Scott Spiegel

According to liberals, it was “un-American” to protest the adoption of Obamacare.  Now apparently it’s unpatriotic not to go out of one’s way to help make it a roaring success.

The New York Times recently claimed that GOP congressmen and governors are spitefully refusing to fund or participate in Obamacare implementation solely to make the President look bad.  On Monday The Times argued that conservatives are harping on the Internal Revenue Agency scandal just so they can delegitimize the IRS and block its assigned role in determining citizens’ income eligibility for having to buy health insurance.

In the Times’ fantasy world, Republicans are going after former IRS tax-exempt division head Sarah Hall Ingram just so they can stall her installation as head of the IRS’s health care office.  The Times also claims that conservatives are spotlighting Department of Health and Human Services Head Kathleen Sebelius’s improper Obamacare lobbying efforts just so the law will fail.

Meanwhile, The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn complains that fast food restaurant owners, nursing home operators, and other low-wage employers are trying to “weasel out” of complying with Obamacare—as though it were every businessman’s patriotic duty to mindlessly accept intrusive, expensive regulations, or as though thousands of Democrat-connected organizations hadn’t already been granted waivers to evade the plan’s dictates.

Cohn explains that a loophole in the law may allow companies to offer employees only barebones coverage and pay a smaller fine than if they had offered no coverage.  But even Cohn admits to the role that free market forces properly play under such circumstances: “[T]hese companies would have to consider the competitive effects, which could push in either direction.  Do they provide less insurance, so they keep costs lower?  Or do they provide more, so they can attract better workers?  Different companies will undoubtedly respond in different ways…”  Yes, Jonathan, that’s exactly the way it’s supposed to work in a free market—minus, of course, the government’s forcing employers to provide any coverage in the first place.

Cohn’s tepid nod to capitalism is positively Hayekian compared to the stance of Ezekiel Emanuel, one-time White House health policy advisor and brother of former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm.  Ezekiel admits that Obamacare may be unsustainable, because it forces young, healthy people to pay disproportionately large premiums to subsidize sick, older people—an arrangement that the former won’t stand for and the latter can’t pick up the slack for.

Emanuel’s solution?  A massive public relations blitz that reminds the Millennium Generation just how much they love Obama, and that urges them to buy Obamacare health plans even if it makes no economic sense so that Dear Leader’s presidency won’t fail.

In a hilariously naïve and economically illiterate editorial, Emanuel preaches, “[Y]oung people believe in President Obama.  They overwhelmingly voted for him.  He won by a 23% margin among voters 18-29—just the people who need to enroll.  The president connects with young people, too, so he needs to use that bond and get out there to convince them to sign up for health insurance to help this central part of his legacy.  Every commencement address by an administration official should encourage young graduates to get health insurance.”  Every commencement address by an administration official should also explain to young graduates where exactly they’re going to find jobs in the Obama economy so they can purchase said insurance.

If I understand Emanuel’s appeal correctly, it’s that twentysomethings should subsidize Obama’s legacy, and in return they won’t look like fools for voting for him if his plan somehow miraculously succeeds.

Commenting on Emmanuel’s Don Draper approach to health care reform, Richard Epstein notes, “Emanuel’s expansive view of civic duty plays the game both ways when he accuses individuals who don’t purchase health insurance of ‘freeriding’ on the public.  But their purchase of insurance will allow the [older] preferred plan recipients to free ride on them.”  Emanuel assumes that young people are already in the bag for Democrats, whereas older folks’ votes need to be bought.

Emanuel also assumes that his proposed marketing campaign will cash in on the emotional nature of persuadable young voters.  Good luck with that.  Most young people who voted for Obama and supported Obamacare are nonetheless learning that the penalty for not having health insurance is lower than the actual cost of health insurance, and are acting according to their rational self-interest by declining to purchase it.  Would we expect young adults—who earn the least of all adult age groups—to do any less?

More broadly, would we expect other age groups, or small business owners, or large business owners, or private citizens, or unions, or—yes—Congressmen and their staffers not to try to find a way to get out of a plan they know costs more than it’s worth and unacceptably limits their options?  Are Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi un-American for not signing up for health care exchanges that the poor schlubs in their districts will be forced to buy?

