Taking On The Taboo Of Socialized Healthcare by Doug Wrenn

Taking On The Taboo Of Socialized Healthcare

By Doug Wrenn

July 16, 2007

It's actually a nice break to have Rush Limbaugh take a day off from his radio show once in a while. His guest hosts are often more interesting, on topic and provocative than he is. They tend to be more focused on the real issues, engage in less of the tedious and shallow "he said/she said" mantra ad nauseum, and there is no incessant bluster about cigars, golf, I-Phones, and name-dropping pomposity about weekend hob-nobbing with societal big shots. While I seldom disagree with Rush on the substantial issues when he actually gets to them, quite honestly, his monologues are often like finally finding the toy buried at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box, too little reward for so much digging.

On today's show, Dr. Walter E. Williams, a noted economist, was filling in for Rush and made a sound and pointed argument against socialized health care. Dr. Williams, who is approximately 70 years of age, is living proof of why we should all have much more respect for our elders. By simple virtue of age, they often know more than we do.

Dr. Williams made the point that before government got involved, many cities had what was called "general hospitals," which cared for the indigent, and services at these facilities was often free or at lower cost, and doctors often worked pro bono. Only someone old enough to remember would, in most cases, have such knowledge. This principle also explains why so many younger to middle aged people of today too easily swallow the tripe that homosexuality is a normal behavior, because most of these myopic cheerleaders have not lived long enough to recall the American Psychiatric Association (APA) being bullied by gay advocates at its annual conventions to remove homosexuality as an entry of deviancy from its Diagnostic And Statistical Manual, which it finally capitulated to doing in 1973. In time, others will also soon forget that the APA threatened and banned any of its members from treating homosexuals seeking conversion, beginning in 1994. If for no other reason than chronology, age is indeed conducive to wisdom.

Dr. Williams cited the abysmal situation with our Veterans Administration Hospitals, which are themselves, microcosms of socialized medicine. I often work with disabled veterans, and I often hear horror stories that make the conditions at Walter Reed army Hospital sound like a McDonald's Playland. As the sage adage reminds us, "If you think health care is expensive now, wait until it's free." All anyone need do is look at our current VA hospital system and they will soon grasp why Canadians with money to burn still come to our country when in dire medical need. Williams also quipped that one Canadian friend told him that if the US socializes health care, Canadians will have nowhere to go.

The United States is the most benevolent country in the world. We play nursemaid for just about every need and to just about everybody, including many of those who supposedly now hate us. We are also benevolent to our own people. More people cared for the poor before government stepped in, and I have seen that first hand myself when I was a social justice minister for one former parish and they denied me resources to assist struggling families with whom I was helping. I was told to seek help from the government. I didn't. I ignored the Pharisees and sought help from fellow Christians and it was amazing what just a few of us accomplished. As Dr. Williams also said, we in the US have never stepped over piles of dead bodies in our streets. We don't deny charity, nor food, nor health care to those truly in need, but since Big Daddy government has stepped in, everyone else now seems to think they're off the hook. As P.J. O'Rourke once opined, no person is entitled to charity, but every person has a moral duty to provide it.

Our Constitution does not articulate a "right" to government-subsidized health care. Just the other day, I heard the tail end of a news report on the radio that some government audit now predicts that the US will be bankrupt in 20 years. It is little wonder when you consider the sheer madness that Social Security and Medicare are both listed as non-discretionary spending" items in Congressional appropriations. That means that these carnivorous, Draconian prima donna government entitlements cannot be decreased or denied, unlike our military, which provides the primary federal government responsibility of national defense.

In a April 28th, 2005 report by Derek Hunter of the Heritage Foundation, "Medicare Drug Cost estimates: What Congress Needs To Know Now," Hunter cites that we currently are facing $29.7 Trillion (with a "T") in unfunded Medicare liability, and that drug entitlements alone will total $8.7 Trillion in 75 years, and that according to Dr. Thomas "Saving" (Yes, supposedly, that really is his name, no pun intended!), a former Medicare Public Trustee, 25% of all federal income taxes will go to Medicare in 2020, and 50% of all federal income taxes will support Medicare by 2040. We have placed a crushing and unbearable burden upon our children and grandchildren and future national generations (if any) because of our current laziness, apathy, selfishness, ignorance and greed. President Johnson zealously signed Medicare into law in 1965. An impassioned Johnson once ironically told an aid, "We're going to spend the rest of our lives, if necessary, passing medical care." Johnson was wrong, but thanks to Medicare's rapid expansion and unfunded liability, much of it recently due to President Bush's prescription entitlement boondoggle, we will now spend the rest of our lives paying for it.

Now take all those figures, and figure in "socialized" hospital coverage. Then factor in the 12-20 million illegal immigrants in our country now, many of whom, according to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, will cost the system far more than what they pay in. Then factor in the possibility of that figure rising to 80 million more immigrants, due to the family members of those here now coming over also if the pro-amnesty folks in Washington ever get their way and pass a bill like we, the enraged citizenry just recently and barely defeated.

Like it or not, 11 ounces of water just will not fit into a 10 ounce glass without spillage. The system can only bear so much strain, and that is why nations with socialized health care have limited medications, no elective surgery, and people often have to languish in agony for weeks, months and beyond for much needed tests, procedures and surgeries. If socialized medicine is so wonderful, why does Great Britain have private hospitals where only the very wealthy can afford to go for care, and do so?

