Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Euthanasia for Clunkers: The So-Called 'Healthcare Bill'

“Maybe you're better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.”

-- President Obama (June 24, 2009) – on the topic of health care for elderly people

If the government can’t handle a $1 billion program that’s as simple as giving a $4,500 check to those who trade in an old car, how can it be trusted to administer a $1 trillion program where your life is on the line? Of course it can’t. The Cash For Clunkers program was a 136 page bill in Congress, and the Euthanasia For Clunkers program (the so-called “health care bill”) is around 1,000 pages just for starters. Its main purpose is to kill whatever remaining aspects of private health care, in favor of a Washington DC politbureau which will decide what health care you will, or will not, obtain.

As with every single government program, this massive socialist scheme will naturally generate a vast bureaucracy, cost many times more than what is being promised today, and deliver abysmal services. This is really so obvious that it shouldn’t be necessary to argue the point, but in the age of the Obama Marxist takeover of America, it has become necessary to explain these basics.

We already have numerous government health care programs – so many, in fact, that the government directly accounts for one third of health care expense in America already. If you include indirect spending and control, the number could be closer to two thirds. Some of the larger government bureaucracies include Medicare (for the elderly) and Medicaid (for the poor). Then we have a long list of other special programs for other groups in society: Indian reservations, the military, Congress and children, among others. The elderly and the poor already being covered, the only remaining purpose of Obama’s multi-trillion-dollar government bureaucracy is to cover those of us who already have health care, as well as one new group of approximately 10 million illegal invaders, people who in most cases ran across the border in direct defiance of US law.

In order for the government to take over the health care system, and to cover approximately 10 million illegals, while at the same time not increasing the number of doctors, nurses or hospitals by a single person or unit, someone else needs to get less health care. Who will have to surrender more than taxes in order to balance this equation? Most likely, all of us will pay to some extent, but the elderly will be the prime target. In Obama’s Marxist philosophy, they have out-lived their useful lives and seeing that as in his mind property rights don’t exist, the elderly in particular can have everything taken away from them by the state. After all, “we” ARE the state, in the view of the Marxist. And you can’t sue yourself.

The already-existing government programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, are already bankrupt and huge failures. 21% of state budgets go to Medicaid alone. Anyone serious about health care reform would start by getting rid of programs that don’t work. If we abolished these huge government bureaucracies that drain private industry, this country would be a lot more competitive with the faster-growing economies around the world. Instead, with Medicare and Medicaid being total failures, Obama and Pelosi are proposing a new and even huger bureaucracy to serve as a super-umbrella-bureaucracy over all the failures. It is rewarding failure with power. Mr. and Mrs. Government Bureaucrat, you’ve failed in everything that you do. You’ve squandered tens of trillions of dollars. Now, let’s give you a gigantic increase in power!

If Obama and Pelosi get their way with the Euthanasia For Clunkers bill, expect all of us, but particularly the elderly, to await that “thumbs up, thumbs down” scene from the movie Gladiator. Need a pace maker? Thumbs down, take a pill. Need hip surgery? Thumbs down, take a pill.

Obama has said as much; perhaps we should listen for a change. When politicians promise nothing but sweetness, light and jingles, it’s time to question and be suspicious. But when politicians basically tell you that they will stick it to you, then it’s time to ring the alarm bell, just like Winston Churchill did in the 1930s. Remember that paperhanger in Austria who moved to Munich and wrote the book “Mein Kampf” in the 1920s? Perhaps we should have listened a bit earlier, no?

There is one, albeit dubious, benefit with the Euthanasia For Clunkers bill, and that’s in the form of “shovel-ready” government stimulus. What do I mean? In order to administer any of these programs, including Cash For Clunkers, there is the need to construct new government offices to house tens of thousands of bureaucrats. It will surely increase employment in the government, with tens of thousands of people being hired to investigate all aspects of your life, so that you minimize your health care expense. What do you eat? We have to change your diet. How much do you exercise? Stop when the dog stops. What do you drive? Make all motorcycles illegal or tax them like tobacco. So the building of these new government bureaucracy facilities will indeed stimulate the construction industry. But the same thing could have been said about Auschwitz.