As Obamacare implementation stumbles on, more and more stakeholders are realizing that, not only is it not their duty to make the plan succeed, it is in their distinct interest to help it fail.

Previously published in modified form at Red Alert Politics

 Print This Post

Related articles

• Emanuel: We Must Brainwash the Youth to Join Obamacare Exchanges (breitbart.com)
• Emanuel: City workers to move to Obamacare (wgnradio.com)
• Is Obamacare’s Fatal Flaw Taking Effect? (pjmedia.com)
• Obama Orders Top Aides To Praise Obamacare During Commencement Speeches (patdollard.com)
• The Obamacare Nightmare Will Officially Start October 1 (economicpolicyjournal.com)

On Thursday the Supreme Court rejected the Obama administration’s justification for the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate as being covered by the Interstate Commerce Clause, since the law as written would not regulate commerce but compel it.

The court nonetheless upheld the individual mandate, which requires people to buy health insurance from private companies.  The administration had characterized the penalty for not buying insurance as such, yet also asked the court to consider it a tax for the purpose of preventing the plaintiffs from suing, since under the Tax Anti-Injunction Act taxes may be challenged in court only after they have been paid.  Roberts and the majority agreed that the penalty could not be considered a tax for the question of whether the plaintiffs could bring suit now.  Yet in their view, it was perfectly acceptable for the penalty to be considered a tax for the purpose of forcing people to buy health insurance.

Roberts admitted, “Congress’s decision to label this exaction a ‘penalty’ rather than a ‘tax’ is significant because the Affordable Care Act describes many other exactions it creates as ‘taxes.’”

Yet in the majority opinion he wrote, “The Federal Government may enact a tax on an activity that it cannot authorize, forbid, or otherwise control.”

And therein lies the rub: Not purchasing health insurance is not an “activity.”  It is a non-activity.  (The hint is the word “not.”)

According to Roberts’ (correct) reasoning, “not buying healthcare” is not commercial activity the government can regulate through the Interstate Commerce Clause.  Yet somehow “not buying healthcare” is commercial activity the government can tax.  How can “not buying health insurance” be non-activity and activity at the same time?

Some conservatives hunting for a silver lining have argued that at least the ruling limited the provenance of the Commerce Clause.  Yet the ruling simultaneously expanded the purview of Congress’s taxing power in such a way as to potentially make up for almost anything the Commerce Clause doesn’t cover.  What have we gained?  What good is restriction of the Commerce Clause if, due to the expansion of other powers, it can’t protect us from abominations like Obamacare?

The ruling expanded Congress’s taxation power in at least three ways.  First, we now know that non-activity can be taxed.  When has the federal government ever taxed non-activity?  Penalized, yes—but taxed our not doing something?

Second, we know that even something that was explicitly disavowed as a tax by its creators and defenders can be considered a tax, if five Supreme Court justices feel like rewriting the law and considering it one.

Third, as spelled out by Roger Pilon, “[T]he power to tax… was designed to enable Congress to obtain the funds needed to carry out its other enumerated powers or ends.  It was not, as Madison made clear in Federalist 41, and often on the floor of Congress, an independent power to tax for any purpose at all.  Search as you will through those 18 enumerated powers and you will find no power to enact ObamaCare or anything like it.”  But thanks to Chief Justice Roberts, we now know that the federal government can levy taxes for any reason it wants, whether it needs the money for any enumerated power or not—and remember that the individual mandate, if it operated properly, would result in $0 revenue.

Also disturbing is the fact that the justices may not have even reaffirmed the limits of the Commerce Clause.  As Mark Levin wrote, “If five justices had intended for their view of the commerce clause (and necessary and proper clause) to be controlling as the majority view, they would have said so by joining or concurring in each others’ [written arguments].  They didn’t.  So, while we can cobble them together, as a formal legal matter, it is a troubling issue.  While the status quo stands re the commerce clause (and necessary and proper clause), there was no formal majority on those issues.”

Of course all this chitchat about RobertsCare will go over the heads of most liberals, for whom I want to ask, not “How is the healthcare law constitutional?” but “Do you even care whether it’s constitutional?”  This is the same group of people, after all, who consistently defended the law, not by talking about its legal soundness, but by claiming that the Heritage Foundation and Mitt Romney had instigated it.  These are the same folks who for two years eschewed discussion of Obamacare’s constitutionality for posting pictures of sad-eyed looking children on Facebook with captions like “Yolanda Rodriguez can finally get treatment for her spina bifida!”

