| « | Guest Post: From Rachel Peepers |
»
|
|
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
“We’re All In This Together”
Via the indispensable Nicki Fellenzer, we have this bit of verified obscenity:
This was a letter to the editor in the August 29th, 2009 Clarion Ledger, a Mississippi newspaper:Dear Sirs:During my last night's shift in the ER, I had the pleasure of evaluating a patient with a shiny new gold tooth, multiple elaborate tattoos, a very expensive brand of tennis shoes and a new cellular telephone equipped with her favorite R&B tune for a ringtone. Glancing over her chart, one could not help noticing her payer status: Medicaid. She smokes more than one costly pack of cigarettes per day and, somehow, still has money to buy beer.
And our Congress expects me to pay for this woman's health care? Our nation's health care crisis is not a shortage of quality hospitals, doctiors, or nurses. It is a crisis of culture -- a culture in which it is perfectly acceptable to spend money on vices while refusing to take care of oneself or, heaven forbid, purchase health insurance. A culture that thinks "I can do whatever I want to because someone else will always take care of me." Life is really not that hard. Most of us reap what we sow.
Don't you agree?
STARNER JONES, MD
Jackson, MSOn 6 September 2009, the Clarion Ledger published a follow-up letter from another reader under the title "Health Care Reform Is Not 'Us vs. Them'":
I've been stewing about an Aug. 23 letter to the editor ("Why pay for the care of the careless?") in which Dr. Starner Jones questioned the worth of a patient to receive Medicaid because of her gold tooth, tattoos, R&B ring tone on a new cell phone, cigarette-smoking and beer-drinking.This kind of personal attack is nothing new with the hateful rhetoric of late. But it's a real slippery slope when one questions whether another human being merits support for health care because of appearances and choices. There are a lot of folks in this state who make less-than-perfect choices about finances and health. We are the poorest, fattest state, after all.
We need to turn off our TVs and radios and do our own research on health care reform. All the Fox-fed and MSNBC-led masses are out spewing the same language the pundits are using.
Look at entities who, bottom line, want to raise their ratings and celebrity, not facilitate a meaningful or productive discourse.
This country deserves more. Read the health care reform bill. And learn the real issues of our entire community. We're all Americans.
This is no "us vs. them" issue. We are all in this together.
Jennifer Sigrest
Clinton
Unpacking Miss Sigrest's tirade in detail would deprive your Curmudgeon of 100% of his stomach lining. The low points alone are nausea-inducing:
- "This kind of personal attack:" Who attacked whom? Dr. Jones noted that the unnamed patient obviously put a far higher priority on various frivolities and vices than on paying for her own medical care: an accurate assessment from the evidence at hand.
- "Less-than-perfect choices about finances and health:" So if your Curmudgeon were to blow his next year's salary on "fast women and slow horses," or go on a sugar binge that precipitates his Type II diabetes into the real thing, Miss Sigrest would approve compelling others to pay for his medical care?
- "Learn the real issues of our entire community:" Such "real community issues" as exist derive from "public goods:" assets none of us can have without providing them to all of us, such as national defense. But what one person can provide to himself without providing it to others is not a "community issue," but a matter of choices and priorities.
The "we're all in this together" canard is one of the oldest and easiest to refute. The most telling refutation in print comes from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged:
"We're all one big family, they told us, we're all in this together. But you don't stand working an acetylene torch ten hours a day -- together, and you don't all get a bellyache -- together. Whose ability and which of whose needs comes first? When it's all one pot, you can't let any man decide what his own needs are, can you? If you did, he might claim he needs a yacht -- and if his feelings is all you have to go by, he might prove it, too. Why not? If it's not right for me to own a car until I've worked myself into a hospital ward, earning a car for every loafer and every naked savage on Earth -- why can't he demand a yacht from me, too, if I still have the ability not to have collapsed?"
For "yacht" in the above, feel free to substitute "very expensive tennis shoes," or "cell phone," or "gold tooth"... or "medical care."
Money is infinitely fungible. The unnamed Medicaid patient in Dr. Jones's ER expressed her priorities for her money's deployment through her purchases...and by allowing the Mississippi state government, and through it, Mississippi's taxpayers, to pick up the tab for her medical care.
That brings us to a central point about State-controlled medical care, one that Miss Sigrest is either too stupid or too blinded by faux-compassion to see. When a private matter such as medical care is made into a "community issue," the "community" acquires not merely the responsibility for dealing with it but the authority to enforce relevant norms. Dr. Jones's unnamed Medicaid patient is but a Senate vote away from federal regimentation of her entire life: deprivation of her cigarettes, her beer, her trips to the tattoo parlor, and many other things, in the name of health care cost control.
Numerous commentators have noted that Europe's luxuriant welfare states are made possible by the American military presence there. Our expenditure of roughly $150 billion per year (1988 dollars) on our contribution to NATO has made it possible for the Europeans to forgo comparable levels of defense spending. The money they saved at our expense was poured into such programs as government old-age pensions and socialized medicine. Had we not facilitated that transfer of resources from a genuine public good (defense against external threats) to state-run charity, Europe could not have afforded its folly.
America certainly won't be able to afford it. No one picks up our bills.
But the ultimate point here is moral. It is absolutely wrong, as a matter of unchallengeable moral principle, to impose a burden upon another person against his will. When some persons, however selected, are permitted to do so, there are always repercussions. The ant won't support the grasshopper indefinitely. Eventually, Atlas will shrug...or collapse from exhaustion.
We can learn this from other nations' example, or we can learn it on our own hides. The time to choose is here.
Comments
As for the expensive cigarettes: they are expensive because of taxes and the unconstitutional Master Settlement of 1998. The prices were driven up to ostensibly cover the purported extra medical costs of smokers.
Considering that tobacco’s price has been tripled by these fiats, smokers long ago covered any such extra expenses. It’s all hooey, of course, as final illnesses of all stripes--death care, if you will--are the lion’s share of medical expenditures. Healthy, unhealthy--it all comes out in the wash.
Yet every time an increase in taxes and other punishments for smokers is proposed, one would think the issue has never been addressed. They pay their share. To deny that is to practice tyranny on wheels.
This post is an argument against government financing of medicine. As few voters want to end that practice, it is incumbent on us to accept all the risks free people practice. To do otherwise is to further the war of all against all instigated by the government.
Posted by on 02/03/2010 at 09:21 AMI wish to digress for a very important observation.
CE wrote: “...Miss Sigrest is either too stupid or too blinded by faux-compassion....”
I beg to differ with this either or. Since none of us is priveleged to know “Miss Sigrest” personally, she remains as anonymous to all as anyone on the Internet with the exception of the “trustworthy” Media outlet who published her screed.
Thus she could easily be a Sinister Wing member of long standing engaging in agit-prop and provocation.
Given how much the Obama admin took out all stops to get elected and to get the legislation as far as it has what with ACORN and SEIU “volunteers”, do you doubt that the likelihood that they are employing such persons full time to counter all published anecdotes that they spot anywhere?
Think of how that excuse for a writer at Vanity Fair sent his acolytes here to harass you and put that type on the Federal Stimulus payroll, and voilà.
Now, the obvious question is: how do we counteract such treachery funded by our own taxpayer dimes?
Posted by Pascal (the derivative) on 02/03/2010 at 04:30 PM
Comment Form
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.
