A reader of this website sent me a flow chart for the new Health Care Plan. Given that the Obama Health Care Bill was over 2000 pages long and not read by its supporters I suppose no-one should be surprised that the Plan, now revealed, is one mighty complicated web of bureaucracy. On its own it will solve the unemployment problem, at least in the shortest term. It will also soak the taxpayers and transform the US Health Care provision into waiting lists for the masses. However we can be sure that the elites of the Media Class and the members of the Ruling political Class will not be subject to its frustrations and inefficiencies. I understand that its Leftist proponents are inspired by the UK’s National Health system.
Notice who is relegated to the bottom of the chart!
Let me say at the start that not everything is bad in the UK system and not everything is good in the current US system but there is no comparison between the two. For the vast majority of Americans the UK model that Obama is about to impose on them will be a cultural shock, turning them from sought-after clients to welfare recipients. Here are two examples of the UK system taken from the experiences of members of my own family this last week.
William is 87 and was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer for which he is now receiving (effective) treatment. In the US he would have been diagnosed many, many months, perhaps a year earlier and before it had spread into his bones. Nevertheless, after overcoming several hurdles and marathon hospital waiting room experiences, he is doing well. Almost all of William’s treatment has been carried out by an overworked McMillan charity nurse who is not an employee of the National Health Care system. This week William, who is now a little more mobile, had a hospital appointment to see the Specialist responsible for his treatment. Like some 40 other patients of the Specialist he arrived at the hospital at 11am, for in the UK few patients are given a personal appointment time. Instead all arrive and sit together, prepared for as much as a day’s wait.
Car parking is rarely free! After some hours of not being called, William was spoken to by his nurse who told him that as he was near the bottom of the list and as the doctor was not available, he might prefer to be ‘seen’ by her. He agreed and thus was able to leave the Hospital after only a few hours of waiting. This is not the first time that William has spent many, many hours sitting in a waiting room along with dozens of other patients all given the same time of arrival. William is not outraged about this but philosophical for like most UK patients he believes that ‘his’ NHS is the best in the world and free and assumes that he is therefore lucky to be getting expert treatment.
Julie suddenly experienced severe neck pain after a casual movement of her neck. Her employer sent her home. She made an appointment to see her General Practitioner that day and he told her she had a trapped nerve and he gave her a prescription for pain killers. She was not x-rayed and if the doctor had decided that was appropriate she would have had to wait for a Hospital appointment. This would have been arranged by the GP over the course of many days, perhaps weeks, for there are long waiting lists for X-rays and they are only carried out at Hospitals. The patient simply goes home after seeing the GP and hopes that the GP will be quick in sending a letter to the Hospital X-ray Department. The GP signed Julie off from work and this ‘signing off’ is one of the main reasons people go to a GP in the UK for it is the passport to sickness benefits and work absence. Julie’s pain was little relieved by the tablets and so she returned to the GP, not waiting for the week to pass that he had arranged. He gave her a prescription for stronger tablets and said he was recommending her for physiotherapy. She was to phone the physiotherapy Dept. at the Hospital and report that her GP had recommended she get urgent treatment. She phoned and was asked if she had been in an accident. When she replied in the negative she was told she would have to wait 12 weeks. If she had been in an accident, she would have waited only 2 weeks for treatment. She has now gone privately to a physiotherapist and has had some treatment and her arm put in a sling. She is lucky that physiotherapists can still practice privately in the UK. It is worth remarking that being signed off work as ‘sick’ is a power only GP’s and other Doctors have and for many patients, who then automatically receive State benefits, this is a rewarding reason for visiting the doctor, even if all else is unsatisfactory.
In a week that Obama has installed a social Leftist on the Supreme Court and a Federal Judge has sought to impose homosexual marriage on the Nation, we might as well acknowledge that the new Ruling Class is making great headway with its social and moral revolution. The Hollywood billionaire and millionaire perverts who funded Obama’s election campaigns are certainly getting their money’s worth. I have no doubt that Kagan is eager to cast her vote for same-sex marriage when this issue reaches the Supreme Court. It is issues like this one that propelled her to the post. Obama turned down the opportunity to attend the national Boy Scouts annual rally. All Presidents before Obama attended but again he is pleasing those who promoted his candidacy and who now manipulate all the news and entertainment not only for the ‘Gay agenda’ but to put a positive spin on his failing Presidency. The Boy Scouts of America have been blacklisted, along with the Salvation Army and other organizations who will not welcome sodomites into their ranks where they will have access to young boys. Obama knows which side his bread is buttered and it is the back side!