So now we can rest assured that Congress will never mandate that we buy broccoli, drink skim milk, or do calisthenics.  It’s just going to tax us to death if we don’t, and with the imprimatur of a “conservative,” Republican-appointed Supreme Court Chief Justice.

Previously published in modified form at Red Alert Politics



 Print This Post

Related articles

• John Roberts’s art of war (economist.com)
• The Commerce Clause Discussion and the Doctrine of Stare Decisis (lsolum.typepad.com)
• Most of the Justices Reject the Commerce Clause Defense of the Mandate (reason.com)
• More Evidence That Scalia’s Dissent Was Originally Written to Be the Opinion of the Court… (delong.typepad.com)
• The Supreme Court’s New Limits On The Commerce Power (outsidethebeltway.com)

Ahead of the Supreme Court’s likely overrule of Obamacare’s individual mandate, and possibly the entire act, here’s a retrospective of the most hilarious and horrifying quotes from bill supporters over the first three-and-a-half years of Obama’s wasted first term.  Hey libs—Thanks for the memories:

1. “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.”  Barack Obama.  Demonstrably false, given that employer-based plans—which over 60% of the population holds—are required to meet Obamacare specifications within five years, so if your current plan doesn’t meet these regulations, your employer will soon have to change it or drop it, if it hasn’t already done so.

2. “Are you serious?  Are you serious?”  Nancy Pelosi, when asked where the Constitution authorized Obamacare’s individual mandate.  Almost as good: “I don’t worry about the Constitution,” uttered by Illinois Representative Phil Hare at a townhall meeting.

3. “These are nothing more than destructive efforts to interrupt a debate…  They are doing this because they don’t have any better ideas.”  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on protesters and Congressional opponents trying to “sabotage” the Obamacare debate.  In fact, House Republicans had 32 better ideas than Obamacare in 2009 alone, including malpractice tort reform, Medicare reform, health savings accounts, healthcare tax credits, vouchers for private insurance, pay for performance, private market competition, and efforts to preserve individual autonomy regarding level and type of coverage and risk tolerance.

4. “These disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid… of differing views…  Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American.”  Pelosi and former House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer trying to delegitimize the concerns of health care townhall protestors.  Compare this claim with liberal commentators’ mentally drowning out the constitutional arguments against Obamacare for two years, and suddenly being shocked that the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn it.

5. “The conjunction of a black President and a female speaker of the House—topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay congressional committee chairman—would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play.”  Frank Rich, claiming that Obamacare opponents are simply racists, and maybe sexists and homophobes too.  Yes, it’s true—we just couldn’t stand having African-American lesbian bill architects like Harry Reid, Kent Conrad, and Max Baucus.

6. “If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.”  The Obama administration e-mailing supporters and asking them to spy on their fellow citizens.

7. “I remember in the last month of her life, she wasn’t thinking about how to get well, she wasn’t thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality, she was thinking about whether or not insurance was going to cover the medical bills and whether our family would be bankrupt as a consequence…  [T]he insurance company said that maybe she had a pre-existing condition and maybe they wouldn’t have to reimburse her for her medical bills.” Obama implying that his mother had had to battle health insurance companies when she was sick with cancer, when it was later revealed that her claims had been paid in full and it was disability compensation he was alluding to.

8. “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it.”  Nancy Pelosi.  And here most people thought it worked the other way around.

9. “I am romantic about the N.H.S. [the UK’s National Health Service]; I love it…  Do not trust market forces to give you the system you need…  I cannot believe that the individual health care consumer can enforce through choice the proper configurations of a system as massive and complex as health care.  That is for leaders to do.”  Donald Berwick, Obama’s recess appointment for Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.  Thankfully the explosively controversial nominee resigned a year later when it became clear Republicans would never vote to continue his appointment.

10. “[W]ell within the traditional bounds of Congress’s Article I power.”  Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on the federal government’s power to force people to buy health insurance, in a lame attempt to hedge against constitutional challenges to the individual mandate.

