Quoting Jimmy Fallon: “It’s amazing what you can achieve when you make something mandatory and fine people if they don’t do it and then keep extending the deadline for months.”
I’ve relayed this story before but the resignation of Kathleen Sibelius commands me to tell it again. Years ago I used points on a credit card to upgrade to first class only to find myself sitting next to a very sharp dressed professional woman. I asked her what she did and she proudly stated that she provided consultant services to manufacturing companies, assisting them with their compliance pertaining to the rules and regulations issued by the Consumer Products Safety Commission.
I then asked her what she did prior to this consultant gig, wondering how she got into this business, to which she replied:
“I was Chairman of the Consumer Products Safety Commission.” I laughed out loud, subsequently making for a very quiet flight, this ex-bureaucrat not appreciating my sense of humor. This individual had essentially created a demand for her services at gunpoint, issuing regulations, the compliance with which was later possible, only with her “assistance.”
I see this same strategy when the head of the Centers for Disease Control, after mandating controversial vaccines, resigns, only to become the CEO of the vaccine manufacturer, the direct beneficiary of the CDC mandates. You would think these people would take a sabbatical or save some tortoises or do some community service for a year so they wouldn’t be so obvious. Al Gore and the global warming crowd, former joint chiefs of staff and their defense contractor pals, big pharma and the FDA….there is no end to this graft.
What will Kathleen Sibelius do now? Will she go on a paid lecture circuit as the expert on complying with the Unaffordable Care Act? Will she go to work for one of the cronies benefitting from the Obamacare scam? Or will she hang up her spurs and retire in disgrace as the hatchet-woman of healthcare, happy to have destroyed the affordability of health insurance for millions and having snatched away the insurance so many more millions were happy with?
While she was likely just a tool, she is nevertheless an accomplice and accessory to the crony crime we now know as Obamacare. If she is like most of the rest of the departing D.C. offal, she has already arranged her soft landing, a high-paid sinecure funded by the folks who have directly benefitted from her crimes.
My default position is to assume the worst from people like this, however, always hoping that whatever good is in these people will someday show itself in the form of an apology and remorse for the violence they have inflicted on the rest of us. While Sibelius will not likely take this path, I will watch and hope that she will redeem herself by repudiating all that she has done and professionally all that she has been.
Let’s watch what she does next. Unfortunately, it will likely be the manifestation of the payoff for her innumerable lies and the “wet work” done to benefit the health care cronies.
G. Keith Smith, M.D.
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