George Rebane

Jo Ann and I returned last night from Denver where we went Friday to celebrate the marriage of our first granddaughter.  Claire and David were married in a simple yet very meaningful ceremony at their church surrounded by family and friends.  The whole affair was preceded and followed by all the traditional dinners and breakfasts designed to give the two greater families plenty of time to get to know each other.  Claire is blessed in having found such fine young man from a solid and gracious family.  (That David is also a graduate software engineer did not knock off any points for him on my scale 😉 )

The debate on Obamacare continues and expands.  The gloves and blinders are off now as to our national destination.  NPR is running programs on the mostly pros of our adopting the ‘European model’, while the Europeans are trying to figure out where their model went disastrously wrong.  Disastrously?  Yes, they can no longer see it as a sustainable model because the system will not pencil out – where will all the wealth come from that will fund the promised government services?  ‘Socialism works only until you run out of other people’s money’, Lady Margaret Thatcher.

And at last, our hopelessly hopeful in Congress and the administration have no answer save raising taxes on those who still pay them.  Over the weekend their minions hit the Sunday talk show circuit, and carpet bombed America’s memory of candidate Obama’s promise not to raise taxes on households earning less than $250,000 annually.  To the hoots and howls of the ignorant, many of us called it a lie then and now stand vindicated.  It is a hollow victory that celebrates another MSM-buried non-event.  Obamacare has finally become the visible multi-headed hydra assaulting America with rationed healthcare (see below), AND new levels of taxation that will stifle wealth creation and middle-class quality of life.  More here.

A dear friend and very liberal RR reader Chris Holland responded (see comment here) to my report of how the British National Health Service (NHS) will handle the recently diagnosed diabetes of our mutual friend and loyal British subject.  Her response, describing the happy land of NHS, was vintage socialist-in-waiting, and therefore deserves a more complete response since Team Obama and the American left have long been holding up the NHS as a paragon of healthcare.  For those few who still do pay attention to the man behind the curtain, NHS has since its inception been more accurately described as Potemkin healthcare.

NHS treatments are government specified, rationed, and delivered in at best unevenly and late.  At worst we can do no better than cite the British themselves way before the current financial crisis impacted government services worldwide.  It was in 1997 that the newly elected Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair declared the urgency of saving Britain’s “derelict National Health Service.”  Britain’s healthcare watchdog Healthcare Commission was already reporting “safety lapses and overcrowding” as “it painted a bleak picture of teeming wards where overworked nurses didn’t even help patients to the bathroom.”  And over ten years later Gordon Brown’s government and his Health Secretary Andrew Johnson were still apologizing to Parliament about the mortality rate of patients in NHS’ care.

This and more was reported in the prestigious Christian Science Monitor over two years ago (here) before things really started getting bad.  Somehow these reports never make the six o’clock news on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, or the print editions of the NYT and Washington Post.  We continue merrily charging forward to destroy our working albeit expensive healthcare system and one sixth of our economy without so much as a nod toward the travesties of the NHS.  Bottom line, the NHS is an abject failure, and an extremely expensive one at that.

Finally, returning to Chris Holland’s comment where she extols the “free” this and the “free” that to which our friend has access through NHS.  The “free” government service is a charming blindspot when encountered one-off, but quickly becomes a brake on the economy when sold in the large.  What the liberal cum socialist always misses is that the “free” had to be paid for by someone somewhere making a profit in the sense of productive income in excess of the expense required to generate that income.  And moreover, a portion of that profit had to be then taken by the government as tribute to make possible all those freebies.  The social hubris is always that the government can spend more wisely what they take, than can the one who was clever enough to generate the profit in the first place.  But the reality is that no profit, no freebies, forevermore.