Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Camille Paglia: "Obama's healthcare horror"

"Heads should roll -- beginning with Nancy Pelosi's!'

Those "progressives" who are paying attentions see what their blinded-by-the-agenda pals do not:
"You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you're happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.

I just don't get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.

As with the massive boondoggle of the stimulus package, which Obama foolishly let Congress turn into a pork rut, too much has been attempted all at once; focused, targeted initiatives would, instead, have won wide public support. How is it possible that Democrats, through their own clumsiness and arrogance, have sabotaged healthcare reform yet again? Blaming obstructionist Republicans is nonsensical because Democrats control all three branches of government. It isn't conservative rumors or lies that are stopping healthcare legislation; it's the justifiable alarm of an electorate that has been cut out of the loop and is watching its representatives construct a tangled labyrinth for others but not for themselves. No, the airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan -- it's the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves.

......And what do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame concerned citizens as the 'mob' -- a word betraying a Marie Antoinette delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.

But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration's outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable 'casual conversations' to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it."

Do you really think Obama, Pelosi, the compliant Demogogue majority in Congress, and their Looney Tooner "reform' supporters really care about any of this, Ms. Pagalia?

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4 comments:

  1. Paglia is a "progressive"???? She has made a career out of attacking progressive ideas and people. I remember her very bitter personal attacks against Hillary Clinton in the 1990s. She doesn't believe in global warming. She attacks feminism. Some of her ideas are far more neo-conservative than progressive. A few years ago, she called herself a supporter of Ralph Nader.

    What she is is a provocateur and a contrarian, which has it's place but to portray her as a "progressive who is paying attention" is propaganda, simply inaccurate.

    Someo of the commentators on this article got the best of Camille. I'll paste some of them here:

    The great columnist Molly Ivins wrote a devastating piece for Mother Jones about Paglia, calling her a sensationalist.

    http://www.its.caltech.edu/~erich/misc/ivins_on_paglia

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  2. The HTML link to Molly Ivins didn't post properly:

    Click.

    More comments from readers:

    Camille writes: "Hello shortages of physicians, importing physicians, lowering the admission criteria to medical school."

    Er, there's already a fixed number of seats in med schools.

    "And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists?"

    You'd still get to keep your (I'm sure) excellent private health insurance you have as a tenured professor.

    "And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor?"

    If they go belly up, they probably weren't that great anyway.

    "Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing."

    We already have brutal rationing. If you lose your job, you lose your health insurance. If you have private, non-employer, health insurance, the company will screw you over any way they can, then raise your rates so it's unaffordable to use or keep the insurance.

    How can the government possibly manage a single payer system? You mean like Medicare and Medicaid? How could it manage a government owned health system? Like the VA? I can't imagine how.

    ...Real Americans don't want socialized medicine. Those vets in V.A. hospitals aren't real Americans! That's why real he-men like you and me won't ever use Medicare. Or S.S. Or highways. Heck, we won't even rely upon the socialized military to fight our battles...

    We'll storm the V.A. hospitals and toss the vets out the windows! Those freedom fighters don't want socialized medicine!! The old people are next!!! No more Medicare for them. They'd rather die than receive socialized care.

    Walter Reed not VA

    I know it's pointless, but I can't let it pass.

    Walter Reed is run by the Army, with the help of private contractors. It's not part of the VA medical system. The VA is an industry leader in quality and customer-satisfaction. Its electronic medical records system is universally applauded.

    The private sector created the abominations seen at Walter Reed because of the profit motive. Patriotism in caring for injured American soldiers did not enter into the profit equation. The excellent VA care for American veterans is an example of taxpayer patriotism....

    Camille: "We'll cover another 50 million people, care won't be rationed, and we'll save money!"

    Do you think those 50 million people today simply go without health care? You must because that is the implication from your statement.

    The fact of the matter is that those without health care insurance end up using the emergency room as their primary care physician and stiffing the hospital for the bill (who in raise costs to recoup their losses, which in turn raises your premiums). They also often delay unaffordable care until the problem is so bad that they really do need the emergency room and then the necessary procedures are orders of magnitude more expensive. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

    So, yes we can cover an additional 50 million people, because we are already caring for them. Health care won't be rationed (more so than it already is) because, again, those 50 million people already receive health care. And yes, we will save money because by providing preventative care to these 50 million people they will hopefully be healthier and need less expensive care -- plus the health insurance industry can stop spending so much money on trying to cull the sick from the healthy to either drop or not insure. And that's just for starters!

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  3. Jim: Paglia voted for Obama.

    Ivins was the worst type of political hack so I don't think she qualifies as an independent perspective.

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  4. Give him a break, Jeff.

    Attempting to deflect attention away from the fact that the cherished worldview agenda item is in trouble is the only recourse these folks have at this point.

    Public opinion and the facts are clearly not in their favor.

    What's an Obamacare shill to do, given the circumstances?

    ReplyDelete