To Serve Man [Reader Post]

The Baby Boomers understand the title. It is the title of the Hugo Award winning short story written by Damon Knight that Rod Serling turned into an unforgettable episode of the original Twilight Zone. Some apparently very well-intentioned aliens land on earth promising to help mankind; they revolutionize technology and they end famine, pestilence, war, and nuclear threat (though, let it be noted, they did nothing about climate change). Most people were thrilled with the aliens, though, as always, there were some skeptics. American cryptographers got a hold of a book that seemed popular with the aliens and attempted to decipher the aliens’ language. At first, they were only able to translate the title of the book, To Serve Man, but even that was enough to convince the last of the skeptics. Soon, people were volunteering in droves to take trips to the aliens’ planet which was said to be a paradise. As one flight of eager Earthlings was boarding one of the cryptographers came running up to the boarding area, telling the people to get off the ship. “To Serve Man is a cookbook!” he shouted.

I am not claiming the Obama Administration is lying to us about health care reform; they rarely pay we the people that much courtesy. What they are going to great lengths to do, however, is an enormous amount of obfuscation, inveigling, and shading of the truth. No one knows what the President envisions in term of health care reform; he has yet to enunciate it. On occasion he will take a stand on a specific point, but he is just as likely as not to alter his opinion within 72 hours. With a concept that fluid how can he justify his assertion that it will be too late if we don’t pass Obamacare this year?

The President outsourced the crafting of health care reform to Congress. I have read that there are 4 or 5 bills currently wending their ways through various committees, but I have been unable to confirm that. Despite considerable communications with my federal representatives all I have received from them is multitudinous copies of the same form letters that merely state their positions on health care. I asked several questions about specific provisions of HR 3200, only one question per email mind you, and all I got was their position on health care reform. That even lacks empathy.

The President has contributed nothing to the substance of the health care reform bill(s), though he is spending millions of dollars to market the idea to the American people via commercials. Most Senators and Congresspeople have not read any of the bills out there, some even laugh at the suggestion that they do so, and they wonder why the American people are hostile at Town Hall meetings. Many on the Democrat side of the aisle have denounced, disrepected, dismissed and marginalized the people who are angry that their federal legislators haven’t done the job they were hired to do. No one can tell us what health care reform involves, but the President wanted it passed in July without debate and our elected representatives suggest by their manner that we the people should just sit down, shut up and like it.

I read a piece by Greta Van Susteren, a lawyer by training, the other day wherein she stated that HR 3200 would be impossible to administrate because the bill is so very poorly written. That’s sounds like its going to drive up costs right there. It sounds like nothing but chaos for something so simple as a flu shot, God forbid any of us should get actually sick before they figure it out. Either health care reform is in an alien language that we the people have yet to decipher and the Government is trying its best to make sure we don’t, or its a labyrinthine, Byzantine, gordian, unworkable, hodge podge of unintelligible legislation and either Congress doesn’t know that (and neither do they care, apparently) or they unwilling to admit to it. Either way, no one can tell we the people what, specifically, comprises health care reform so that we might have an intelligent debate.

If the bill is so poorly crafted, why, oh why, would we want to enact it? Why would we sign over 17% of the economy to the most inefficient body of managers known to man? What place has government in anyone’s health care? If the government wants to convince us it can do this job, let them reform the areas of health care they already have: Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA. Get those up and turning a tidy profit and then we’ll talk, OK? If they seriously want to lower costs, let them carefully attend Tort Reform as they should have done 30 years ago.

Until we have solid evidence to the contrary, I think we must proceed on the assumption that health care reform is a cookbook.