ObamaCare's Pre-Existing Conditions

By Phil Boehmke

A former high school classmate (our senior class president) recently had occasion to scold me for my March 7th American Thinker post "Obama's health care sob stories vs. tragic truths." He took offence that I chose to highlight the death of 22 year old Kane Gorney from dehydration due to extreme negligence at the hands of the doctors and nurses of the NHS. It seems that all of the recent horror stories about socialized medicine have been exaggerated by angry right-wing extremists like myself. In truth (as leftists see it), Britain's National Health Service has been the envy of the world for six decades.

In 1975 when I was in high school and Barry Obama was being mentored by known Communist and sexual degenerate Frank Marshall Davis, Harry Schwartz wrote an essay entitled "The Infirmity of British Medicine" which was featured in R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.'s The Future That Doesn't Work. At the time Dr. David Owen was the Labor Minister responsible for the day to day operations of Britain's NHS. In an interview with the London Sunday Times, Dr. Owen said.

"The health service was launched on a fallacy. First we were going to finance everything, cure the nation and then spending would drop. That fallacy has been exposed. Then there was a period when everybody thought the public could have whatever they needed on the health service-it was just a question of governmental will. Now we recognize that no country, even if they are prepared to pay the taxes, can supply everything." (1)

The editor of Britain's "New Scientist" magazine, Bernard Dixon observed that.

"For most of us, it is only when we join a year-long hospital waiting list, or have taken an injured child to a hospital casualty department on Sunday afternoon, that we realize just how threadbare and starved financially the service really is." Mr. Dixon added: "Not only is there an acute shortage of resources, but the expertise and facilities that are available are all too often dispensed via a conveyor-belt system which can at times be positively inhuman." (2)

By the end of his essay, Mr. Schwartz concluded that the increased costs of providing healthcare under a single payer system "could bankrupt any nation that attempts to provide it." In a chilling observation of the economic realities facing the NHS, Mr. Schwartz said.

This must come down to the decision that some shall be helped at the cost of others being permitted to die before they need to. The conflicts on this issue have only begun, but there can be no doubt that they will be fierce indeed when the Draconian nature of the alternatives is fully realized.(3)

Thirty five years later the NHS is still staggering under its own weight and incompetence and now the UK Telegraph reports.

Documents show that health chiefs are considering plans to begin sacking workers, cutting treatments and shutting wards across the country.

[...]

The final details of the plans are not due to be announced until the autumn, well after the country has gone to the polls for the general election. The Conservatives and health campaigners said the public deserved to know the true extent of cuts at their local surgeries and hospitals before voting.

Gee, does any of this sound familiar?

(1) R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., The Future That Doesn't Work: Social Democracy's Failures in Britain. (University Press of America. 1975). Pp 22-3
(2) Ibid. p. 23
(3) Ibid. p. 40

Phil Boehmke