11. “They have to understand that the health care bill is not going to be repealed…  [They] should get a new lease on life and talk about something else.”  Reid dismissing Congressional Republicans’ Obamacare repeal efforts.  If the Supreme Court does what everyone expects it to do tomorrow, Reid may just be right.

12. “I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”  President Obama’s ignorant and deceitful comments ahead of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli’s disastrous effort to defend the administration’s position before the court during oral arguments in April.

13. “129 million Americans with a pre-existing condition could be denied coverage without [the] new health reform law.”  The Department of Health and Human Services cautioning against Obamacare repeal, in a claim promptly torn apart by the Cato Institute.  Also: “Thirty million Americans… are going to be able to get healthcare next year because of that law,” Obama recently defending his bill.  Newsflash: Healthcare is not health insurance, and most needy people can get healthcare through Medicaid, parts of Medicare, medical charity groups, or emergency rooms.  Most people without health insurance are temporarily lacking it while in-between jobs or choose not to pay for it.  The Obama administration hyped a nonexistent crisis in order to implement an unnecessary solution.

And the prize for most inane pronouncement in support of Obamacare goes to:

14. “Denying someone their life and liberty without due process…  Can you tell me what’s more unconstitutional than taking away from the people of America their Fifth Amendment rights, their Fourteenth Amendment rights, and the right to equal protection under the law?”  Texas Representative Sheila Jackson Lee on the legal implications of Obamacare repeal.  Everything is bigger in Texas, including stupidity.

 Print This Post

Related articles

• Dear Dems: Get Angry if Obamacare Goes Down (newser.com)
• Liberal Second-Guessing Won’t Make ObamaCare Constitutional (commentarymagazine.com)
• No pass for Nancy Pelosi (bostonherald.com)
• Three Reasons to End Obamacare Before It Begins! (txwclp.org)
• ObamaCare’s Secret History (libertycrier.com)

The Supreme Court’s impending Obamacare overrule seems to have liberal legal types anxious lately.

In their recent lecture-disguised-as-an-op-ed “Health Care Economics 101 And The Supreme Court,” University of Michigan professors Jill Horwitz and Helen Levy argue that by intervening in the health insurance market, government has the power to make healthcare uniquely efficient and affordable.

Assuming that that’s correct—and it’s not—so what?

Horwitz and Levy contest that upholding Obamacare’s individual mandate could lead to forcing people to buy broccoli or cars, as several Supreme Court Justices suggested during oral arguments in April.  They write, “[T]here are significant economic differences between health care and the list of goods the amicus brief and some of the Justices cited…  [T]he market for health care is characterized by multiple and substantial departures from the assumptions of perfect competition…  [A]ppropriately structured government intervention—which in this case means guaranteed issue, community rating, and an individual mandate—can actually promote efficiency, solving the problem of market failure and making the pie bigger for everyone.”

Actually, who cares?  Where in the Constitution can Congress force people to do something they don’t want, just because liberals think it will make life easier?  Actually, where does the Constitution give the federal government the power of central planning for the quixotic purpose of “making the pie bigger for everyone”?

Actually, where in the Constitution may I find the “Correcting Imperfect Markets for Competition via Abridgment of Individual Liberty” clause?

Horwitz and Levy toss out the following unconnected arguments in the hope that one of them will stick: the health insurance market operates poorly on its own; the health insurance market involves many interrelated parts, the failure of any one of which can compound failure in the others; an individual’s need for healthcare is unpredictable; the healthcare industry is high-stakes; the country is experiencing a health insurance crisis.

Not one of these reasons compensates for the egregious constitutional violation of forcing people to purchase a product on the private market against their will.

Obviously the health care market differs from the market for broccoli or cars—no one disagrees with that—though it’s not uniquely different from other markets we don’t allow the federal government to take over.

But all laws vary widely in their outcomes when applied to different referents.  The Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure, could yield different consequences if applied to a pastor’s suburban home vs. a drug-infested housing project.

One could argue that government should be able to randomly invade run-down apartments in gang-infested inner cities, since the likelihood of finding illegal weapons, drug paraphernalia, or evidence of other crimes is much greater there.  You might say that such a law “can actually promote efficiency” in law enforcement.

But does the principle prohibiting government from wantonly entering private homes without a warrant and poking around apply universally, or doesn’t it?  If it applies universally, then it applies whether we’re talking about split-levels or slums.

