by Ralf Seiffe
Watching the selling of the so-called stimulus bill has changed my entire regard for the constitutional construct of the United States. By championing the Daschle Plan to ration older people out of our health care system, I have now come to view Illinois’s senators not as my representatives in Washington but as Washington’s representatives to the people of Illinois. Both Dick Durbin and Roland Burris voted for this dark-of-night, dirty trick and in doing so, they must now be considered our adversaries, not our advocates.
The "stimulus proposal" is a fraud, beyond question. Anyone reading these columns already knows that the plan is actually the Democrat’s blueprint for national socialism. As the winning party in the last election, that is their prerogative even though they are so innumerate as to have generated a $60 trillion fiscal overhang for issues they have already socialized. This is a financial hole so big that it cannot be filled by any evident combination of economic growth and tax increases. They apparently expect the nation’s children—born and unborn—to make good on these debts yet, unsatisfied with that hole, the Democrats insist on digging deeper.
The most odious part of the bill is not its incalculable spending but its creation of a new federal bureaucracy, The National Coordinator of Health Information Technology. Recommended by the tax-adverse former Senate majority leader, the bill, as passed, will create a federal rationing scheme that would deny health care for the very sick or older people that the bureaucrats deem to be too ill or too old for society to stand the cost of treatment. Presumably, the coordinator would deny treatment to Teddy Kennedy because any effort to medically serve him would be cost ineffective. After all, he’s an old man, already at or beyond the life expectancy of white males. What purpose would be served by extending his life?
When to stop treatment is a debate Americans need to have. Medicare spends an inordinate amount of its annual spending on patients in the last few months of life. Much of this spending does nothing to improve the patient’s quality of life but it does help the survivors come to believe that they did "everything possible".
Taking heroic steps goes beyond scientific and pecuniary considerations; they test the very concept of morality and our regard for what constitutes the end of life. Accordingly, this is an issue so important that it should be argued forthrightly and with the greatest possible deliberation. Indeed, many Americans voted for the Democrats last November because they promised to bring this and other health issue issues forward while, at the same time, promising us we would be able to keep the current arrangement, if that is what we preferred.
So my complaint with Durbin and Burris, these de facto employees of Washington, is not that they want to us to sell a fundamental change to health care system but they have swindled us out of this important debate. Hiding this in the "stimulus bill" shows they prefer embezzlement to exposure.
Why would our supposed representatives do such a thing? Perhaps they know that this legislation would be a non-starter if introduced on its own as "The End Life Early Financing Act". That sort of honesty is absent because it’s better for the senators—as representatives of government—to steal the health care industry rather than take the risk that full disclosure might leave it in the private sector. By hiding it in the hundreds of pages of the bill, never mentioning it in the debate and rushing it through under the cover of the economic emergency, these employees of Washington have shown their intent to cheat the public out of honest debate. It is a calculated deception that reveals Burris and Durbin’s real loyalties lie in Washington, not in Illinois.
Indeed, one can make the charge that their behavior is a scheme to deny constituents of our intangible right to their honest service. Hmmm, isn’t that the catch-all charge for which George Ryan resides in Terre Haute rather than Kankakee? This may also explain the senior senator’s obscene effort to get Ryan a pardon—Dick Durbin refuses to understand for whom he works.
