It’s one thing for us knuckle-draggin’ conservatives to blast Obamacare and the inept administration that is trying to cram it down our throats, it’s quite another for someone like Salon’s liberal columnist Camille Paglia to do so, with all guns blazing and no holds barred:

But who would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises — or that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Obama’s aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land. The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.

You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you’re happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.

I just don’t get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.

As with the massive boondoggle of the stimulus package, which Obama foolishly let Congress turn into a pork rut, too much has been attempted all at once; focused, targeted initiatives would, instead, have won wide public support. How is it possible that Democrats, through their own clumsiness and arrogance, have sabotaged healthcare reform yet again? Blaming obstructionist Republicans is nonsensical because Democrats control all three branches of government. It isn’t conservative rumors or lies that are stopping healthcare legislation; it’s the justifiable alarm of an electorate that has been cut out of the loop and is watching its representatives construct a tangled labyrinth for others but not for themselves. No, the airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan — it’s the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves.

And she also has a few things to say on the rising paranoia of Obama and his crew:

But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration’s outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable “casual conversations” to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it.

As this administration works overtime to figure out how to derail the best health care system in the world, some are actually trying to figure out how to make it even better. Lord knows there are big problems with our current system, and in today’s LA Times, columnist Steve Lopez, liberal extraordinaire, interviews Glendale-based surgeon Paul Toffel who has a few ideas that even this ol’ Okie could get behind and support.

If Toffel were the healthcare czar, he would dump the “50-state patchwork” of private insurance programs that can’t cross state borders and switch to competing national plans that would be required to take all comers, with no exemptions for preexisting conditions.

Then he would reinstate federal regulations abandoned in the 1980s that limited insurance companies’ fees. Freedom from those limitations, Toffel believes, was part of what caused healthcare to shift from its mission of treating the sick to the business of printing money.

Toffel would also move away from employment-based healthcare, with companies paying higher salaries, instead, so employees can shop for a suitable plan and carry it with them from one job to the next.

On point four, Toffel would cap frivolous malpractice suits across the nation, as California did many years ago.

{…}

If Toffel were king, every teaching hospital in the nation would have but one mission — treating the uninsured residents of its own community, as County-USC has done.

If there’s a publicly funded component to Toffel’s plan, it’s that such schools would be subsidized as necessary with grants and a variety of federal, state and local funding.

That could be expensive, too, if those schools provide preventive care and health maintenance as opposed to just crisis care.

But that money, Toffel argued, should go “directly to the delivery of medical care rather than the expansion of bricks and mortar.

“Great USA-style medical care can be provided cost-effectively in simple perk-free settings, as in the U.S. military hospitals, without requiring private rooms and flat-screen TVs for every patient.”

Toffel treads on thinner ice with the prospects of “limiting fees” for insurers and with getting companies who are currently providing health insurance to employees to give out higher salaries so that the employees could then buy their own insurance — how this would be administered without ever more government interference in business management is probably that it couldn’t be.

One of the key provisions he mentions is tort reform. If there was real CHANGE in that regard, physicians would not have to practice “defensive medicine” to the degree they do today, which would take a huge chunk out of medical costs. Their malpractice insurance rates would plummet, which would take out another huge chunk — savings that could be passed directly on to patients and insurers alike.

As Paglia stated at top, “The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made.” Dr. Toffel’s solution wouldn’t be burdened with that kind of overhead. With no “public option” insurance competing with nation-wide insurers, we wouldn’t have to worry about the government driving them out of business by subsidizing the government-run entity.

Gee, at the culinary institutes they have students prepare and serve gourmet meals to the public at discounted prices. One might get a slightly overdone piece of flounder or a burnt edge of toast, depending upon who was manning the pass, but still you get the opportunity to experience cuisine that you might never wish to pay for at an established restaurant, or that you could not afford in the first place. Surely our teaching hospitals could rise to the challenge of treating all of the uninsured, and if the Feds want to spend a hundred billion or so on healthcare reform, that would be a good place to start. Sounds better than multiple TRILLIONS spent on something that will end the health care superiority that we now enjoy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 9:59 am and is filed under Health Care Wars, Obamacare Nightmares. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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Tags: Camille Paglia, health care reform, Obamacare, Paul Toffel, public option, single payer