Liberals: What Makes Them Tick?
By Jack Kinsella
I wish I knew how their minds work, but it is mystery to me. I can’t figure them out. It is as if they get up in the morning and plan what steps they’ll take today towards the ultimate goal of their own national destruction.
I am referring to American liberals — a class of Americans I confess completely baffle me. Nobody in the right mind can believe that a single-payer health care system can work — particularly not the liberal politicians that are advancing the plan. They know better.
It sounds good, but it doesn’t work.
There is no nation in the world where a government-run single-payer system hasn’t resulted in sub-standard health care and health care rationing.
In a single-payer system, the government pays the doctor a set fee per patient. The patient can’t pay extra and the doctor can’t bill extra — that would result in a ‘two-tiered’ system, one for the rich and the other for the poor.
A single-payer system rectifies that imbalance by extending similarly poor care across-the-board. When a doctor can only charge so much for each patient’s visit, there is only two ways for a doctor to earn more. See more patients. Or move somewhere outside that system.
Here is how that works in Canada’s Ontario Health System. A doctor earns a flat fee of $17.75 per patient. According to the government, that should entitle a patient to 20 minutes of the doctor’s time.
Based on these figures, the government thinks a doctor should earn about $50 an hour. Forty percent of that fee is overhead (office expenses, nurses, receptionists, etc.), leaving the doctor with about $28 an hour for himself.
Of course, $28.00 an hour doesn’t even make his medical malpractice premiums, so the average doctor’s visit is more like five minutes or less.
To make ends meet, individual doctors are coming together to form ‘clinics’ where several doctors share the office staffing and expenses. There are six doctors that have joined my family doctor and now my family doctor’s office is a ‘clinic’.
I overheard the receptionist at my doctor’s office tell someone on the phone that they have more than ten thousand patients. (I’m not making this up)
A doctor’s appointment for 2 pm means you will likely be called at three-thirty. You’ll spend thirty minutes in an examination room before a doctor can see you. And the exam will be five minutes or less.
(And I’ve got one of the most sought-after doctors in the region.)
Under Ontario’s single-payer, government-run health care system, the average doctor bills $244,581.00 per year. That number is misleadingly high because it includes doctors with specialties not covered by the government system.
If you need an eye doctor, the government pays for one visit per year. You pay for subsequent visits.
In 2007, forty-three opthamologists earned $1 million or more. That brought up the average, but government figures still show that 95% of all doctors in the system earn less than $500K per year.
Consequently, there aren’t enough doctors and the ones that don’t specialize or move away are, well, you get what you pay for.
Hospitals in Canada for the most part, look like Third World institutions. Niagara Falls, as Canada’s most recognized address, is the national showpiece. The last time I was in Niagara General Hospital, the floors were unwashed, the paint was peeling, and I saw a cockroach scurry under a chair.
Down in North Carolina, the locals joke about Carteret County General Hospital — “in the front door, out the back” (where the morgue is). But I took Gayle there once when she was sick.
It was as clean as a military facility. Gayle was treated immediately. And the staff actually seemed empathetic, something that doesn’t exist in a government-funded facility where you pretend you’re paying the bill and they pretend they care if you’re satisfied with the care you receive.
NONE of this is a secret. None of the liberals in Congress or the Senate are unaware of the consequences of universal government-run single-payer health care. They know that it means substandard care, health care rationing, the loss of the best and brightest to other careers (or other countries) but none of that seems to matter.
What matters is that they advance their agenda.
Assessment
Universal health care is just one of the liberal causes that otherwise sober-minded and intelligent human beings want to foist on America.
Liberals want to return the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ despite the evidence that shows that it STIFLES the free exchange of ideas, although the liberals claim their goal is to expand the free exchange of ideas.
Unfortunately, nobody wants to hear liberal talk radio, which is the reason that 95% of talk radio is conservative. That’s nobody’s fault. The market delivers what people are willing to support.
The ‘Fairness Doctrine” undoes that by demanding that what the public won’t pay for be forced on them. So, in the interest of ‘leveling the playing field’, taxpayers will be expected to support with their tax dollars those liberal programs unable to compete in the fair market.
Historically, rather than comply with the government ‘fairness’ rules, most radio and TV station managers just drop the discussion format from their programming schedule.
Speaking of the Fairness Doctrine, I read today on the Drudge Report that ABCNews is abandoning all pretense of political neutrality and is literally planning to anchor a nightly news broadcast from INSIDE the White House.
The network reportedly plans a primetime special — ‘Prescription for America’ — originating from the East Room, exclude opposing voices on the debate.
The Director of Communications at the White House Office of Health Reform is Linda Douglass, who worked as a reporter for ABC News from 1998-2006.
The GOP complained that by excluding any opposing voices, ABC was in effect, giving the Democrats free air time to advance a one-sided political agenda. ABC fired off a letter of response to the GOP which could be boiled down to four words: “So what? We won!”.
When it is liberals who are interested stifling opposition, ‘fair’ is a call in baseball. Alternatively, ‘fair’ is anything that advances a liberal cause.
In 2009; President Obama signed an executive order extending federal benefits to same-sex “couples.” This is a big deal to liberals, who think it should be expanded to a recognition of gay marriage.
The institution of marriage exists to provide structure to the family unit. The purpose of marriage is for that family unit to reproduce, maintaining the continuation of the human species. The family unit is so-called because it is self-sustainable.
The family unit is the model upon which government is designed. A gay ‘family’ will die out without a trace in a single generation. The liberals in government know this.
Just as there has never been a successful single-payer, government-run health care, there has never been a successful gay country.
Why do the liberals want to release pictures that make America look like we routinely abuse prisoners? Why do liberals oppose waterboarding terrorists but have no problem with waterboarding members of the US military? Why do liberals want to disarm America?
Why do liberals want to raise taxes? Why do they support bankrupting the country in order to bail out autoworker’s unions? Why do they support illegal immigration? Why are they opposed to enforcing existing laws?
Why do they work against their own best interests and the best interests of the country when it comes to advancing elements of their agenda? Finally, why are they so hateful about it?
I’ve come to the conclusion that there are three possible explanations for liberal thinking.
1) Mental deficiency. Some people confuse cognitive dissonance, (the state of having inconsistent or contradictory thoughts or beliefs) with intelligence.
So when Barack Obama says that raising taxes will put more money in their pay checks, they think, “Nobody would say that if it wasn’t true. Everybody else is just too dumb to get it.”
They think that they are smarter than everybody else. And the proof is that they can see the social justice of gay marriage and the mercy and compassion inherent in abortion rights.
2) Self-Loathing. One could rightly classify self-loathing as a mental illness, unless one is a liberal. Liberals can justify self-loathing by examining their own principles.
3) These are the last days and liberals are evidence that the Bible is true.
The Bible outlines the liberal worldview of the last days in detail. The amazing part about Paul’s admonition to Timothy is how his description actually grows more accurate as time passes.
“This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof…” (2nd Timothy 3:1-5)
I am not ‘picking on’ liberals, neither is this intended to be political in any normal sense of the word. I intend it as instruction, not criticism.
The OL is about Bible prophecy and liberals are the evidence that these must be the last days.
“Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be yet wiser: teach a just man, and he will increase in learning.” (Proverbs 9:9)
Note: This brief was originally published June 17, 2009.