Similarly, there may be compelling reasons from a pure efficiency standpoint for government to intervene in the healthcare market.  (There aren’t, but bear with me.)  That the government could make healthcare so much more superior doesn’t justify forcing people to buy insurance policies they don’t want, or forcing policies on them that mitigate more risk than they care to pay for.

Perhaps the claim that Obamacare won’t lead to mandating broccoli consumption would be more credible if liberals weren’t regularly trying to ban trans fats, salt, Happy Meals, soda, popcorn, and “milk drinks.”  For a perfect example of the left-wing tactic of abridging liberty while distracting the public with superfluous “good for you” justifications, see Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s 10-year crusade to turn Manhattan into a monastery.

When the Supreme Court overrules the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate 5-4 next week, liberals are going to gripe about “judicial overreach” for decades, the way they’re still grumbling about Bush v. Gore.  They’ll roll their eyes at anyone who’s happy the Court overturned the law, and try to convince themselves that their legal argument is so much more sophisticated and forward-thinking than ours.

They need to be told why they’re wrong.

Previously published in modified form at Red Alert Politics



 Print This Post

Related articles

• The Broccoli Argument Isn’t About Broccoli (volokh.com)
• Obamacare fight ‘soon to be over’? LOL! (wnd.com)
• The individual mandate of Obamacare: Constitutional or Unconstitutional? (anniesanalysis.wordpress.com)
• The Times Serves Broccoli But No Dessert (justoneminute.typepad.com)
• A Back Door to the Public Option (wallstreetpit.com)

Liberals conspired for two years to plant a web of technologically sophisticated, hard-to-defuse bombs across the country’s urban and suburban centers, explosives that sparked up here and there frightening people and were programmed to detonate four years later.

Conservative SWAT teams screamed and pleaded and begged the public not to let them do it, and tried to stop the impending carnage via arguments, campaigns, and ultimately elections.  Liberals just laughed at the chaos like the Joker.

Twenty-six states sought intervention from the Supreme Court, which may be on the verge of defusing the bombs, and if the Court doesn’t do it the next Republican Congress will.  The right inevitably will spread collateral damage as they storm into downtown areas cordoning off districts, deactivating trigger devices, resetting timers, and safely dismantling and clearing out every last bomb.

Naturally, the media are blaming conservatives for the mess they’re going to make clearing out the explosives liberals planted.

The bombs in question are, of course, the various provisions of Obamacare.  The disorder left by conservatives’ clearing them out constitutes “messy ripple effects” the mainstream media are warning about if conservatives get their way.

In one recent report expressing hope that some Obamacare terms will be retained, Associated Press reporter Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar explained, “It sounds like a silver lining.  Even if the Supreme Court overturns President Barack Obama’s health care law, employers can keep offering popular coverage for the young adult children of their workers…  But here’s the catch: The parents’ taxes would go up.”

Translation: None of us in the MSM wants Obamacare repealed, but perhaps we’ll be able to keep parts of it intact, and through workaround solutions trick Americans into reinstating the rest in Obama’s second term.  What a shame, though, that parents with freeloading 26-year-olds will have to pay marginally higher rates for their children’s healthcare instead of soaking taxpayers for the difference—about $20 a month per child, according to an economist cited in the article.

Alonso-Zaldivar helpfully assures us that “The coverage for young adults up to age 26 on a parent’s health insurance is a popular provision that no one’s arguing about.”  No one in your administration-supporting, socialized medicine-loving AP reporters’ pool, that is.

He warns, “Better Medicare prescription benefits, currently saving hundreds of dollars for older people with high drug costs, would be suspended.”  Note how Alonso-Zaldivar writes as if seniors had been receiving such benefits for decades, and the extra cost would result in their being thrown in the street.  He acts as though government doesn’t constantly make changes to federal programs, adding or removing funding depending on changes in officeholders, and as though state agencies and private charities aren’t constantly stepping in to make up the difference so constituents barely notice changes in their benefits.  He seems to think Americans have never heard of budgets.

Alonso-Zaldivar adds, “Lacking legal authority, Medicare would have to take away the [“donut hole” coverage gap] discounts.  Drugmakers, now bearing the cost, could decide they want to keep offering discounts voluntarily.  But then they’d risk running afoul of other federal rules that bar medical providers from offering financial inducements to Medicare recipients.”

