Why Obamacare Is Shovel-Ready

Sarah Palin struck a chord during the Obamacare debates when she spoke of "death panels" denying care to old people whose "quality of life" wasn't good enough to justify spending public money treating them.  Her warnings about turning medical decisions over to government bureaucrats resonated with anybody who's dealt with the Department of Motor Vehicles, the Post Office, the Internal Revenue Service, or any child protection agency. 

Liberals keep telling us that everything is totally rosy with the British National Health Service, but they must not read overseas news where the British press fulfills their duty to inform the public about the realities of government-run health care.  They wrote of high-level government figures saying that older people have a duty to die to save the government money.

As one would expect, this pronouncement was followed by outrageous incidents of patient abuse, including leaving elderly patients lying in their own filth in hospital beds and ambulance attendants deciding not to resuscitate a man who had suffered a heart seizure because he wasn't worth saving.  These unfortunates would have been better off had there been formal "death panels" to judge them unworthy of life; at least they'd have had advance warning and possibly been able to appeal rather than merely being ruled disposable when they were already in need.

Now the Telegraph tells us "A paralysed patient has been left severely brain damaged after a nurse switched off his life support machine in an incident captured on CCTV."

Violeta Aylward, an agency nurse working for the NHS, was caught on camera turning off the ventilator keeping quadriplegic Jamie Merrett alive.

The 37-year-old, left paralysed from the neck down following a car accident in 2002, had a bedside camera set up at his home after becoming concerned about the standard of care he was receiving.

Look at this from Mr. Merrett's of view.  He's a helpless quadriplegic who's dependent on government employees who can't be fired to keep him alive.  He became worried that the nurses who called on him didn't know how to operate his ventilator.  He couldn't do anything to get a better quality of care - his letters to the government agency who managed his care were ignored.  In desperation, he had his relatives set up a camera to record what happened:

Footage recorded only a few days after it was installed shows Miss Aylward fiddling with the ventilator before a high-pitched warning tone sounds, indicating it is switched off.

Mr Merrett is then left fighting for life as the nurse panics about what to do next, unable to restart the ventilator or properly operate resuscitation equipment.

It was not until 21 minutes later that paramedics who rushed to the scene managed to turn the life support machine back on.

But by that time, Mr Merrett had suffered serious brain damage, which has left him with the mental capacity of a young child.

Before the incident, he was able to talk, use a wheelchair and operate a computer using voice-activated technology.

How do you think Mr. Merrett felt as he watched her fiddle ignorantly with the machine that breathed for him, then saw her panic as it shut down and she couldn't restart it?  Unfortunately, he can't communicate any more because of brain damage.  We'll never know how he felt, but we can imagine it.

In a normal market system, a customer can change vendors but he couldn't.  Government agencies decided who would care for him regardless of his well-grounded reservations about their lack of competence.

No Choice for You

Mr. Merrett's sorry fate is a dire warning of what will happen to all of us under Obamacare.  In the US, a patient is able to switch to a different nursing agency, go to a different hospital, or switch doctors.  This may not happen all that often, but it can, which means that hospitals have to work to please patients at least a little.

Remember when Mr. Obama said whoever liked their insurance could keep it?  Once we got into the details of the 2,000+ page bill, insurance companies have to cover all sorts of expensive things to the point that many employers won't want to pay for it any more.  as was predicted at the time, we're seeing employers forced to cancel the insurance coverage that their employees have and like as a result of Obamacare's passing.  Mr. Obama lied, pure and simple.

He also said we could choose our doctors and hospitals.  Lo and behold, the bill has pages and pages which authorize the secretary of Health and Human Services to write rules about what treatments we may have and who will be authorized to supply them.  We won't have much choice at all.

When you go to the DMV to renew your drivers' license, what can you do if the clerk who deals with you is incompetent?  Can you get your license from another place that treats you better or offers you a better price?  Nope, that's the only place you can get a license which you're required by law to have; you just have to sit there and suck it up.

That's just about how much choice you'll have under Obamacare.  The Democratic party is owned by labor unions which insist that incompetent practitioners be protected.  Mr. Obama helped kill a successful voucher program which educated inner-city black children at less cost than the public schools and he gave billions of taxpayer dollars to preserve outmoded work rules and inflated union wages at GM and Chrysler.  Under Obamacare health workers will in effect be government employees who can't be fired no matter how incompetent.  This attitude toward performance has been disastrous in public schools, how will it play out in hospitals?

Why should government officials care about the DMV?  As with Obamacare, our rulers have exempted themselves from this form of government abuse.  Governors, senators, anybody with pull, come in the back door and get their pictures taken immediately, standing in line is for us peasants, not for them!  When Mr. Obama promised that if we liked our health care we could keep it, he was talking only to the Senate and the US Congress, everybody else will take whatever the government doles out.

Mr. Obama lied about Obamacare, and thousands will die.  The government gravediggers - unionized, of course - had better get their shovels ready.