Thursday, August 20, 2009

Your Brother's Keeper

Many Americans are concerned that their country in the last half a year or so has been rapidly moving towards socialism. Those who have not been misled into believing that this new “New Deal” will help our country overcome recession and improve the lives of the majority of Americans, warn us about dire financial and lifestyle consequences for us and future generations. However, only very few are ready to contemplate the moral consequences of the new Obama reforms.

Our leaders from both conservative and liberal sides encourage us to sacrifice for our country and for our neighbors allegedly because we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. All we have to do to make our society more fair, we are told, is to love each other and to help our government carry the burden of care for the underprivileged. I am sure that most of us already understand that this goal is too difficult, if not impossible, to achieve, as the history of mankind, especially in the 20th century, shows. Yet we still believe that this is a worthwhile goal. Many of us agree that our society is too consumption oriented, too egoistic and too indifferent to the less fortunate. Therefore, in spite of all our distrust towards the government we continue to buy into “helping your neighbor” rhetoric. This is the rhetoric that occurs whenever our “wise and enlightened” leaders push for another reform meant to achieve a greater good for a greater many – a reform that is supposed to make us love each other and care about each other more.

However, in spite of all the beautiful promises of social architects, the results are exactly the opposite. When I first came to the United States from my native Russia, I was pleasantly surprised at the general feeling of benevolence: people smiling at each other, ready to help a stranger, giving to charities. Living in Russia I was used to treating a stranger as a person that you cannot trust, as a some kind of enemy. In the US, surely a more egoistic and profit-oriented country, that was not the case. Why? The answer was very simple although not very obvious. In a society where people are free to work for themselves, to take care of themselves and their loved ones, to take responsibilities for their own lives and to make their own decisions, people tend to be more satisfied about their lives. Consequently they are more respectful towards themselves and each other. On the other hand, I grew up in a society where every fruit of your labor was taken into the common pool and then redistributed “equally” by the government. This “fair” arrangement makes every one of your neighbors your competitor. Not a competitor for a portion of the free market which requires of you to be your best to succeed, but a competitor for a “free piece” of the common pie, where you have to present your worst to win the competition. When you have to convince a government official that you are more deserving of a new apartment or of an expensive surgery than your neighbor because you are more miserable, or because you have more children, you will begin to hate and despise your neighbors.

This is already happening in the USA where hard-working Americans are forced by their government to pay for their neighbors’ food stamps, education, healthcare, jobs, etc. Yet many of these hard-working Americans still continue like Hank Rearden from “Atlas Shrugged” to ignore that burden because it is still bearable or because they fool themselves into believing that it is moral to be generous to their brothers. Wait till the government nationalizes your healthcare. Now we hopefully still consider it immoral for a government official to decide who will get a certain treatment and who will be sacrificed. Wait until we get to the point where our limited common resources have to be distributed among unlimited medical needs. Will we all agree with our leaders that when one has to choose between saving the life of a healthy child and the life of an old or handicapped person, the child should have the priority? Will we all turn into a bunch of whining moochers begging the government for a handout and hating every one of our neighbors for their very existence? If you still subscribe to the premise that our underprivileged brothers suffer from our neglect in this age of egoism and profit-hunting, wait till you are forced to live in a socialist society.

This, in my mind, is the gravest implication of a society where you are forced to be your brother’s and sister’s keeper – the resulting hate and distrust of all your brothers and sisters.

Monday, August 10, 2009

My letter to the Congressman on Obamacare

Dear Congressman,

I would like to take this opportunity to ask you to vote against government healthcare. This “free” healthcare will cost the taxpayers, the very people you want to help, in taxes and higher prices of virtually everything more than they could possibly spend on any private health insurance. And this “free” healthcare is going to be of a much worse quality. Government healthcare doesn’t work. It’s more expensive and less efficient. It takes a choice away from people. It is immoral, because it enslaves the doctors and impoverishes people who could otherwise find a better use for their money. It is immoral and it is unconstitutional. In order to provide this “free” healthcare you will have to rob us, people, of everything we still have left. Please, stop this madness!

