The Clinton Administration has ordered a new $26 million telephone system installed in the White House (without competitive bidding), claiming that the one used by the Bush Administration was inadequate to handle the 65,000 calls a day the President received in February.
However, investigators have discovered that the old system could be programmed to field 200,000 calls an hour — but the Clinton Administration personnel just didn’t know how to operate it.
Now the same bureaucrats who can’t make a telephone system work tell us they want to manage all U.S. public AND private spending on health care — one seventh of our Gross National Product. Can you believe the gall of these people!
Hillary Clinton’s 245-page health care proposal is genuine socialism — an attempt to control every aspect of U.S. health care under a National Health Board functioning like a Communist Central Committee. Nothing so totalitarian has ever before been proposed in the history of the United states.
Hillary’s proposal will take away your right to choose your own doctor. You may, perhaps, be able to choose your “plan,” but it will be pure coincidence if your doctor happens to be in your “plan.”
Hillary’s proposal will force (yes, force) every American to buy basic health coverage from a “regional health alliance” — a newly coined word that means a government monopoly, sort of like collective farms in the old soviet Union. It will be the “obligation” of every individual to enroll (p.15), and “the state ensures” that you will do it. (p.50) Wow! Send out the storm troopers!
Your “alliance” may offer you a choice of several plans, but there is no assurance you will get into the plan you choose if it is oversubscribed. If you don’t sign up, you (and newborn babies) will be assigned to the plan that Hillary’s henchmen select. (p.15 and 58)
You may even be denied the pretense of a choice of plans because states are given the right to opt for a single-payer (Canadian) system for the state or for a part of the state. (p.54) Alliances are also given the right to exclude all choose-your-doctor plans (p.62) and to impose a costly surcharge on anyone who insists on choosing his own doctor. (p.98)
Price controls and the rule that no plan may cost 20% more than the average price of other plans will make it practically impossible for most alliances to offer any plan that allows you to choose your own doctor. Hillary’s proposal is thus vindictively designed to eliminate all doctors in independent private practice.
Hillary’s proposal will take away your right to spend your own money for better medical care. No matter how hard you work to provide for your family, to buy a better house, a better car, or send your children to better schools, it will be illegal to buy your family better medical care or see a physician specialist on your own, outside the system. If you try to do this, you will be subject to criminal penalties. (p.9)
The purpose of this totalitarian scheme is to make sure that America has a one-tiered system of medical care at the level determined by the Clintonistas. (p.28) This means you will be restricted to the same level of medical care received by the deadbeat drug addicts picked up off of skid row (and you will be taxed to care for them, too).
This one-tiered system will make it very difficult for you to see a physician specialist even within your alliance. A new oligarchy called Gatekeepers will restrict access to their services by price controls and rationing, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services is empowered to reduce hospital residencies to one-half their present number by deciding how many specialists can be trained in each specialty and by “allocating training slots.” (p.125-127)
On September 30, CBS-TV News gave us a preview of how medical costs and quality of care are reduced under socialized medicine. CBS showed that, under Britain’s national health system, 80% of babies are delivered by midwives (who cost less), not by obstetricians.
While the basic comprehensive coverage may or may not cover the surgery, prescriptions or tests you need, you will have to pay for coverage for everyone else for abortions (p.19), treatment for drug and alcohol abusers (p.19), school-based clinics (p.131), and “education” courses in birth control and stress management. (p.27)
Hillary will give you a “national health security card” (p.14) which ties your medical care to the “alliance” in the region where you live. If you move to another region, you will have to “notify the alliance” within 30 days. (p.58)
This amounts to a national identification card, the sure indicia of a state in which Big Brother monitors your movements. It also amounts to an internal passport system. That’s the way it was under Communism everyone was required to check in with the commissar when traveling as far as 30 miles from home.
