The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
From his recent Random Thoughts column at The American Spectator. (It’s chock-full of candidates. I chose this one.)
With his decision declaring ObamaCare constitutional, Chief Justice John Roberts turned what F.A. Hayek called “The Road to Serfdom” into a super highway. The government all but owns us now, and can order us to do pretty much whatever it wants us to do.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuA2_P-m4Sk?rel=0]
When asked “What would you replace it with?” I like Thomas Sowell’s response: “When you put a fire out, what do you replace it with?”
While you’re waiting, here’s a short photo-essay I started a while ago, and never posted. Part of Instapundit‘s “peeling an onion of fail” meme:
Feel free to link to anything you think I should add in the comments. I’ll see what I can do. Must be a graphic.
On September 1, 2010, my doctor informed me that I was Type II diabetic. Oh, joy. I’m able to control it through diet (my last A1c test came back at 5.9), but my body doesn’t regulate blood glucose real well. My doctor gave me a prescription for blood glucose test strips – Freestyle Lite – but even with my prescription coverage, these things work out to about 75¢ per test, and the prescription is for two tests a day. Basically, insurance partially defrays the cost of one 50-count pack of test strips per month. Personally, I want to keep a closer eye on things, but not at $1+ per test.
I ran across somebody saying good things about WalMart’s ReliOn Prime tester & strips. These cost only about 22¢ per test, without my medical insurance, so I bought a kit. I still had some of the Freestyle strips, so I did a side-by-side comparison with my last five Freestyles, and the readings matched ±3 mg/dl, which is close enough for me. I’ve used it for a couple of months now, testing 4-5 times a day to keep a closer eye on my blood sugar, and that, I’m sure, helped with my latest A1c test results.
So if you’re diabetic and want to save some money, I can recommend WalMart’s ReliOn brand. The strips are a little bulkier, the test results are a few seconds slower, and it took me a bit to figure out how to get them into the tester properly (it’s a tight fit), but at less than a third of the cost per test I’m not complaining. And they don’t require any more blood than the Freestyles do.
Scott Adams, author of the Dilbert cartoon documentary strip, recently wrote a scathing post on his blog. Excerpt:
I hope my father dies soon.
And while I’m at it, I might want you to die a painful death too.
I’m entirely serious on both counts.
My father, age 86, is on the final approach to the long dirt nap (to use his own phrase). His mind is 98% gone, and all he has left is hours or possibly months of hideous unpleasantness in a hospital bed. I’ll spare you the details, but it’s as close to a living Hell as you can get.
If my dad were a cat, we would have put him to sleep long ago. And not once would we have looked back and thought too soon.
Because it’s not too soon. It’s far too late. His smallish estate pays about $8,000 per month to keep him in this state of perpetual suffering. Rarely has money been so poorly spent.
I’d like to proactively end his suffering and let him go out with some dignity. But my government says I can’t make that decision. Neither can his doctors. So, for all practical purposes, the government is torturing my father until he dies.
I’m a patriotic guy by nature. I love my country. But the government? Well, we just broke up.
And let me say this next part as clearly as I can.
If you’re a politician who has ever voted against doctor-assisted suicide, or you would vote against it in the future, I hate your fucking guts and I would like you to die a long, horrible death. I would be happy to kill you personally and watch you bleed out. I won’t do that, because I fear the consequences. But I’d enjoy it, because you motherfuckers are responsible for torturing my father. Now it’s personal.
It goes on that way a bit longer, concluding with a post script announcing that Scott’s father had passed a few hours after he wrote the post.
I sincerely hope I never get to the point that Scott’s father did – mind “98% gone” and in agony. I hope to keep my faculties about me as long as I can, so that I get to decide when I check out, government be damned.
The modern version of the Hippocratic Oath goes:
I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:
I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.
I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.
I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.
I will not be ashamed to say “I know not,” nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient’s recovery.
I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.
I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person’s family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.
I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.
I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.
If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.
The part I’ve emphasized in bold is the one where the .gov should butt the hell out and let doctors and the patient, or in cases like Scott’s father, the patient’s family, decide when enough is enough and the point of “therapeutic nihilism” has been reached.
