Devil in the details, glitches in the machine

President Obama’s repetitive promise that “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor. Period.” and “If you like your health care plan you can keep your health care plan. Period.” was a premeditated lie, multiplied Xs many. He knew, in advance, that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was implanted with “pre-existing conditions” intended to cause the cancellation of millions of Americans’ health care plans, even if they were satisfied with them. Deliberately causing the termination of millions of those plans may appear to some to be cruel and unusual punishment, which it is, but that was what the Democrats had to do to try and hold together the government’s massive takeover and extreme makeover of America’s medical system.

The installation of the ACA amounts to a declaration of eminent domain over the private sector practice of medicine and transfers the controlling interest of that profession over to the government. From the conception of the Obamacare scheme to its implementation, that was the plan all along. The only unplanned occurrence in the process of nationalizing the medical profession was the collapse of the machinery – three years and $600 million in the making – that failed to get the ACA up and running. The debacle made it appear as though the devil in the details had arisen to plague the rollout of Obamacare with a pox of “glitches.”

Obamacare is not the final stage of the Affordable Care Act. It is preamble to the more sinister “single payer” system — the lynch-pin that, if put in place, would lock the doctor into a system of compulsory servitude. When government becomes the single payer of society’s medical bills, it becomes the single employer and the single source of a doctor’s income. It means that every doctor in the medical profession is subject to the non-negotiable authority of absolute power. The single payer system will deliver the practice of medicine in America to where the British already are. It’s a very scary place — for doctors and patients alike.

The “free” health care system of socialist Britain is not just a failure; it is a “catastrophic” failure. In four years, from 2005 to 2009, “hundreds of patients died unnecessarily” in the Stafford Hospital in central England. To change the medical behavior blamed for the disaster, Jeremy Hunt — Britain’s counterpart to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius — said that the government is passing a myriad of legal liabilities that will effect a “profound transformation” in the culture of the British medical profession. Mr. Hunt has not bothered, and no doubt will not bother, to wonder if the existing laws of the single payer medical system may have any causal connection to the “unnecessary” deaths of “hundreds” of British patients. The British Medical Association warned the government that intimidating doctors with threats of criminal prosecution would “worsen the culture of fear amongst medical professionals that (already) prevents people from speaking up.”

This administration is leading our nation down the road of Britain’s crumbling single payer medical system. The American people, however, having seen with their own eyes and heard with their own ears, the brazen deception of which President Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are capable, are no longer willing to follow their marching orders in lock-step. We can now start reversing the political madness of the last five years, come the next two election cycles just ahead of us. The facts are “aligned.”

Orlis Trone is a frequent contributor to Perspectives.