Healthcare Chiefs' Answer to Suffering Americans: Let Them Eat Cake
It is not enough that a gang of collectivists pried our mouths open in 2010 and poured their Obamacare slop down our throats, now we must be subjected to the Queen Advocate of Partial Birth Abortions attempting to convince us everything will be all right in the end.
Testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Committee about the botched rollout, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued a fake apology and clownish request that we hold her accountable for the $600 million IT mess. Sebelius also urged the millions of citizens suddenly finding themselves without health insurance policies they liked and could afford, to just "go shopping" on the exchanges. The online system where consumers can shop around actually crashed while Sebelius was advising the masses.
Then, when committee members relayed personal stories from tearful and confused constituents who had received cancellation notices in the mail after paying premiums for years, Sebelius acted like a Dostoevsky character who insists that political and social change demands "a hundred million heads." No big deal.
Like Obama's other administrator, CMS chief Marilyn Tavenner, Sebelius has no regard for real Americans suffering under the weight of a tyrannical bureaucratic takeover of our health system. At a hearing the day before, a flippant and bedraggled Tavenner displayed the same willingness to destroy people's lives as her colleague.When pressed whether patients could keep their doctors as the President promised, Tavenner ducked and dodged until she actually said "doctors come and go."
Get it? In Obamaland doctors are dispensable, interchangeable and capped at how much they'll get paid for each patient. But you can bet if Tavenner's kid needs brain surgery, she won't stop until she gets the most experienced neurosurgeon her taxpayer salary can buy -- if she can still find one.
In the last three years, since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, more and more doctors have expressed a desire to get out of the field altogether. The ones that stay will get with the program or set up practices catering to the 10% who can afford to pay out of pocket for all their needs. At the heart of American medicine is the doctor-patient relationship and the freedom to choose which makes Tavenner's cavalier response a harbinger of things to come.
Add into the mix Obama's defiant Boston speech yesterday, calling policies offered by insurance companies "substandard," and his overall demonization of for profit companies that were forced to comply with business-killing regulation. Obama's plan to remove the private sector in health care coupled with Sebelius' and Tavenner's absurd assurances this week that the Obamacare website will work or be up in mid-November has us staring down the abyss of a true Leninist state.