Despite the addled thinking of Kathleen Murphy, we are not at the point where, aside from laws which codify that which one must adhere to in the
process of providing health care, no one can be forced to provide it
per se. This is not to confuse laws in most states which require hospitals to accept and treat anyone who shows up in the emergency room. Such a requirement is based on the idea that if one
wants to operate a hospital, certain rules apply. But no one is
required to operate a hospital. Similar laws regulate the conduct of doctors and drug companies. But again, no one is required to become a doctor or open a pharmaceutical business.
At least not yet. And that, my fellow Americans, is the fatal flaw that lies at the heart of Obamacare. In the process of expanding access to health insurance, progressives – once again displaying their gargantuan level of ignorance regarding human nature – failed to understand that access to health
insurance and actual health
care are completely different realities.
Thus the question arises: would the American left dare to compel doctors to take patients they don't want?
A partial answer to that question is already available, and National Review's Larry Kudlow
provides it. “As a 60-something, relatively healthy person, I don't want lactation and maternity services, abortion services, speech therapy, mammograms, fertility treatments, or Viagra,” he writes. “I don't want it. So why should I have to tear up my existing health-care plan, and then buy a plan with far more expensive premiums and deductibilities and with services I don't need or want?
Why? Because Team Obama says I have to.”
Thus we have reached the point where millions of Americans are not only required to buy health insurance or pay a fine, they are required to buy insurance containing elements they don't want, and will
never need. In other words, regardless of we like it or not, Americans are beholden to progressives “enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun.” The “gun” in this case is an IRS that has already demonstrated a contemptuous capacity to kick the rule of law to the curb in pursuit of a political agenda.
Does anyone seriously think Kathleen Murphy is an anomaly?
Note where the American left has been willing to go so far. Here is a
video compilation of President Barack Obama telling the American public the bald-faced lie that they if they liked their health insurance plans and/or doctor, they can keep them. As the video reveals, he did so on
twenty-four separate occasions. The lying that drove Richard Nixon from office, and Bill Clinton into impeachment, a subsequent loss of his legal license, and a $90,000 fine,
pales in comparison to this breath-taking level of outright mendacity.
Has a single politician demanded his resignation? Is there even a remotely comparable level of media-fueled indignation that attended either Nixon or Clinton? During the Congressional hearing last week, did a single politician ask HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius the simplest of simple questions: what did the president know and when did he know it?
Obama's popularity rating
did take a “hit” – all the way down to 42 percent. Trust me when I tell you, despite all the faux hand-wringing by the American left, they are enormously encouraged by the reality that Obama has emerged relatively unscathed. For the rest of America, as incredible as it may seem, Obama's lie represents the tip of the iceberg. Page
34,551 of the Federal Register, Vol. 75, No. 116, dated
Thursday, June, 17, 2010, reveals what this administration knew and when they knew it:
“In total, approximately 66 percent of small employers and 48 percent of large employers made a change in either cost sharing or premium contribution during 2009 that would require them to relinquish grandfather status if the same change were made in 2011.”
Forbes Magazine's Avik Roy
explains the implication. “All in all, more than half of employer-sponsored plans will lose their 'grandfather status' and become illegal,” he explains. “According to the Congressional Budget Office, 156 million Americans – more than half the population – was covered by employer-sponsored insurance in 2013… As to the number of people facing cancellations, 51 percent of the employer-based market plus 53.5 percent of the non-group market (the middle of the administration's range) amounts to 93 million Americans.”
Again, does anyone seriously believe an administration that knew for
three years it would be compelling 93 million Americans to change their current health insurance policies, isn't busy at work figuring out how they can
compel doctors to fall into line?
“I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind – yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands?”
“Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of a man who resents it – and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn't.”
Once suspects the Kathleen Murphys of the world don't have a clue regarding the ultimate destination of their jackboot impulses. In that regard, she is like every progressive do-gooder who ever lived. As I have said many times before, only progressives believe that incentive and coercion are interchangeable terms. No doubt whatever happens, some doctors will fall into line. And perhaps a brave new future
does await, one where the government will impose the kind of licensing requirement for the medial profession envisioned by Kathleen Murphy. At that point, one of two things will happen: the current doctor shortage will be exponentially exacerbated – or Americans will be receiving medical treatment from the kind of mediocre hacks willing to prostrate themselves before the state.
Stay healthy, my fellow Americans.
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