Lovely.  So we can’t repeal Obamacare, because the federal government prevents drugmakers from generously offering seniors discounts to help pay for their medications.  It’s got to be the government giving us treats or no one.

Last year I pointed out the absurdity of liberal legislators protesting conservative efforts to repeal Obamacare as unconstitutional, given that the legislation itself exists in a different universe from our Constitution.  Idiots like Texas Representative Sheila Jackson Lee characterized conservative repeal actions as the equivalent of trying to roll back a half-century of civil rights.  In fact, the bill had only been eked into law months before, and conservatives were hoping to stop it before any of its provisions kicked in.

Liberals are taking the same tack now, arguing that undoing Obamacare would be hopelessly messy and complicated (never mind what it would do to our health care system if allowed to stand), would take away popular and longstanding benefits, and should be accepted as a fait accompli.

That is, unfortunately, what happened with big-government welfare programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  Those programs became so entrenched in federal and state policy that today they’re nearly impossible to eliminate.  Not so Obamacare, which—unlike those programs—was not passed with bipartisan support, or even a healthy majority of one party, and is still raw enough in voters’ minds that they’re full of piss and vinegar about abolishing it.  The fate of Obamacare will be sealed by November 6, and possibly by the end of this month, and Democrats know the odds aren’t in their favor.

Alonso-Zaldivar gets one thing right: “A mixed verdict from the high court would be the most confusing outcome.  Some parts of the law would be struck down while others lurch ahead.”  Though Obamacare authors’ failure to include a severability clause suggests that if one part of the bill fails the entire thing would have to be struck down, I agree: It absolutely should be abolished in its entirety, down to its last period.

No matter how untidy reversal of Obamacare is, the effects can’t be more destructive to the country’s healthcare system than letting it stand.  And the deleterious effects of either course of action are entirely the fault of overzealous, power-grabbing, liberal Democrats.

Previously published in modified form at Red Alert Politics



 Print This Post

Related articles

• Obamacare II Coming to the USA (independentsentinel.com)
• Top 5 Things the Administration Forgot to Tell Women About Obamacare (heritage.org)
• The Lousiest ObamaCare Defense You’ll Read Today (reason.com)
• Democrats Join Republicans to Smother Obama’s Medical Device Tax (jdjournal.com)
• Harvard Economist: Obamacare Is Insane. Medicare Should be Phased Out (subzinfo.wordpress.com)

In honor of National Nurses Week, I thought I’d pose the question: What are American nurses’ actual responsibilities these days?

Last week while researching a column on Obama’s pandering to various interest groups, I noticed that his campaign website featured a page, grouped with pages for various demographic categories, devoted to Nurses.  What was that about, I wondered?  Was Obama shoring up support for Obamacare with a key segment of the medical profession?

I’d like to suggest another reason: Nurses are the new Teachers, the apocryphally underpaid, overburdened sirens of the service industry who make heroic sacrifices to nurture their tender underlings.

Not at the hospital I spent last week at, they didn’t.

After suffering a spontaneous pneumothorax (collapsed lung), I entered the emergency room of a midtown Manhattan hospital for surgery that involved suctioning excess air out of the space between my left lung and chest and allowing the lung to reinflate.  When the lung collapsed again two days later, doctors performed a more advanced surgery.  Two days with tubes in my chest, a day of observation, and I was home.

Throughout the week, all of the doctors I encountered—pulmonologists, cardiologists, generalists, specialists, attending surgeons, resident physicians—were top-notch, and eagerly took all the time needed to answer my most detailed and speculative questions.  They made my long, difficult stay more bearable.

Not so the scores of nurses who crossed my path, virtually all of whom made my stay far more uncomfortable and demoralizing than it needed to be.

All week there were precisely three nurses I encountered who could be described as better than terrible.  The first was a perky twenty-something who fed me rapid-fire advice and reassured me with her calm competence.  The second was a fifty-something Latino man who always welcomed me profusely, whistled while he worked, and asked if there were anything I needed before he left the room.  The third was a thirty-something Filipino woman who was quick, thorough, cheerful, and brimming with information.

The rest of them can go to hell.