I understand the “slippery slope to euthanasia” argument – I’m a gun-control opponent. OF COURSE I understand “slippery slope” arguments, but the fact remains that we treat people at the end of life worse than we treat our pets.
So much for the Right not having an alternative to Obamacare™.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-TccVX5BBo?rel=0]
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGeWMPFlGlY?rel=0]
So, there’s just one question here: are these people really so incredibly dense, out of touch, incompetent and downright delusional to think that all this was going to work, or was it destined to fail from the beginning in order to destroy the private insurance market and leave us nothing but the single payer utopia that gives progressives a thrill up their legs?
Good question.
He left this as a comment to yesterday’s QotD, but it’s too important just to leave there:
I’ve said it before. The pre-Obamacare healthcare market was already distorted by perverse, unnatural market forces, and that this sort of problem whose root cause was complexity was not going to be solved by adding additional complexity to it.
The only thing additional complexity would do would be to shake things up, find a new set of winners and losers, and generally cost everyone.
Coming off my yearly engagement with the think tanks, I’ve heard, for the first time, a series of data points coming from hospital CEOs that add up to one thing: the admission that exercising a hospital’s primary function is no longer a source of value and revenue, it is viewed as entirely cost, risk, and liability. Consequently, they are no longer building any capacity, and are in fact looking for ways to reduce their capacity and eliminate hospital beds.
The aging boomers are gonna love that when it comes home to roost.
Again, I think it bears repeating: the healthcare industry now views exercising its particular expertise and primary function as primarily a source of cost, risk, and liability.
That, as they say, isn’t sustainable.
In desperation, they’re looking to preventative care across their collective “healthcare community” (defined by what?) to save them, but at the end of the day, preventative medicine comes down to 3 things: “Don’t smoke, don’t be obese, and get a checkup once a year, do what doc says if they find something”. That will get them something, but not a whole lot. Humans being what they are, horsehair shirts never work.
The dark portent dripped across the whole thing is, of course, the premise that any lifestyle choice that potentially affects health becomes a matter of public policy, because it’s now a matter of public expense.
Welcome to the endarkenment, a peculiar state of nature.
I’m going to close this post with a quote from the Starship Nostromo’s AI “Mother”:
“The option to override detonation procedure has now expired.”
American healthcare is all over but the screaming.
Did someone drop acid in my iced tea? Just let me leave this here:
Stop digging. Start over.
The Americans manhandled by this exercise in government arrogance now find themselves divided into warring tribes: Those with chronic ailments who have found new plans on Obamacare exchanges and are pleased. Those who don’t want or can’t afford the replacement policies Obamacare offers them. Those whose new policies block them from using the health providers who have treated them for many years. The estimated 23 million to 41 million people whose employer-sponsored plans are the next to be imperiled. And on and on.
Most of these tribespeople only wish their big problem was a slipshod Obamacare website. On Thursday, their plight grew more frightful. With even Democratic members of Congress storming the White House over the cancellations, Obama declared — by what legal authority is unclear — that he would overrule the law he signed in 2010 and allow insurers to extend those canceled policies for a year.
—
We understand why the president and leaders of his party want to rescue whatever they can of Obamacare. On their watch, official Washington has blown the launch of a new entitlement program … under the schedule they alone set in early 2010.
What we don’t understand is their reluctance to give that failure more than lip service. Many of the Americans who heard their president say Thursday that “we fumbled the rollout of this health care law” would have been pleased to hear him add: So we’re admitting it. This law is a bust. We’re starting over.
(Bold emphasis mine.) RTWT.
Wow.
Who knew the editors of the Trib were racists?
From a comment to Tam’s post If schadenfreude had calories, I’d weigh 300 pounds:
I would be inclined to believe you are correct, and that this whole debacle is purely incompetence, and had no reason or logic behind it, but that isn’t what concerns me. Have you seen what liberals can do with incompetence? Incompetence is their milieu; the left can build shining towers out of incompetence while the sane and competent are barely keeping a roof over their heads. However this breaks, it will break bad for us.