Mrs. Obama has raised a few eyebrows by taking one of her daughters off to Spain for a vacation and being absent for her husband’s birthday. He is in Chicago enjoying a bachelor vacation with his old political chums. My guess is that Mrs. Obama’s vacation will cost the taxpayers some half million dollars but that is chump change amongst trillions of dollars of the public spending that Obama has unleashed since taking office. I think that many White Americans and most Black Americans will take the view that it is surely the ‘turn’ of African Americans to get their snouts in the trough. Thus Mrs. Obama is probably greatly admired for this vacation and its cost for it is compensating for slavery. Many will think, though not say out loud, “Why shouldn’t Blacks take advantage after being bottom of the economic pile for so long”. I can understand this line of thinking, especially amongst Blacks. “It’s our turn now!” What this all reveals is that we are not in a post-racial society. When I heard African Americans being interviewed on the streets of Harlem after Obama’s election and saying that now they would get everything free, I thought it was clear that his election was about to sharpen racialism and so it has. He and his Democrat comrades play the race card at every opportunity. Mrs. Obama’s expensive vacation reminds me of the pigs in Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’, surely one of the most insightful novels ever written. Charlie Rangel and Maxine Walters stand accused of having their snouts in the trough too and there are some 8 ethics investigations now involving Black members of Congress. This is about 20% of them! Black Newspapers and other Black organizations are leaping to their defense, seeing their alleged transgressions and investigations in an entirely racial context. They should read ‘Animal Farm’ where they will discover that when underdogs (or pigs in Orwell’s novel) get into power they frequently turn out to be as exploitive or worse that those they ousted in the name of Hope and Change.
This leads me to the story of Omar Thornton who is the Connecticut Black man who this week shot and killed 8 Brewery workmates and wounded two others. He had been called into work to be dismissed, having been caught on video stealing beer for resale. The Media has lost no time in turning him into the victim for the Media Class is in the forefront of playing the race card for political advantage. Anyone who has had experience of the lying reporters of the MSM will know that they will interview hundreds until they find the handful whose quotes can be used to further the Media’s agenda. Thus the Media Thornton stories are all about his alleged suffering from White prejudice. We are told by family and friends that he quietly ‘seethed with a sense of racial injustice’ and that he saw racial graffiti on the walls at work. It is also reported that he had been made so happy by the election of Obama and thus expected great things. It seems that like those interviewed on the streets of Harlem he was expecting to be rewarded with free things, perhaps including beer! I have yet to read anything about the 8 dead and their families. I suppose if they were White oppressors they got what was coming to them. Yet it seems to me that the Mainstream Media (MSM) has once again turned the truth on its head and reversed the roles of victims and victimizer. Thornton shot them and he was it seems a workplace thief who was caught.
As the toll of US military and other deaths in Afghanistan continues to rise I keep looking for reports in the MSM of Cindy Sheehan. I can’t find any, yet on this website we frequently reported how Cindy was the Media’s darling when she camped outside President Bush’s Texas home back in the pre-election years. We forecast then that her fame might be short-lived depending on how she fitted into the Media Class agenda. Perhaps she is busy camping outside the Obama mansion, waving signs by day and singing protest songs around the camp fire at night. Somehow I doubt it! Perhaps she tried but discovered that the Media had suddenly lost interest in her.
Here in central California we are getting into August and still no heat wave. There have been only a couple of days this summer when the temperature has reached 100F and not many in the 90’S. The next ten days are forecasted to be in the low 70’s. I am writing this from the edge of the Central Valley where high temperatures from June onwards are the norm. In Bolivia it is minimally reported in the MSM that a million fish and thousands of alligators and other river creatures have died of the cold. Brazil and northern Argentina are also experiencing record cold temperatures. Every day in the MSM I see much about the Russian heat-wave and the crumbling iceberg off Greenland so this proves global warming. I checked yesterday and confirmed that Starcross in Devon is still above water, in fact exactly above the sea level as it was back when I was a boy. Just thought you would like to know!