The Rations of Government: You’ve Had Enough

Posted by Noel @ 7:31 AM Sunday 29 November 2009 at ColdFury.com

IT’S CLOSING TIME AT THE BIG GUMMENT BAR & GRILL

Or “You Don’t Have to Go Home, But You Can’t Stay Here. And You Don’t Have to Stay Here–But You Can’t Go Home.”

Charles Krauthammer, “Carbon Chastity”:

Only Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe.

There’s no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society.

Well, there is one other greater instrument of social control than energy rationing; health care rationing.

Mark Steyn, “Bad Things Come to Those Who Wait”:

“If you need surgery,” he said, “it’s in my interest to get you in and operated on as soon as possible, because that’s money for me. The faster it happens, the better my cash flow. But when the government runs the system, every time you get operated on it costs the government money. So it’s in their interest to restrict or delay your access. When you look at the overall budgets – salaries, buildings – it’s not hard to understand that the level of service you provide to the patient is one of your few discretionary costs. So the incentive is to reduce that.”

He was chuckling merrily as he explained this, and I got the feeling he’d said it to many Canadians over the years.

And there is also another word for rationing: “waiting”.

Hygiene is the number one issue in Canadian hospitals, and a problem with hygiene is the logical consequence of a system built on “waiting.” On March 7 last year, Tse Chi Kwai went to Scarborough Grace Hospital and, as is traditional, was left on a gurney in emergency for 12 hours, exposed to hundreds of people. Two days earlier, his mother had died of SARS but, despite displaying to her doctor all the symptoms detailed in the several health alerts on the subject, had cause of death listed as “heart attack.” And at Scarborough Grace, even after discovering that Tse’s mother had recently died after returning from Hong Kong, Dr. Sandy Finkelstein concluded that, even if Tse was infectious, it was only with TB. Lying next to Tse on that ER gurney hour after hour was Joe Pollack, who was being treated for an irregular heartbeat. He was subsequently sent home but returned on March 16 with symptoms of SARS. He was admitted and isolated, but apparently it never occurred to the hospital to isolate Mrs. Pollack. So she wandered around the wards and infected an 82-year-old man from a Catholic Charismatic group.

Mr. Pollack, Mrs. Pollack, the 82-year-old Catholic Charismatic and his wife all died. None of these people went anywhere near Southeast Asia. They were exposed to SARS by the Toronto health care system, as was the 82-year-old’s son, who was also unknowingly infected at Scarborough Grace and went on to expose another 500 to SARS at a religious retreat. As I wrote in the National Post at the time, “Only in Canada does the virus owe its grip on the population to the active co-operation of the medical profession. In Toronto, the system that’s supposed to protect us from infection instead infected us. They breached the most basic medical principle: first do no harm.”

Almost all scandals in Canadian hospitals boil down to the same thing: a decrepit system unable to observe basic rules of hygiene and quarantine. Sometimes it’s SARS, sometimes it’s C. difficile, sometimes it’s hundreds of women going in to the Captain William Jackman Memorial Hospital in Labrador City and being gynecologically examined with unsterilized instruments-and thereby potentially exposed to chlamydia, gonorrhea, hepatitis or HIV. And almost all these crises are due to, in Dr. Marshall’s words, “the structures” – a system that ensures sick people wait longer in crowded rooms in dirtier hospitals will, by definition, spread disease.

One day it will be something much worse than C. difficile.

Why would we do that to ourselves?

Why would an otherwise sane, “rational” people chose health care rationing and energy rationing? Shortage and deprivation, over health and prosperity?

Because we’re in the sway–and in the way–of control freaks and fanatics who see these issues as their last, best chance to impose their provably failed theories of Socialism on you–by hiding behind these twin masks:

“health care” to control your inner world and “carbon care” to control your outer world.

The common denominator is Them, Controlling You.

It’s still your choice; the Consent of the Governed…or Government of the Consented.

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Whether or not they ask for your consent, you have the right to say NO.