How doctors can rapidly undo ObamaCare
When I graduated from medical school, had someone told me that physicians would one day face fines or imprisonment for doing what they thought was best for their patients, I would have been more than incredulous; I would have wondered if the doomsayer was on drugs or visiting from another planet. However, thanks to President Obama and a majority of Congressmen who seemingly were born on another planet in terms of their inscrutable logic, ObamaCare and its myriad abominable provisions are now law.
Repealing ObamaCare is not feasible while Barack Obama is in office. The earliest possible repeal is in 2013, or 2017 if enough voters fall for the second round of “hope and change” malarkey. Incoming Republican Congressmen have spoken of defunding ObamaCare, but history shows that people who go to Washington with promises to change it rarely succeed; instead, they are changed by Washington, seduced by the power and perks. Result? The federal government inexorably expands, even when Republicans who profess to hate big government control both houses of Congress and the Presidency.
Defunding ObamaCare will not erase all of its impact. Most laws are enforced even though they receive no specific funding. Republicans will likely succeed in reversing a few of the onerous ObamaCare provisions and declare victory, leaving doctors and patients crushed by what remains, forced to kowtow to federal bureaucrats who know nothing about medicine but salivate for the day when they can order doctors and patients to do what President Obama and his Dr. Strangelove—Dr. Donald Berwick—want done: cutting corners without regard for cutting lives short.
Anyone who doesn't want his life ruled by a tyrant must do everything possible to oppose ObamaCare, but now that it is law, what can doctors do besides pinning their hopes on Republicans who rarely deliver their campaign promises?
How about going on strike until Washington gives in?
If you think that temporarily losing doctors is extreme, consider the alternative: permanently losing them. Judging by a study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, almost half of U.S. doctors say they will either quit because of ObamaCare or be forced out of business. Losing half of our doctors would be catastrophic.
So what is better? A temporary or permanent loss?
Temporary, obviously. However, physicians could avert the need to strike if their threat to strike was credible, not bluster. An empty threat would do nothing except embolden the Beltway tyrants, reinforcing the notion that we are powerless to resist their progressive usurpation of our freedoms. Ignoring a credible threat would be very foolish for our leaders because it would provide a nationwide tutorial on how much their power depends on our cooperation. If doctors didn't blink, Washington inevitably would. Our leaders couldn't risk such an affront to their power, so the smart thing for them to do would be to negotiate with doctors in advance instead of being forced to back down later.
Doctors are willing to spend 40,000 to 50,000 hours in training to become licensed and then have government bureaucrats tell them they will be paid less for saving a life than the cost of an iPod—or even a Happy Meal, in many cases—yet no ethical doctor will tolerate following orders from bureaucrats without medical degrees, common sense, or compassion. If we give in to Washington, we will be abandoning our professional responsibility to do everything possible to foster patient care.
Obama and Congress think their wacky laws can compel doctors to slip nooses around the necks of patients while bureaucrats gleefully tighten them. Hitler's henchmen did his dirty work without complaint, but ethical American doctors will not be willing accomplices.
Is such defiance to Washington ethical? In this case, unequivocally yes. When Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said “we have to pass the [healthcare] bill so that you can find out what is in it,” and when Congressmen voted for it without reading it, and when Obama signed it without reading it, they removed all doubt that our leaders are responsible people fulfilling their constitutional duties and working for us, not whack-jobs like George Soros, whose hobby is crashing economies and then rushing in like a vulture to profit from the misery of others.
If Nancy Pelosi wasn't such a dingbat, she would realize that passing a bill to find out what's in it is just as absurd as a doctor prescribing an unknown drug for a patient to see what it is and does. A doctor who did that would have his medical license revoked by the state medical board, who would rightfully say that practitioner was dangerously irresponsible. Judging by the smile she gave while uttering that famous admission of legislative insanity, the bats in Pelosi's belfry tell her that passing unknown legislation is a good idea. When the other Martians in Congress agreed with her, we knew that we had the illusion of representation, not bona fide representation.
No citizen should tolerate representation that is just a sham. It's time to put our feet down and draw a line in the sand, telling our leaders to behave like responsible adults instead of children who need adult supervision.
Two of every three practicing physicians oppose ObamaCare, so we possess the critical mass of discontentment to give our leaders a long overdue black eye.
Our Founding Fathers never intended for the federal government to become the intrusive monster it has become; they specifically limited its scope and power, giving it just enough authority to deal with matters that only a federal government could perform. The rest of the power—most of the power—remained with state governments, or the people. The Constitution states:
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Anyone who didn't like the laws in their state was free to move to a different one. This freedom is rapidly being eroded by the federal government as it dictates to states and to us what we can do and must do, creating an oppressive uniformity that is antithetical to freedom. Instead of safeguarding our freedom, the federal government is decimating it to fuel their endless power grab. If George Washington was forced to choose between fighting the King of Great Britain or our current federal government, he would surely point his musket towards Washington, DC. The only freedom our federal government wants is the freedom for it to do whatever it wants to us.
