To The Free Clinic.....March!

According to an AP story shown on Yahoo.com news, John Edwards, the man Rush Limbaugh calls "the Breck Girl," and Laura Ingraham calls "the Silky Pony," and I call one of several interchangeable "Rotten Fascist Bastards" is proposing a socialized medicine system in which everyone is required to go see the doctor for "preventative maintenance."

Edwards' plan claims it will cover preventive, chronic and long-term health care, including dental and vision coverage for all Americans. Showing either his utter contempt for the intelligence of Americas or his own poor knowledge of both economics and human nature, Edwards claims the plan will cost "up to $120 billion a year" which he will cover by ending President Bush's tax cuts to people who make more than $200,000 per year.

Edwards' plan is also unConstitutional. No where in the document can one find authorization for the federal government to be involved in the health care of individuals in any way.

I'm imagining, and this will unquestionably be the case should this program be enacted, Edwards' Bureau of Health" police marching manacled groups of people, rousted from their homes at all hours of the day and night, to wait in long lines of others who are really sick, or have hangnails or sniffles. I'm imagining people with serious conditions, waiting in long queues to be seen by specialists--the queue only moving when someone nearer the door dies.

I'm imagining tens of thousands of competent doctors retiring early or taking less responsible jobs to get away from the bureaucracy--leaving largely doctors of lesser ability and experience to fill the gaps.

“I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years ago,” said Dr. Hendricks. “Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill?
That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or of my patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything—except the desires of the doctors.
Men considered only the ‘welfare of the patients with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to chose, they said, only ‘to serve.’ That a man who’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards—never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my consciousness, to stifle my mind—yet what is it that they expect to depend on when they lie on an operating table under my hands?
Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of a man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.”

--excerpt from the novel, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Rand's novel is a dramatization, but it's both logically and empirically true that individuals will either quit work, or continue working at a less-than-optimum level, if his conditions of work are not suitable. This is only part of what we will face if Williams' program, or that most of the posturing fascists running for the office of President have their way in this area.

They've killed Freedom! Those bastards!

Warm regards,

Col. Hogan
Stalag California