Every wannabe recipient of Hillarycare or Socialized Medicine or Republican FedMed Lite or Universal Health Slavery or whatever plan du jour the powercrats are peddling with the promise that everyone can have free medical care at the expense of everyone else needs to study the text below.
New Orleans has been trashed by a trio of disasters since 2005.
The first, of course, was the costliest and one of the deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history, which bitch-slapped the Big Easy upside the head and made every mama-to-be forget about ever naming a girlchild Katrina.
The second calamity was man-made: The levees broke. The federally built levees in the system burst asunder in more than 50 places. Expert testimony before Senate committeecrats included this: "Most of the flooding of New Orleans was due to man's follies." The Army Corps of Engineers eventually fessed up that their levee-building stunk.
The third disaster was also man-made: The bureaubrains from FEMA responded.
They responded late, and slowly, and stupidly, and threw billions of taxbucks about while doing it. One way FEMAcrats threw taxbucks about was paying out millions in emergency aid to hucksters and grifters who weren't entitled to the handouts.
FEMA also paid $2.7 billion for 145,000 crappy trailers that were deployed weeks and months and even years later to house Katrina survivors. But Katrina survivors may not survive the FEMA trailers. People bake in the summer and freeze in the winter, all the while sucking in unhealthy levels of formaldehyde gas given off by wood and glue in the trailers.
Thousands of the infamous "FEMA trailers" could not be used in flood zones. Thousands are simply rusting away, unused. Thousands more are being auctioned off at pennies on the (tax) dollar.
As if officialdom's bureaucratic bungling isn't bad enough, the whole enterprise has been fraught with fraud from the first. Millions of taxbucks flooding into the flooded Crescent City have fostered a flood of official corruption. Hundreds of picayune politicos, including cops, teachers, judges, highway officials, city councilcrats, and a former school-board president have been charged with bribery, fraud, payoffs, and shakedowns.
The final score isn't in yet, but bureaucratic bungling and corruption will likely cost American taxpayers more than the bashing New Orleans took from Katrina.
So what does all of this have to do with the proposals to impose a nationalized health-delivery scheme upon us all?
Like a dog that can't pass a tree without giving it a hind-legged salute, government can't do anything without creating a bureaucracy. This will be the mother of all bureaucracies, spending not billions but trillions of taxbucks, administered by bureaucrats just like those FEMA functionaries, swindled for millions by people like the counterfeit Katrina victims, and plundered for billions by the multitudes of powercrats nationwide.
Libertarians like to quote the Iron Law of Bureaucracy: All bureaucracies exist primarily to benefit the people who run them.
Patients will be nothing more than the fodder that fertilizes the federal medical factory that feeds the bureaucrats. Expect to sit for months while cynical civil servants decide whether to rubber-stamp requests for cancer treatments or critical surgeries - or to simply let you die waiting.
Every person now employed in any phase of medical care will become slaves of the bureaucrats. They will no longer serve their patients. They will serve the shiftless paper-shufflers.
Doctors with even an eyedropper of self-esteem will flee the system and set up clinics in places such as Mexico and Costa Rica and Thailand. And that's where moneyed patients will go.
But don't worry about the ruling classes in Washington and statehouses nationwide. They'll have a taxpayer-paid premier health system set up just for themselves and their families. Powercrats always take care of their own.
Government health care is not about health. It's about control.
Welcome to FEMAcare.
More of Garry Reed's writing can be found at (http://www.freecannon.com).
