The Gulag Obama: No Excellence, Just 'Fairness'
December 15, 2009
For those of you who missed the 20th Century, The Gulag Archipelago is the great work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian historian, novelist, dramatist, World War II veteran of the Red Army, and dissident and political prisoner of the Soviet Union.
Gulag means Chief Directorate of 'Corrective Labor Camps' (read concentration camps), and the word 'archipelago' compares the system of concentration camps spread out across the U.S.S.R. with a vast chain of islands known only to those unfortunates imprisoned in it and the Communist dictatorship responsible for creating and running it.
The Gulag Obama is President Barack Obama's proposed healthcare system which will create a vast federal bureaucracy designed not to improve the quality, availability and affordability of medical care, but to make Americans subservient and beholden to, and enslaved and taxed by, Obama's favored political groups, ACORN and Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
This conclusion is derived from:
- The contents of the bill; and
- An understanding of who authored it and why.
For convenience, we have attached a copy of the proposed Senate bill, which you can access by clicking here.
Begin on page 693, and note that the Secretary of HHS has been tasked with developing a 'National Strategy For Quality Improvement In Healthcare', and "through a transparent collaborative process, shall establish a national strategy to improve the delivery of health care services, patient health outcomes, and population health".
Excellence in medicine is not a government 'collaborative process'. It's an accomplishment of exceptionally intelligent and highly motivated people, focused on the dispassionate pursuit of science, truth and skill.
Leaving that aside for the moment and the fact that neither the Secretary nor any other bureaucrat has the relevant knowledge, skills, experience or incentive to accomplish such a goal, consider that on page 699, the President is instructed to assemble an Interagency Working Group On Healthcare Quality known as the 'Working Group'.
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The goals of the Working Group shall be to establish "collaboration, cooperation, and consultation between federal departments and agencies with respect to developing and disseminating strategies, goals, models, and timetables that are consistent with the national priorities" for healthcare improvement.
We are loathe to waste space with a recitation of facts, but it's instructive to note which agencies shall be responsible for this effort, and here they are:
The Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the Administration for Children and Families, the Department of Commerce, the Office of Management and Budget, the United States Coast Guard, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Labor, the United States Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Defense, the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Veterans Health Administration, and any other federal agencies and departments with activities relating to improving health care quality and safety, as determined by the President (perhaps the U.S. Postal Service).
They couldn't deliver H1N1 vaccines in time for the epidemic, but we're supposed to believe that they'll efficiently and effectively create an entire new, national healthcare system which will improve quality, increase accessibility and reduce costs?
Imagine the expansion of budgets these agencies will experience, and the bureaucrats who will have vast new avenues for career advancement. Now try to conceive of any way that their involvement in your healthcare will improve your health or lower your costs.
If you can bear it, begin reading page 702 to understand the depth of involvement these agencies will have, along with ACORN and SEIU, in determining the types of medical care doctors may provide, and when and to whom they may provide it.
Here's a synopsis:
The Secretary will be empowered to develop measurement standards and tools to determine the quality and cost-effectiveness of care delivered by your doctor. She will grant contracts to outside parties, who may include community organizing groups such as ACORN, and unions such as SEIU, to develop those standards and tools.
They also will be tasked with measuring "equity of health services and health disparities across health disparity populations". 'Multi-Stakeholder Groups' will be nominated by the public to participate in this process.
The quality, availability and delivery of your healthcare will become an exercise in 'fairness', determined by 'stakeholder groups', not medical professionals.
They will have the power to establish "varying payments to doctors who order advanced diagnostic imaging services (such as mammograms) according to the equity of health services and health disparities across health disparity populations for ordering such services as determined in consultation with physicians, specialty groups, and other stakeholders".
'Varying payments' means that your doctor will get paid less for providing you with services that don't conform to the dictates of these community groups. In other words, if you're a 'rich, white woman' living in a nice suburb, you're not a member of a 'health disparity population'. ACORN will reallocate resources away from your doctor and your hospital in order to address 'health disparities across health disparity populations'.
This entire process is a scheme for wealth redistribution, and you will be taxed to pay for it.
The healthcare reform plan was written by the President's good friend, Andy Stern, who heads SEIU, which contributed $60 million to the 2008 Obama campaign. SEIU also gave millions to Health Care For America NOW!, which advocates a plan, not surprisingly, that is nearly identical to the President's.
Click here to read Mr. Stern's opinion about the Senate's version as of December 17, 2009.
SEIU has two million members, and one of its officials admits that a significant percentage of them are illegal aliens. Contrary to the President's claims, the health care reform bill does not prohibit publicly subsidized medical care from going to illegal aliens.
The President's plan does gut Medicare, the entitlement program which pays the medical expenses for elderly Americans. Seniors have paid insurance premiums into Medicare for the past forty years.
Obama wants to cut one-half trillion dollars from it over the next ten years. The money will not be reinvested in Medicare, it will be used to fund this giant redistribution of wealth.
Under the guise of 'Comparative Effectiveness', ACORN and SEIU will determine which medical procedures are effective, which aren't, and which members of the population will be entitled to receive them.
As an example, if a medical surgery to treat colon cancer costs $100,000, a fifty year-old patient with a life expectancy of twenty years will be allowed to have it, as the cost averages $5,000 per year. A seventy year-old with a life expectancy of ten years will be denied the surgery because the cost averages $10,000 per year.
In the jargon of Obamacare, the older patient has less life potential and therefore less right to call on communal resources. That's the problem with Marxism: It treats people as fungible commodities rather than as God's children (see Marxist! Marxist! Marxist!, which we wrote more than a year ago).
The doctor/patient relationship will be replaced by the government/doctor relationship. Doctors will be compensated based upon their adherence to government mandates regarding which procedures may be performed on which patients.
The real kicker is that SEIU will organize and unionize all hospital personnel. Go wait in line at the Post Office, and then contemplate lying in a hospital bed with similarly dedicated union members in charge of your care.
If our wealthy, liberal friends think they won't get caught in Obama's healthcare gulag, they should remember that liberals always get shot first in a Marxist regime.
The future of the Democrat Party is not senior citizens or middle class Americans of any race; it's union members from Mexico and Central America and government-dependent U.S. citizens.
Barack and the Democrats will throw grandma from her scooter and give it to Jose, and they're willing to vote in the dead of night to do it.
Whether the healthcare legislation contains a public option and/or funding for abortion is beside the point.
Obamacare is a Third World healthcare system concocted by our Third World president and the union and community organizing thugs who helped elect him, and who stole the Minnesota U.S. Senate seat for Al Franken.