Have gout, will travel

Is this what "medical tourists" look like? Well, no, these visitors to Zocalo
plaza in downtown Mexico City earlier this year are actually tourists trying to
avoid medical treatment, specifically the swine flu. (AP Photo/Enric Marti)

In the ongoing argument over health delivery in this country, whether it's going to be called FedMed or GuvLuv or Nationalized Healthcare or Mandated Medical Management or Dictatorial Doctoring or Motherland Medicinal Monopoly or the benign-sounding Obamian euphemism Public Insurance Plan, the forgotten people in this dysfunctional delusion are the actual bringers of wellness. 

No, that does not refer to the professional administrators aptly known as Medicrats, those management power-wielders found in the academies, associations, boards, colleges, organizations, and societies like the American Medical Association and the American Nursing Association and the National Gonad Gangliographery Society and the Institute of Erectile Massage Therapy and about a thousand or so other such self-serving wellcare groups. 

These are essentially medicine unions. Like all such bureaucracies, they exist primarily to benefit the politically connected cronies who run them. Their primary functions are to control entry into these cozy, closed clubs, thereby creating personnel shortages and guaranteeing greater profits. 

No, the forgotten people in the Grand Government Care Con, the doctors and surgeons and nurses and anesthesiologists and bone & joint specialists and hip replacement practitioners and eye, ear, nose, sinus & empty brain socket pathologists and all the other real people who do the real healing. 

Who will be our future caregivers once everyone figures out that medicine is a closed government monopoly and its healers are slaves of the state? 

Answer: only two kinds, the altruists and the incompetents. 

Each, in his or her own way, is dangerous – the do-gooder who thinks emoting is a valid substitute for reason, and the screw-up who can't make it on merit. 

And what will become of all the competent and experienced people-menders who refuse the authoritarian's leash? 

Expect experts to become expats. 

You've already heard of Medical tourism. Today when people stuck in public health plans need real medical attention they chuck their nationalized health hoaxes and flee in search of real treatment. 

Need dental work or an orthopedic tune-up at an internationally accredited hospital? Cruise off to Costa Rica. Aiming for abdominplasty? Buzz off to Brazil. Need something trifling like open-heart surgery? India is in. 

But once Obamacare kills off private practice America's caregivers, or at least the ones with any inkling of self-respect, will hang out their shingles to treat your shingles in Mexico. And Thailand and Singapore. And South Korea and Taiwan and Malaysia. 

Some of these countries may be small or poor or both but they're not stupid like the United Socialist States of America. Good doctors bring needy patients. Needy patients bring money and family members who become tourists and spend more money. And bad service means a bad rep that means not getting the word-of-mouth advertising that keeps new patients and their money rolling in. 

As America destroys its free markets the developing world is developing them. And the only ones left in the scary GovCare clinics back home will be the poor and downtrodden, both as practitioners and as the practiced upon. 

Rank and file progressives don't get it. Their hard left political leaders do but don't care. That's because, like all other juggernaut government mega-missions, healthcare isn't about health. 

Think about it. Drug control is about control, gun control is about control, war on poverty is about control, war against terror is about control. 

What do you think war against private healthcare is really about? Health? 

So while your pancreas crashes and your kidneys curdle and your rectum rots off while you're whiling away your last days on the three-year government-care waiting list don't shed a tear for the ruling classes. They and their loved ones will be well cared for. 

Don't wonder how. Don't ponder the loopholes and exceptions and rulings and policies and special clauses hidden in the depth of the thousands of unreadable and unread pages of legislation that put you where you are but allows them the benefit of world-class medical care at taxpayer expense. 

The ruling class always looks out for itself. Except, that is, when rank-and-file pie-in-the-sky starry-eyed liberal no-nothings take to the streets and demand a system that does the looking out for them for them. 

That leaves everyone in between, meaning whatever is left of the middleclass, with the option of selling their cars, mortgaging their homes, siphoning their savings, and piling up credit card debt just to get real healthcare abroad. 

As for you poor misguided conservatives, don't think the Republicans are going to save you. They don't believe in freedom and individualism like they pretend to. They believe in power, and they'll play along with the healthcare killers to gain and keep that power. 

But there is good news for all you card-carrying collectivists who fought for the idealized politicalized bureaucratized bastardized healthcare. You may end up prematurely dead but by God you'll all be equally dead!