The question smoldering at the edge of my consciousness all week was, What do these people get paid to actually do?

Most of the nurses’ duties seemed to be implemented for them by an army of nurses’ assistants, assistant nurses, nurse practitioners, social workers, Candy Stripers, and housekeepers, all of whom were regularly corralled into service to handle the supposed overflow.

The nurses performed no food-related services.  A separate contractor rushed in three meals a day to each patient, retrieved replacement items, and cleared everything away.  Requests to nurses for a measly cup of coffee were usually met with rolled eyes, mumbled complaints, and vague promises that rarely amounted to any follow-up.

The nurses performed no recreational services.  A contractor visited every day to collect payment for the cable TV.  Elderly volunteers strolled by offering magazines, newspapers, and paperbacks.

The nurses performed no therapeutic or cheering-up services.  A physical therapist met me twice a day to teach me exercises that would help me transition back to normal life.  Volunteers popped in throughout the week to see if I needed someone to talk to.  One day two ladies offered me “pet therapy”: a sociable Shi-Tzu named Rockie who played with me on my bed while we all chatted.

What did the nurses do?  I’ll tell you what they did—they took blood pressure.  Oh! how nurses love to take blood pressure.  They love to roll in their clunky, ominous, coat-stand-shaped contraption every couple of hours, wrap that cuff around your arm, and crush you like a boa constrictor.  They love taking your blood pressure, over and over again, whether it’s needed or not, whether it overlaps with other nurses’ readings, whether you’re dead asleep in the dark getting much-needed rest and must be rudely awoken to bright lights to take it.  They love taking blood pressure with a cat, they love it in a hat, they love it in a house, they love it with a mouse.

I have no history of high blood pressure, and mine never veered out of excellent territory.  Yet nurses leapt at me with their cuffs every chance they got like lions on wildebeests.  My upper arms had rashes by the time I escaped.

Maybe constantly taking blood pressure made these nurses feel useful.  I would say that they were trying to be sadistic, but Nurse Ratched had energy and focus.  These people were mostly just extraordinarily lazy.

That brings me to the other thing they did, which was shuffle around with sour looks on their faces as though they hated their jobs and were happy to take it out on their patients.  One nurse sloppily inserted four consecutive IVs in my arm over an hour—each of which popped out, because my arm was sweaty and she wasn’t taping them securely enough—and then, instead of investigating the situation and adjusting her methods, yelled at me and told me it was my fault.

These women are in the wrong profession.  They should be toll-takers or parking-meter attendants, where their callousness is less consequential or maybe expected.

The language issue is also not to be overlooked.  When you’re not fluent in English, and your patients speak only English, the results aren’t funny, George Lopez-style misunderstandings, they often cause your breathless, nauseated, aching patients great frustration and discomfort.  I asked one nurse to ratchet down my meal tray, which was a foot too high.  She said “Down?” and proceeded to lower my bed a foot, then turned and left before I could summon the lungpower to protest.

Maybe my experience at this hospital doesn’t generalize to the rest of the country.  This was a large, well-known, respected hospital, and I had a sample size of scores of nurses over seven days.  My observations seem relevant to what goes on in at least some major urban hospitals.  In private consultations with me, doctors and other hospital employees quietly confirmed my dismal evaluation of the nursing staff in a way that implied it wasn’t limited to that particular hospital.

What has happened in recent generations to practitioners of this once-noble profession?  I don’t know.  But I do know that if Obamacare isn’t repealed, Democrats and nurses’ unions are going to do their best to corrupt the occupation even further, teachers-union-style, by shielding professional misconduct, decoupling performance from compensation and advancement, and generally doing everything they can to lower the quality of nursing nationwide to a rock-bottom lowest-common-denominator.



 Print This Post

Related articles

• Montreal nurses suspended over woman’s death during childbirth (vancouversun.com)
• You Know You’re a Nurse If… (blogher.com)
• Nurses week is weak (mystrongmedicine.com)
• Infographic for National Nurses Week (rickmorey.wordpress.com)
• The Nature Versus Nurture of Nursing (nursetopia.net)

Talk about chutzpah.  The same chief executive who refused to provide a speck of guidance to one branch of government in crafting his signature legislation is now threatening another branch of government not to overturn it.

