This article is worth reading.  Now I’ll tell you why.  Notice what is not there.  Got it?  No? Market competition.  Transparency.  Less government intervention.  Addressing uncompensated care.  Abuses by not-for-profit hospitals.  Sending the management of these Ponzi schemes back to the states where they can be dismantled.  Didn’t see those did you?  I’ve been in meetings like this.  Lot’s of very educated, very articulate people saying almost nothing, their statements shrouded in the most eloquent prose.  Very impressive. Guess what?  These folks don’t know crap.  Oh yeah.  The author is up on his stats.  In meetings like this if you ask a pointed question, you get the look.  You know, that look where someone is busted, totally outed as a fraud, but they have the presence of mind to go on the offense and look at you as if you deserve some charity from them as your comment betrays your ignorance of the massive factual databank they are called to command.

This is what health care policy meetings in Washington D.C. are like.  Woe to he or she who mentions some principle of constitutionality or liberty.  Woe to he or she who dares bring up the sanctity of the doctor patient relationship.  

One conclusion I’ve come to over the years is that in most cases, disagreements between people are not a difference of beliefs, but a difference of facts.  Different people subscribe to different sets of facts.  But facts are facts.  Thomas Sowell once told someone in a debate that they were entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.  I think this is why lawyers agree to certain facts or principles prior to trial.  Certain points or facts are not disputed by either side.  This is the common ground that must be established prior to any sort of argument on the finer points.  

So many assumptions have already been made by the people in the room at the meeting described in the attached article that beg an argument.  To question the premises of the folks in the room sends a message to them that this meeting is going to take 39 hours not the 1 hour allotted.  ”But health care is not a right!”  Can you imagine saying that in the meeting that produced these conclusive questions?  ”Why don’t we suggest (not require) facilities to post their prices and let market competition do the work of lowering the price of health care?”  You won’t be invited back.  

That’s the goal, isn’t it?  To be invited back.  To be a respected, sought-after authority in your field.  Mustn’t marginalize oneself with these fringe, radical, libertarian comments.  On a career path, you know.  

This is the foundation of filth and garbage that Obamacare is built on.  This type of meeting ultimately will result in denying care through rationing to millions, and result in their deaths.  Can you imagine saying that to this crowd?

G. Keith Smith, M.D.