For all the degrading jokes told about them, even lawyers do pro bono work for the poor. Despite all the hyperbole about the big, greedy evil corporate pharmaceutical companies, even they participate in a consortium that provides free or reduced cost drug prescriptions to the poor. As Dr. Williams cited, doctors started raising their rates when the government got involved in medicine back in 1965 when the monster called Medicare was born. They were milking the system then, and undoubtedly, many still are one way or the other. I am not defending doctors for gouging the government, but this historical event shows that even reasonably honest people, who would normally not steal from an individual would often not think twice about stealing from the big, nameless faceless government (which, broken down, translates to you and I as taxpayers) and likewise, the big, bloated, bumbling blob called government cannot get out of its own way or effectively manage healthcare, as the government has constantly proven.

Even President Franklin Roosevelt, no conservative by any means, simultaneously helped starving Depression era Americans and answered a call for much needed improved infrastructure by transforming the jobless into government workers, rather than paying these same people to idly sit home and wait for a check to get mailed to them once a month for doing nothing in return.

In Connecticut, the state's only four (previously five) Catholic hospitals have fallen into the trap of taking money from the government. As my father always said when I was a kid, "My roof, my rules." Ditto with the government. He who pays the bills gets to dictate the terms. Now, Connecticut's Catholic hospitals have been forced by recently approved legislation to administer the abortifacient "Plan B" pill to rape victims, despite the fact that the pill can be taken within 72 hours of sexual contact, that Connecticut pharmacies now carry the pill without necessity of a prescription, and that the same cities that are home to these four Catholic hospitals are also home to four secular hospitals. The Catholic faith forbids the taking of such a pill if the woman is ovulating. This legislation is not at all about so called "compassionate care" as the bill was deceptively labeled by the radically liberal Connecticut legislators, but about the veiled attack on (Catholic) religious liberty and an ongoing agenda of a culture of death that also promotes abortion, euthanasia and (embryonic) stem cell research with blind, frothing zeal. While the bishops of the state's three Catholic dioceses intend to further fight this matter in the courts, the fact remains that had Catholic hospitals never taken government money, this issue would either never have occurred or it would have died a quick death. It is by this same sordid tactic that government also infringes on the 1st Amendment rights of churches by threatening to revoke their tax exempt status, under the grossly misunderstood and manipulated so-called "Doctrine of Separation of Church and State." If you are looking to see what page of the US Constitution mentions that doctrine, save your energy. It doesn't. Ironically, Catholic hospitals were originally built specifically to provide care for the indigent. Now even Catholic hospitals, once autonomous, have succumbed to the seductive but equally dangerous siren-like allure of handouts from Big Brother, with conditional strings attached.

As Dr. Williams also alluded to in his monologue, charities of today suffer from fewer donations to people who have already donated via their taxes and expect the government to do the rest. Even our homeless are a bigger problem today. Part of the problem is because some liberal do-gooders said the rights of the homeless were being violated by having them institutionalized somewhere with warm beds, hot food and clean bath facilities. (These wing nuts bearing heads as soft as their hypocritical hearts also tend to be the same folks who complain about terrorist detainees at Camp Gitmo being served cold cereal for breakfast, an unspeakable atrocity mysteriously not defended, although nevertheless shared by our own GI's as well.) However, part of the problem once again is the collective feeling that Almighty Government will do all for all. Talk to older folks who recall having a down and out neighbor. Everyone chipped in and did what they could so that their fellow man could remain in his home and enjoy a hot meal once in a while. Now such a person would be lying in a gutter, or watching out the window for the postal carrier to bring their monthly check, courtesy of the public dole, just enough to live on, yet not enough to break the enslaving chains of bureaucratic dependence, and why? Because some bureaucrat gets a paycheck for cutting a Welfare check, and on the cycle goes. Likewise, if we ever had a statesman, as opposed to a politician, who had the vision and the guts to dismantle Medicare and instead initiate opportunity for personal medical savings accounts, he would soon be out of a job, and God help him, maybe even worse.

Stopping socialist government entitlements is the equivalent to suddenly no longer feeding an unrestrained lion. You can either feed the beast more, and often, or it will soon consume you. Either way, it's not going away in the foreseeable future, and our citizenry is becoming sadly more motivated by the vice of narcissism rather than by the virtue of patriotism. Few among those who call themselves Americans would be willing or at all passive about giving up their own cherished governmental perks, and the country be damned. After all, that's someone else's problem, isn't it?

We created this Frankenstein so only we can kill it, but I doubt we will, and history shows us that similar free societies have committed suicide the same way, by moral deterioration and legislating socialist greed until the bending system finally breaks. For better or for worse, money makes the world go around. Between the ongoing war on terror and the rapidly growing of a mighty, ambitious, and evil communist China, these are times far too dangerous to have little more than a few lonely, jingling coins rattling around in our endangered federal treasury. Charity begins at home. The same short-sighted, emotion-driven, knee-jerk hypocritical liberals, who point to an aging and infirm Grandma or Grandpa and ask, "What about them?" should stop using that finger to point at the government, and instead, use it to dig some money out of their own pockets and take care of their own family, an ideal now about as prevalent in our culture as the dinosaur now is to Earth.

As Dr. Williams pointed out, relevant commerce flourished and prices dropped when the Civil Aeronautics Board and the Inter-State Commerce Commission were abolished. Likewise, until we get government's oversized size 13-E aircraft carrier of a foot out of the door of the healthcare marketplace, we will soon fall by the very solution created to address a non-existent problem. Now, only 42 years later, the placebo has become the poison, and LBJ's envisioned "Great Society" will be no more than a needless postmortem failure of a naïve dream that soon evolved into a national nightmare, with the help of quite a few others, including Presidents and paupers alike, along the way.

"Government does not solve problems, it subsidizes them."

"Government's first duty is to protect people, not run their lives."

"Man is not free unless government is limited."

"The taxpayer-that's someone who works for the government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination."

"Today, if you invent a better mousetrap, the government comes along with a better mouse."

"The most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"

"Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other."

(President Ronald Reagan)