Does President Obama believe in the separation of powers?  You wouldn’t know it from his intemperate comments Monday on the legal challenge to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which the Supreme Court is now deliberating.  Just days after skeptical justices had subjected administration lawyers and their opponents to a historic six hours of questioning, and just as the judges were retreating to contemplate the competing claims in private, Obama stood up in the Rose Garden and loudly warned the nine “unelected” rubes that they’d better get this one right.

Obama declared that overturning his health care law would be “unprecedented” and “extraordinary”—which is funny, because that’s what a lot of people have been saying about his health care law.

What with his haranguing of the justices over their Citizens United decision and his veiled threats over Obamacare, we haven’t had a president interfere this much with the Supreme Court since FDR.  (Apparently Obama’s intimidation tactics still aren’t strong enough for Representative James Clyburn, who wants the president to campaign against the Supreme Court this fall.)

Can anyone recall an instance of one faction of the Supreme Court instructing a sitting president which laws to veto?  How about a Congressional caucus telling the Chief Justice which cases to turn down?

One federal appeals court is so rattled by Obama’s posturing that it is requiring his Justice Department to submit a brief by Thursday noon outlining whether and when it believes the Supreme Court has the authority to overturn federal legislation.

In his address Monday, Obama blithely threw around the term “judicial activism,” suggesting that the Supreme Court justices would be guilty of practicing it if they overturned Obamacare.  But judicial activism doesn’t mean “making decisions the other side doesn’t like.”

The justices’ sworn oath is to uphold the Constitution.  Conservative complaints of judicial activism refer to cases in which justices override the Constitution while upholding or striking down laws that suit their political preferences.

Conservatives have focused obsessively on the constitutionality of the law since Day 1, in particular the propriety of requiring people to enter commercial contracts against their will by purchasing health insurance in the private market.

Judicial activists, including Obamacare supporters, ignore the constitutionality of laws, unless they are forced by their opponents to concoct phony, sophistic defenses invoking the Constitution, in which they typically claim that whatever it is they’re proposing—banning guns, preventing violence against women—is covered by the Interstate Commerce Clause.

When was the last time you heard a Republican legislator respond, when asked about the constitutionality of a law he had proposed, “Are you serious?” as former Speaker Nancy Pelosi did when queried about Obamacare?  How about a Republican announcing, as Illinois Democrat and former Congressman Phil Hare did at an Obamacare townhall meeting, “I don’t worry about the Constitution”?

(The left needs to get its story straight on whether the Supreme Court may ever consider the constitutionality of legislation.  Liberal Dahlia Lithwick, for example, claims that Congress can pass anything it wants, whether constitutional or not, because the Supreme Court will assess its constitutionality and strike it down if need be.  This was two years ago, back when blinkered Democrats didn’t think there was any chance the Supreme Court would hear the case against Obamacare, much less overrule it.  On the other hand, fellow Slate writer Jamal Greene recently argued that the Supreme Court should eschew its constitutional function and let Obamacare stand, because two branches of government have already weighed in.)

In case the “unprecedented” and “judicial activist” arguments weren’t convincing, Obama also crowed that the law had been passed by “a strong majority” of Congress—by which he meant a sputtering, cobbled-together Frankenstein’s monster of reluctant coalitions that had to be bribed, deceived, and coerced into compliance.  (The 2010 Republican midterm election landslide, though—that was nothing special!)

Meanwhile we’ve learned that the American public is solidly on the conservative justices’ side, with 72% endorsing the notion that the individual mandate is unconstitutional.  This includes over 50% of Republicans, Independents, Democrats, voters who oppose the law, and voters who support the law.  How’s that for “a strong majority”?

Obama’s chance to offer input on his namesake legislation has long since passed.  It’s time for him to accept the court’s—and the public’s—verdict on the disastrous legislation he recklessly set in motion.



 Print This Post

Related articles

• On health care law, who’s the judicial activist? (politico.com)
• Arrogance, Ignorance or Worse As Obama Talks About Supreme Court (dewgeneral.wordpress.com)
• Federal Court Slams Justice Department Over Obama Comments (jonathanturley.org)
• Obama’s Bogus Complaint About Health Care and Judicial Activism (reason.com)
• Obama Questions the Supreme Court (davidscommonplacebook.wordpress.com)