Dr. Maller’s Blog

I’m not referring to pizza but to politics.

In the last 24 hours the equivalent of a tsunami has hit health care in the form of a sweeping “reform” passed by one party in Congress, despite growing opposition from the public. I’m disappointed and like most of you, frightened of the long-term implications of this enormous change that will, if it stands, affect every person out there, most of all the young.

I cast my first vote on the south side of Chicago. It was not an experience likely to elevate my opinion of the process. I learned first-hand what a “community organizer” does and why. Back in those pre-ACORN days they were called “ward heelers”. At 8 a.m. a drunk, badly-dressed goon stood in the doorway of the local polling place, a barber shop, handing out lists of candidates to be voted for, right under the American flag. When I tried to get past him and told him what he could do with his list he said, “Well could you at least vote for MY judge?” Ironically I had spent a day in court as part of my psychiatry training, observing that very judge and I did vote for him because he seemed caring and professional. He later became governor of Illinois (Otto Kerner) and went to jail for corruption, which is a common career path in the state of Illinois.

The current crop of White House operators come straight out of the moral vacuum that is Chicago politics. Every vote is bought, every transaction tainted by cronyism, and few even try to hide it. Like the Mafia and the drug cartels, the power brokers build parks, schools, gyms, housing, etc. to give themselves a veneer of respectability while creating more and more dependency and perpetuating the cycle of corruption.

While our economy staggers, while Iran and the Islamofascist world menace us, our single-minded president and his minions have chosen to focus on a “crisis” in health care that happens to represent a naked power grab of one-sixth of our economy. Nancy Pelosi said “We have to pass this bill so we can find out what’s in it.” Alcee Hastings, an impeached federal judge who now sits in Congress as Chairman of the Rules Committee, is caught on C-SPAN camera saying “We ain’t got no rules – we makes them up as we goes along.” The president wants us to believe that this multi-trillion-dollar legislation will lower costs while insuring over 30 million more people and that pharmaceutical research and medical care will be available no matter how many punitive taxes and onerous regulations they pile on.

As fourteen months of pseudo-crisis have unfolded, millions of Americans have realized what they voted into office. This is socialism on steroids. In the face of a 3-2 level of opposition, these Chicago thugs have installed an unconstitutional and fatally flawed program that is not about health care but about controlling votes. We are at the tipping point where the producers of wealth are becoming outnumbered and outvoted by those who live off them, and where the debt incurred by our children and grandchildren can never be repaid. As Margaret Thatcher famously said, “The trouble with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.” But this program does create “jobs”; i.e. 16,000 IRS agents to enforce its provisions. I wonder if they’ll all be be named Guido.

Hope is not lost – it never is in America because we’re not Europeans. The “benefits” don’t start until 2014, which gives us time to put a new Congress in place which can undo some of the damage. The requirement to buy health insurance is so blatantly unconstitutional that even the 9th Circuit must be embarrassed. Not to sound like the happy kid in the manure pile saying “There must be a pony in here,” but the health care system we’ve evolved in the last 45 years is so messed up that this may be an opportunity to wind up with real reform. In earlier blogs I’ve outlined the keys: a competitive national health insurance market; insurance for major expenses only; malpractice reform (“What do you call five trial lawyers at the bottom of a lake? A good start.”) Either we put patients and doctors in charge or we go down the path to destruction of what is, for all its faults, the best health care in the world. Government can’t run the 50% of medicine it already controls. States are lining up to sue the Feds over Medic-Aid because they’re broke. Social security is a Ponzi scheme like the one Bernie Madoff is serving 150 years for. The CEO of United Health Care made about $785 million last year, but if your child had an ear infection in 1998, he might not be covered for future ear problems for the rest of his life.

My wife wants us to go see “Alice in Wonderland” tomorrow night. Aren’t we already there?

This entry was posted on Monday, March 22nd, 2010 at 8:18 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.