I am originally from Russia, and Russia, as you know, has a government-run healthcare. Here are a few ideas of what it looks like:

The shabbiness of Russian policlinics and hospitals can horrify any American who sees them for the first time. Doctors, always underpaid, couldn't care less about their patients. Misdiagnosis is something absolutely common. They can be treating you for one disease till you die from another.

80% of medical negligence cases are never won. In fact, if somebody manages to win a case against negligent doctors and get some compensation (you are lucky if it's about a thousand dollars) it'll be all over the news.

There have been numerous cases through the years where babies and little children were infected with AIDS at hospitals during blood transfusions. Doctors don't always bother to check a donor’s blood for diseases. In some cases the number of infected children reached over 150.

If you are an old person (and old in Russia starts at 50-60) you get less and less attention from the doctors. If you are 80-90 and need an ambulance they may never even bother to come to your call, after all you've already lived too long.

Women are often afraid to get pregnant, because pregnant women seem to be treated worse than anybody else. My mother was made to walk to the delivery room when her water had already broken and her baby was half way out. A nurse or a doctor can yell at you if you are doing something wrong as if you are a whore and not an expectant young mother. Imagine the psychological stress especially for a first time mother who is already scared without any additional “help” from the doctors. Many babies are born with chronic conditions and their mothers get chronic diseases for the rest of their lives due to the doctors' negligence.

In my home town there is a practice now for young women as soon as they get pregnant to visit a certain doctor and pay him an advance to make sure that he helps them through the pregnancy and is personally present during the delivery, after which he gets the rest of the money. If you don't want to pay this bribe, blame yourself, your baby will be pulled out by an indifferent nurse. If they tear you apart in the process, it's your problem.

I heard of a case where a future father, when he saw the way his pregnant wife was treated, pulled out a gun and stuck it in the doctor’s mouth and promised that he'd pull the trigger if anything happened to his wife. The doctor did his best, of course, but not many women are lucky to have such protectors.

If you or your relative were in the hospital for any problem you would need to be prepared with bribe and present money. Small tips, chocolates, etc. for the nurses and bigger tips for the doctors. Plus you’d have to roam the drugstores in search of medications they’d tell you to buy, because they won’t have any.

If you were to go to your physical exam you’d have bring your own sterile latex gloves and your own gown if you care about your safety and cleanliness.

One good thing is that people don’t have to go to the doctor to get a prescription to buy a drug. You can buy anything in the drug store without a prescription, starting from antibiotics and birth control and ending with Viagra. For that reason people try to avoid doctors as much as they can and rely heavily on self-diagnosis and self treatment. I am sure it kills a lot of people too, but many people would rather die on their own than deal with doctors.

Do you need a transplant? Keep dreaming, for most people it’s absolutely out of reach. The waiting lines are so long that you might as well give up hope.

There are a few private clinics, of course, but they are absolutely unaffordable for about 90% of the population. And very few cities actually even have them.

If you want to imagine going to a doctor under socialized medicine imagine going to the DMV or a post office. The waiting time and the attitude are exactly the same. The only difference is that a driver’s license or a postage stamp are not the same as your kidneys or your heart or your liver.

Of course, you may say that Russia is not Canada or France or Great Britain because things are so much worse in Russia. Things are worse in Russia, but Russia is the ultimate example of what Canada or Great Britain or France or the USA can become when the governments of these countries run out of other people’s money and run out of people who care.

Trusting your heart or your brain to a doctor, enslaved in the socialized healthcare system is the same as committing a suicide. They simply don’t care, because they don’t have to compete, because there are very few doctors who want to work under that kind of system. You might as well go to a butcher to have your brain surgery. Or maybe you are hoping that you and your family will be spared. I am sure you won’t have to wait in endless lines for basic medical procedures. You’ll still be able to afford private healthcare unlike 90% of the Americans who will be forced to use public doctors because their money has been stolen from them to support those very public doctors, and they won’t be able to afford anything private anymore.

Please, stop this public healthcare plan! Please, use your reason. You must have some consciousness left to keep you from participating in the destruction of this country and the people who voted for you!