Matthew's Week End Commentary:
"Totalitarianism Comes To America..."
Bearing yesterday's shocking and somewhat mystifying Supreme Court decision on ObamaCare in mind, it has become apparent that our government -- at all levels, county, state, and all three federal branches -- is atrociously out of control.
Without getting too far into the weeds on the 2,400-page (and counting) Affordable Care Act (because I'm not a lawyer, thankfully) the gist of the 5-4 decision is this:
Congress has the constitutional authority to impose any tax that it sees fit, for any reason, whatsoever, despite the fact that a) The Bill itself was passed in anything BUT a Constitutional manner, and b) the Obamatard lawyers did everything in their power to portray the costs of the Individual Mandate as anything BUT a tax. Somehow six Justices sat there and listened to months of "it's not a tax, really, and we don't want to make the argument that it is" and came to the conclusion that it was up to them to make up their own arguments in favor of calling it a tax.
First things, first:
I would hardly call any bill which threatens to set up a score or more of new federal bureaucracies, granted ever-more intrusive powers that will slowly seep into every nook-and-cranny of American Life, which was passed only because the then-democrat-controlled House of Representatives manipulated Congressional rules until they got the vote they wanted, and then passed the resulting pile of stinking dogcrap onto an openly-bribed, democrat-controlled Senate, to be Constitutional.
The entire process which brought us the Affordable Care Act was the sort of sleazy, one-hand-washes-the-other backroom political dealing -- brazenly carried out in the light of day -- that people in this country used to find abhorrent, and at one time would riot in the streets over. Apparently this is not true anymore, and it's both disheartening and disgusting. The bill should have been disqualified on the basis that it was conceived in the worst sort of political sewer. I don't know if the Court has the authority to make that determination, but when you consider that previous courts have made shit up out thin air to justify everything from abortion to seizing private property in order to save insects or to build yet another strip mall, one wonders when this penchant for our most eminent jurists to fly by the seat of their pants kicks in, and under what circumstances.
I would also tend to view the idea that it is the federal government's job to keep anyone alive, outside of it's enumerated power to defend the United States and it's citizens, is a badly-flawed one, if only because, eventually, such decisions must become politicized. Between bureaucracies fighting turf wars and fighting for funding, and the propensity of presidents and congressdouches to use the organs of government as both stick and carrot, it is a foregone conclusion that healthcare in this country will change on a mostly-political basis.
Pandora's Box has been opened by this decision; now the the government has empowered itself to know everything, and do everything, about your Irritable Bowel Syndrome, your Chronic Pink Eye, your Creaky Prostate, your Leaky Bladder, your AIDS, Cancer, or Purple Hemorrhoids, it will soon follow that in order to "fairly" distribute healthcare services, or to "ensure access for all" that the government will also be empowered to mandate all sorts of things, always explained as preventative or cost-effective measures.
Soon, there will be a mandate that every American eat a high-fiber diet, and to ensure compliance, a whole new bureaucracy will be established to make sure you do by examining your stool under a microscope. You WILL have to eat your vegetables, and since in many American Urban Landscapes the real vegetables are too busy giving birth to babies they can't feed and collecting welfare checks with which they buy crack and pork rinds, the government will expand Food Stamp programs so that these miscreants can "afford" spinach, carrots, and broccoli. This, of course, will not lead to a healthier ghetto at all, once someone figures out how to scam these additional rations for cold, hard cash on the Q.T.
Soon, every American will be ordered to exercise at least 30 minutes daily, and every business in the country will be saddled with the expense and responsibility of ensuring that their employees are either supplied with a gym, or that time is taken from the busy business day for some sort of communal PhysEd period, like they do before work in Japan. Or which every Party member had to endure during the Physical Jerks in Orwell's 1984, all done under the watchful eye of some bureaucratic dipshit from OSHA or something.
Soon, every American may be required to donate blood, bone marrow, any extra organs they may have lying around, skin grafts, hair, sperm, unfertilized ovum and toenails on a regular basis, as a "Patriotic Duty" to ensure that those requiring transplants, or sex-change operations, or open heart surgery after 85 years of age, always have a goodly supply of whatever is needed at any given time. Of course, as long as the government has these things, it will take the "necessary step" as either a "crimefighting measure" or as "a mere formality, necessary to establish identity" to DNA test the fuck out of it all, and keep secret records for it's own purposes. It is even conceivable that having this information at hand, the government should take it upon itself to order -- or at least request -- that people donate what appear to be genetically-compatible organs to complete strangers, or face a hefty fine.
Ultimately, the purpose of the Affordable Care Act has little to do with anyone's actual health, nor with making health care any cheaper or easier. In fact, one could argue that it's sole intent is to destroy the health insurance market, for if I read this right, that is the main thrust of the Individual Mandate. So far as I can understand it, those who don't buy health insurance as per the Mandate, are fined. However, the fine is so ridiculously low (as compared to a stay in the hospital) that only a complete doofus would splurge for health insurance. The treatment they receive would still be paid for by the taxpayer, in any case, just like what happens to the uninsured when they walk into Emergency Rooms now!
