it’s not an attractive society to be in. It’s not a place to run a small business – a feed store or a plumbing company or anything innovative, all of which will be taxed and regulated into supporting that seventysomething per cent. After all, what does it matter if your business goes under? Either you’ll join the government workforce, or you’ll go on the dole. So you too will become part of the dependent class, or the class that’s dependent upon the dependent class.  Either way, Big Government wins (as we already see in California)…

Read more at Steyn Online - August 11th, 2009

http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/2341/26/

Read more about Mark Steyn:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Steyn

Document to decide who lives and who dies:

http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/PIIS0140673609601379.

This from Gates of Vienna - August 1st, 2009

http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2009/08/obamas-old-friends-and-why-we-should.html

What’s Really in the Health Care Reform Bill?

summary:

If you’re a crazy, drug addicted. pregnant woman with a chronic disease this bill is for you. Everyone else appears to be on their own…

This from Wizbang - August 11, 2009

http://wizbangblog.com/content/2009/08/11/whats-really-in-the-health-care-reform-bill.php

What’s Really in the Health Care Reform Bill? (Part 2)

summary:

1. Freedom to choose what’s in your plan
2. Freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, or pay your real costs
3. Freedom to choose high-deductible coverage
4. Freedom to keep your existing plan
5. Freedom to choose your doctors

This from Wizbang - August 11, 2009

http://wizbangblog.com/content/2009/08/11/whats-really-in-the-health-care-reform-bill-part-2.php

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