Sunday, October 30, 2005

Socialized Medicine at its’ Best

For a bit of perspectives on those demanding socialization, it would be good to get a little perspective what medical rationing eventually gets you:

«I recently came face to face with a level of Western ignorance that I hadn't encountered since the 1980s, when Russian immigrants were still a novelty to Americans. A British-American asked my father a question that could only come from someone who has known freedom his whole life: "Why did you leave Russia? Your family was there, you had a job, you had free health care. Why did you leave?" The questioner, a former editor with the New York Times, then proceeded to assert that today's Britain and U.S. are no longer free.»
Writes Julia Gorin. Leftists having sold their adherents on a non-existent utopia here and there, also managed to fit meds into the package which will arrive free of charge when they achieve their paradise on earth. The truth of the matter is that the outcome could never be what they’d like it to be. Resources would have to be rationed as they were during WW2. People lived more poorly because of the rations, and that economic system generates less still. The poor are worse off, and have fewer ways to escape said poverty as well. Expect a free ride, and it isn’t just reality that will bite, but expectations will go up as quality crashes:
«For her second delivery, Mom never went into labor. She was two weeks overdue and the baby had stopped moving. Fearing the worst, she took the metro to the hospital.

"Are you in labor?"

"No."

Again Mom thought she'd done something wrong because people were yelling at her as soon as she walked in: "Then why did you come? You like hanging around hospitals, do you?"»
Maybe not today, but someday, and for the rest of your life. Of course on the way, there is the system as it stands today in places like Canada. People manage to live with it in a state of partial decay and tell themselves that it’s just, somehow, and good, somehow.

Mark Steyn:
«Her son Tse Chi Kwai went to Scarborough Grace Hospital and, as is traditional in Canada, was left on a trolley in Emergency for 12 hours, exposed to hundreds of people. Despite all the memos warning them to be on the look-out for this new and highly contagious disease, after discovering that his patient's mother had recently died after returning from Hong Kong, the doctor concluded that, even if Tse was infectious, it was only with TB.

So Tse died, but not before infecting the man lying next to him on that ER trolley hour after hour: Joe Pollack, who was being treated for an irregular heartbeat. He was eventually isolated with symptoms of Sars, but apparently it never occurred to the hospital also to isolate Mrs Pollack. So she wandered around the wards and infected an 82-year-old man from a Catholic charismatic group. Mr Pollack, Mrs Pollack, the octogenarian charismatic and his wife all died, and their sons infected at least 30 other members of their religious group, plus a Filipina nurse, who flew back to Manila and before her death introduced Sars to a whole new country.»
So living with less has it’s risks. Very big risks. All the while people won’t just be unhappy, but be trained into having to yell and scream like prisoners to the singular source remaining: a government which didn’t need to remotely be involved at that level if it didn’t want to do it just to have a “better public image” unless it’s used as an instrument of social engineering, and at the far end, of oppression itself. Gorin again:
«Today the Soviet Union is gone, but the communist system lives on in a few places. The glimpse we have into North Korea's delivery rooms is into those at detention centers for political prisoners, as described to Marie Claire magazine in 2002 by Lee Young Suk, a 65-year-old grandmother who was deported back to North Korea after she defected to China. At a detention center in South Sinuiju province, Lee Young was assigned to help deliver babies of other prisoners.

When she delivered the baby of the first woman under her care and reached for a blanket, a guard stopped her: "You crazy hag, are you out of your mind? What are you doing with the baby? Just put it in the box!" He grabbed the baby by a leg and dumped him into a wooden box that was sitting on the floor. He hit Lee Young's arm with a leather strap.

"North Korea is short of food already," the chief medical officer explained. "Why do we have to feed the offspring of foreign fathers? Since China is an open country, they could even be babies of American sperm, so then we'd be feeding Americans."»
I can’t bring myself to go any further into Lee Young Suk’s description of what happens later, but it proves one thing: socializing anything centralizes power in a way that’s FAR worst than the worst nightmares of an anti-capitalist with a penchant for conspiracy theories. Somehow those who have a problem with capitalism don’t realize how much worse the “mega-corp” of socialism can be.

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