So, we will eventually get to a Single Payer system -- like every card-carrying Libtard actually wants -- by virtue of the fact that we will remove the possibility of profit from the health insurance industry, and by giving people a choice which they'd have to be a complete retard to pass up, which is, basically, catastrophic health care services for next to no money.
Having recently spent a nearly $9,000 night with no insurance in a hospital, myself, if you told me before the ordeal that my choice was going to be between paying that bill, or running afoul of the Individual Mandate and paying a $700-to-1,000 fine for the misdemeanor crime of not having private health insurance, which option do you think I'm most likely to choose?
Now, what happens when everyone makes that choice? Well, hospitals close. Doctors go out of business and take up plumbing. Who needs nurses? Who is going to buy flu vaccines? Who needs surgical supplies and instruments? The system, as it stands, flaws and all, will simply be taken over -- by necessity -- by the government, who will staff them the same way they staff their bureaucracies: with overpaid, unionized morons of the sort that fall asleep at the controls of Amtrak trains, or forget to turn their TSA metal detectors on at the airport, or who spend eight hours a day safeguarding your food supply by keeping a careful watch for salmonella on chicken with the naked eye.
Under that circumstance, assuming I have my facts right in that example (it's hard to tell, because even after Nancy Pelosi got it passed, we still don't know what the fuck is in it) the Individual Mandate, then, is not about providing vital health services to anyone: it's about destroying the Insurance Companies and health providers by undercutting their bottom lines! And once certain providers -- say, hospitals? -- become insolvent because the government has both fixed their costs ridiculously low and ruined their revenue stream, what do you think happens next? They become nationalized, of course.
Which has worked out so well everywhere else. In Canada, it's famously joked that women wait 10 months to get into a maternity ward. In England, the National Health Service routinely kills or seriously injures patients through neglect, antiquated facilities and bureaucratic muddle, and the victims can't sue to get recompense. In some countries in Europe, anyone who comes into a hospital seeking mental health services is automatically dispensed anti-depressants and anti-psychotics, whether they're actually needed or not.
It's bad enough the government is run by nameless, faceless, high-school dropouts that work in the federal bureaucracies, for it is axiomatic that while President X, Congresscritter Y and Senator Z appear to be running the country, they are, in truth, not. They are temporary. They are simply the visible pustule that signifies the manifestation of the underlying disease. This country is run by bureaucrats, mostly stupid bureaucrats because they are drawn from the lowest-common denominator of American Society (why do you think most civil service exams are written for a 3rd-grade reading level, and only require a 65 passing grade?), because without these jobs these folks would only take up a life of crime, or wander about aimlessly.
It's doubly bad that the bureaucracies only tend to get bigger, and more-expensive, and overlap, because if there's anything government is good for, it's doing everything, badly, two or three times, and at exorbitant prices, before some low-level clerk loses the paperwork between her 11:50 coffee break, and her 12:00 lunch hour.
We are more-and-more being controlled by ever expanding bureaucracies, run by who the fuck knows. These organs are given ever-more sweeping power, and lavishly funded with borrowed money. In return, we get mid-level paper-pushers taking expensive vacations-disguised-as-work in luxury hotels in Las Vegas. We get the proverbial $400 hammer, the $600 toilet seat, the $200 roll of toilet paper which the cleaning staff will take home when no one is looking. We get an EPA which spews dictates on a daily basis with little or no authority in law to back them up. We get 35 (or is it more now?) unelected Czars who are only accountable to the President of the United States, in effect, his Privy Council of Hatchet Men, like Henry VIII.
And now they want to get between you and your doctor?
Soon, very soon, after the Affordable Care Act kicks in, assuming it isn't defunded or repealed by a Republican Landslide in November which brings a Congressional Majority with it, we'll be seeing lines outside of hospitals and clinics that will remind you of the good 'ol days of Jimmy Carter's gasoline queues. Soon, very soon, we'll see a new wave of illegal immigration that will come across the border in order to get kidneys and corneas, false teeth and facelifts, because the system will be so chaotic and so full of loopholes that it is difficult to tell whether anyone will actually be caught cheating.
Hell, the government can't seem to find -- or isn't interested in making the effort -- 12 million potential cheaters mostly hiding in plain sight, so why not try to go for the free angioplasty, and a boob job, while you're at it?
It was once thought that what the country needed was simply a change of political parties in order to flush out the worst of the muck that clogged the arteries of government. It is now clear that what is required is more than just switching democrats for republicans or Tea party; we need a fundamental rethink of what government does and how it does it, from the top to the very bottom. It may be some time for some needed government and Constitutional Reform, because it's crystal clear that both are badly needed.
This is all spiraling out of control.
Crossposted @The Lunatic's Asylum
Matthew is a friend and weekly contributor to DMF
Please stop by and give him a shout at the above link
Matthew is a friend and weekly contributor to DMF
Please stop by and give him a shout at the above link
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