I used to be a veritable cheerleader for the federal government, eager to defend it when friends would malign it, but now I view it as an amalgamation of good people doing good things coupled with bad people forming an organized crime ring engineered to steal as much of our money as possible while revoking our freedoms. The control they so rabidly seek to impose on us cannot be implemented without diminishing our inherent liberties. That is obvious, yet it does nothing to moderate their zeal to control us.
The federal government has become a malignant cancer. Ultimately, they will do more harm to Americans and America's future than everyone convicted of treason in U.S. history along with Nazi Germany and Japan in World War II, the USSR during the Cold War, and the Islamic terrorists who don't have a prayer of realizing their wacky dreams of making us live on our knees, doing what they command—or else. However, the federal government is doing just that, implementing controls that once would have been unimaginable, and ones that would have made our Founding Fathers fight to the death to remove.
Our enemies never got close to destroying us, but without a miracle, we will fall from being an economic superpower to a banana republic, just as Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) predicted. On August 4th 2009, Gregg, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee and the man who Obama initially selected to be Secretary of Commerce, said that “we’re basically on the path to a banana-republic-type of financial situation in this country” within 10 years. “We're going to undermine fundamentally the quality of life for our children by doing this. [ … ] It will be hard for our kids to buy a car, buy a house, or send their kids to college. The standard of living will drop.”
The standard of living is dropping. I've met people who once ran successful businesses who are now unemployed and homeless. Their fall from the upper-middle class to cardboard-box poverty wasn't precipitated by laziness, a lack of education, mental illness, or abuse of drugs or alcohol. In many cases, the only mistake they made was trying to follow the rules dictated by leaders who do the bidding of the billionaires who pull their strings, while we get lip service and 70,000 pages of new laws and regulations every year that bury us under a blizzard of rules that Einstein could not fully comprehend.
Can the Tea Party eradicate this cancer? I'm skeptical. I've heard similar promises before. “Elect me, and I'll go to Washington, cut taxes, reduce the size of government, eliminate fraud and wasteful spending.” Blah, blah, blah … it sounds good, but government never shrinks. It just keeps expanding and restricting our liberty. Freedom is like a pie: when the government gives itself a bigger piece of the pie (the right to do more), citizens are left with a smaller piece: less freedom, more control.
The federal government, as designed by our Founding Fathers, was never supposed to be our master or the master of the states, but by usurping powers it never had, it has morphed from a friendly ally to a belligerent foe that is strangling our economy.
In a Fox News interview on December 3rd 2010, host Bill Hemmer asked Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID), “You said yesterday, 'We need to avoid a third-world-style economic crisis.' Do you think in 2010, going into 2011, that the United States of America faces a third-world crisis? Explain that.”
SENATOR CRAPO: If you look at our debt posture right now, our national debt is 62% of our GDP. If we do nothing, that will grow to 90% of our GDP within this decade and hit 180% of GDP by 2035. Now we actually will not hit that, because as we approach the 90% level, which we are rapidly approaching, the economy itself will take over and make the policy decisions that Congress refuses to make, and we will see pain and difficulty in our economy and across the board for all Americans that far exceeds anything in this proposal [from the Deficit Reduction Commission] or any of the other deficit-control proposals that are out there.
HEMMER (speaking to co-host Martha MacCallum): He [Senator Crapo] also said our debt crisis is a threat not just to our way of life but our national survival.
Leaders must, by definition, lead. Our federal leaders are leading us to the grave, economically and literally. ObamaCare will unquestionably kill patients as bureaucrats mindlessly follow their scripts that dictate what doctors can and cannot do for patients, so doctors must lead us away from the grave and toward a brighter future.
Our federal government has repeatedly proven it cannot run anything well at reasonable cost. ObamaCare will be the kiss of death for the U.S. economy and many patients, so doctors have an ethical obligation to become national leaders instead of followers who meekly acquiesce to irresponsible politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.
Remember what Senator Gregg said about us being on the path to a banana republic? People in banana republics receive healthcare that is worse than what dogs now receive in the United States, so as we fall from being an economic superpower to an economic joke, you can expect to be treated like a dog.
Obama and Pelosi hope that people are dumb and spineless enough to follow their commands. Roll over. Play dead.
Not me. You?
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Reference: Imagining dialogue can boost critical thinking: Excerpt: “Examining an issue as a debate or dialogue between two sides helps people apply deeper, more sophisticated reasoning …”
Comment #104 by Ross Blomberg
January 20 2011 11:45:59 PM
Spineless
Having doctors go on strike would work only if they have the spine to strike when Congress passes the law that makes it illegal for doctors to strike. This is what they did with air traffic controllers. Then the doctors would have to risk arrest to have it work. I don't see this happening. Doctors have much to lose.