Happy Friday! You’ve nearly made it to the weekend.
Today in history:
In 1971, NASA’s Mariner 9 entered Mars’ orbit after 167 days in space
In 1969, Apollo 12 launched
In 1851, the book Moby Dick by Herman Melville made its debut. The movie would take a bit longer.
Birthdays today include: King Charles III, Park Chung-Hee, the third President of South Korea, and Joe McCarthy.
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I’ve been thinking and reflecting about the Schumer Shutdown. Particularly, in light of what the Democrats have been doing post-capitulation. They’ve shifted gears to — big shock here — Epstein. Yeah, that got shut down, too, but that’s another column.
I’ve concluded that the only way you could consider that the stunt backfired, though, is if the Democrats actually gave a damn about what the American public believes and wants. I mean, did anyone contact you about whether we should be giving illegal aliens free healthcare? Oh, sure, they pitched it as keeping your healthcare costs from exploding. Thing is, that ship has already sailed.
Let’s focus for the moment on what I will call the domestic side of the healthcare questions from the Schumer Shutdown. We will address the illegals further on.
Healthcare costs at the consumer level, even when you ignore the massive subsidies required to keep the monster breathing, are still going up at a rate far faster than they were prior to Obamacare. (Might we consider the left cheering Luigi Mangione to be indicative of Obamacare’s abject failure?) Again, that’s with the taxpayer subsidies. Without them, well, that brings the level of Obamacare failure to another level.
The fact is that government-run healthcare — even when well-run, honest, and corruption-free — is more expensive because it takes away market incentives and restrictions. It removes the restriction that raising costs to cover a new set of golf clubs means you’re going to lose business to a lower-priced competitor.
It’s time to come back to reality and recognize once and for all that government has been destroying healthcare in the name of saving it, since the ’60s and Johnson’s Great Society, to the precise degree that government has been put in charge of it.
In many parts of the country, such as my native Rochester, N.Y., the largest employer isn’t industry as we know it anymore. The biggest employer is a government entity that runs the healthcare system hereabouts.
You would think that with that kind of spectacular growth of infrastructure, government healthcare would be far more responsible and able to handle things, wouldn’t you? Well, not so much. Don Surber, a while back, observed:
Dr. Edwin Leap works in ER at WVU Hospitals in Princeton and Bluefield. (Beautiful country, by the way).
He wrote, “Patient volumes are high. EMS stretchers line up in front of our desks like small, tragic train cars from some war-zone. On them, old men and women slump in exhaustion or cry from broken bones. On others, young addicts struggle against restraints because of their methamphetamine use, or scream because Narcan robbed them of their high; saving their lives causes instant and miserable withdrawal. They park as we try to find rooms in which to put them when all the rooms are full. Treatment in the hallway, or in the waiting room, is routine. Nurses, short-staffed as always, try their best to keep up with orders from physicians and balance that against very simple needs of patients, like food, clean gowns or trips to the bathroom. Bedpans in the hallway are, obviously, less than optimal.”
It’s called government healthcare. This is exactly the kind of thing I’ve warned about with government takeover of health care for the last 20-plus years. Hillarycare, Obamacare, it doesn’t matter. It all ends up being exactly as Don describes it here.
The spectacle of COVID-19 raised further questions about the quality of care. Regarding the vaccine mandates, we now have documented proof that being what the CDC defined as “fully vaccinated” (and boosted) did absolutely nothing to keep you from contracting the virus. It also did absolutely nothing to stop you from spreading the virus. In fact, the data now shows that those who are fully vaccinated are, in fact, more likely to contract the omicron variety than are the unvaccinated.
Where, I ask, is the response of our all-caring, all-seeing, all-knowing government healthcare system to what, in the best case, is complete incompetence, and is more likely a case of corruption? We had our lives, our society, and our culture completely altered and uprooted by this nonsense, for nonsense it is, and the data now shows that clearly.
As for trustworthiness, let’s look very closely at the heavily redacted list of investments made by Dr. Anthony Fauci. Since the IRS is giving us all an annual colonoscopy every April 15, let’s use that government data to find out just where his money’s been coming from, shall we? Let’s get rid of the redaction and find out precisely what’s going on here. I think we’d find out that all of this has more to do with Fauci’s bottom line and that of the Big Pharma that owns him than it does with healthcare. The government must think so as well, since there’s been no serious criminal investigation into the matter.
I’ve said for years that when the government runs healthcare, every healthcare decision becomes a political one. There’s only one problem with that assertion: It ignores the avarice a goodly number of people succumb to when they’re handed the power of government.
Related: NPR/PBS and Now the BBC: The Problem of Government-Funded Media
I remind you of Fauci getting up on his hind legs on CNN, telling the world that Donald Trump was going to be facing a pandemic less than two days after Donald Trump was first elected. Now, how on Earth would he have known that? Without a serious explanation of that, it’s easy enough to consider the timing of the release of the virus as suspect.
And for that matter, whose good idea was it to trust the Communist Chinese and even pay them for doing what amounts to biological weapons research? Who was it who signed off on that research? Why are they not adding to our prison population at this very moment?
It seems clear that, as a direct result of that “research,” which, beyond question, got away from the supposed experts and was quite possibly released intentionally, the supposed experts had no bloody clue as to what to do about it. I suggest that the very reason we’re not pursuing this matter on a criminal basis is that the answers to these questions may very well result in a couple of million counts of involuntary manslaughter, to say nothing of the civil suits.
Obviously, none of these questions was supposed to have been brought up. I suspect there was a combination of hiding the facts that raise these questions and having other priorities, which leads us to the Democrats and their obsessive lean toward illegal aliens, their newest, bestest voter buddies. In this context, the issue was and remains the documented push to give illegal aliens free healthcare. I’ve already addressed a bit of this in a column last week (behind the PJ Media VIP paywall).
Is it possible that one of the reasons for healthcare being so expensive is that we are paying for that of illegal aliens already (or at least we were, before the Big Beautiful Bill)? Might this be the reason every counterproposal offered by the Democrats during the shutdown removed the prohibition on healthcare for such people?
It seems the only healthcare the government is willing to do correctly is the colonoscopy it gives us every April 15.
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