ObamaCare and StalinCare: Who gets the good doctors?
Friday, October 9, 2009 E-Mail this story Free Headline Alerts
Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972. His columns are today read in both English and Russian.
On Sept. 9, 2009, Obama recited to Congress his revolutionary project for U.S. health care. Incidentally, it is these revolutionary dreams that gave him the majority votes to win the U.S. presidency. In Britain, he would not be the Prime Minister of Her Majesty the Queen, but owing to the U.S. direct majority vote, anyone can turn out to be the U.S. president!
Many Democrats believe that nothing is more important than their triumph over the Republicans. So they behaved during Obama's recital like those listening to their leader, prophet, and political thinker of genius, while the Republicans looked angry, grumbled, and one of them shouted that Obama was lying, but then apologized to Obama by telephone, and Obama graciously accepted the apology. But the Democrats were not satisfied: they demanded his apology to Congress.
In the past three decades, quite a few good books and articles have been written on the subject of U.S. health care reform, but none of them were mentioned in Congress on Sept. 9.
You see, America so far has been living in darkness, and Obama, the great luminary, explained to Congress what was wrong with America's health care. Apart from America's lack of Obama's "partnership" with the People's Republic of China. And apart from the nuclear weapons in the U.S.A. and other countries that possess them, all of which weapons Obama will eliminate.
No one in Congress recalled that the previous U.S. president (George W. Bush) prepared a printed plan and an oral report to reform health care, particularly for those who have insufficient medical insurance or none at all. The goal was to discourage them from using hospital emergency rooms when they get sick and instead to enable them "to get the best care from the doctor of his or her choice" (page 8).
To recall this in Congress would have been an insult to great Obama, who was enlightening via Congress the ignorant United States. Everything that had preceded the sunrise of great Obama was forgotten by apparently all Democrats in Congress, for they did want a revolution in U.S. health care, and they condemned the Republicans as reactionaries.
George W. Bush is a Republican, but though I attacked him, let me remind you that he presented his health care reform in his speech to the Medical College of Wisconsin. Indeed, Congress should be worried more about Obama's prospective "partner," whose General Chi Haotian has threatened to infect and kill "one third or two thirds" of the Americans.
Governments like the "Soviet government" between 1923 and 1953, that is, Stalin between 1923 to 1953 (when he died), ensured minimal standard medical education to whoever wanted to become a doctor. Their tuition was deducted from their forthcoming salaries, which were roughly equal to the notoriously low wages of Stalin's workers.
Of course, Stalin and his helpmates were treated by the few selected doctors, and in Moscow there were two special hospitals called Kremlevkas, created for that purpose. Below those highest medical institutions, a patient could not choose his or her doctor.
My wife and I have never been rich in the United States. Still, in the United States I have been writing (in English) what I wanted, and this has been published, while my wife worked as a senior medical editor for McGraw-Hill (English was her passion in Russia, just as it was mine). However, a friend of ours, a Russian poet who emigrated with his family to the United States without one dollar in their pockets and without his poetry published in English, received all health care benefits in New York.
The most important aspect of health care Ñ a patient's freedom to choose his or her doctor Ñ exists in the U.S.A. for those who can buy medical insurance which does not restrict their choice of doctors.
ObamaCare may turn out to be not unlike StalinCare, praised by foreigners, like the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times of the 1930s, as yet another "miracle of socialism." StalinCare was equal for all, except those who were Stalin's top officials and had the best doctors exclusively for themselves.
It is noteworthy that Obama's glorious recital before Congress is less trustworthy than was Bush's report to the Medical College of Wisconsin.
According to Obama and his supporters, more than 46 million Americans are deprived of medical care. Bush explains that every American can go to an emergency room, and no hospital will turn him or her away. What such Americans are deprived of is a visit to a doctor of his or her choice, who was, indeed, accessible everywhere a century ago only to a tiny minority, "the rich," for whom to have a personal physician was a privilege, like having a musical virtuoso playing in their mansions, the Renaissance paintings on their walls, or the world's greatest poetry recited by its authors to their guests. StalinCare was based on his and his top officials' conviction that anything and anyone can be mass produced for the population at large, which led to the disappearance of the best doctors for anyone except Stalin and his top officials, as it led to the emigration of composers such as Rakhmaninoff and Prokofiev, or to the annihilation of Osip Mandelstam, probably the world's greatest poet of his time.
Incidentally, Clinton also had a plan for a health care reform. Outside Congress on Sept. 9, Obama mentions his predecessors as predestined to have failed, and himself as predestined to win.
The value of every doctor also depends on the development of new medicines and new medical equipment. Anton Chekhov was born in 1860 and received his medical degree at the age of 25. Simultaneously, he began to publish his short stories, was welcomed as a genius, and became the greatest Russian writer, at a par with Tolstoy. His works can be defined as "medical realism," describing people as objectively as though they were his patients. He gave free medical treatment to the poor.
Yet he himself had tuberculosis, which he discovered when he was 23 years of age, and he died in 1904, at the age of 44, since medicine had no cure for TB, and he, a genius of "medical realism," could not cure himself. That is, even the best physician depends on the progress of medical science, development of new medicines, new medical equipment, etc.