Real Pain

Liberal politicians on both sides of the aisle want to control every aspect of the average citizen’s life. How you think, work, play, worship, and relax, those should not be your choice...not according to the liberals. The elite in the liberal camp firmly believe they are far better suited to make those decisions, and the liberal drones agree with them. To the drone, it is far easier to shift the responsibility over to the government.

Responsibility. To the liberal mindset, if you add the word “self” before responsibility, you are speaking blasphemy. A populace of independent, self-reliant citizens is a vision of unspeakable horror to the liberal. One reason is that the independent need no one to tell them what to do. The independent make their own decisions. They deal with problems as they come along and they succeed or fail on their own. They are the ones who make the fundamental choices about their own lives. The liberal elite want to remove that ability, even to the point of telling you how to travel or at what temperature your home will be kept.

Pelosi, Reid, Dodd…to the liberal elite, the pinnacle of established wisdom...to the true conservative, a new axis of evil; a tri-liberal committee. Because of the policies and laws these three stooges have put in place, the ability to be self reliant has become an endangered dream. One of the favorite tools of the liberal is healthcare, specifically the arena of pain management.

Pain is a reality of the human condition. Bruises come with the territory. Pain is nature’s way of telling us to “not do that again”. Unfortunately, sometimes things go wrong and pain becomes a constant unwelcome presence in our lives. The pain management specialty is made up of doctors who have studied and in some cases perfected ways to allow the pain sufferer to live a functional life while dealing with that pain. Liberals somehow think that is wrong. They point out the tiny percentage of patients who act irresponsibly as an indication of the whole. Rush Limbaugh’s problem with pain medication is one of their prime examples. They ignore the fact that Mr. Limbaugh has dealt with that problem and seems to be doing quite well right now. To the liberal, a middleclass working American dealing with chronic pain while supporting themselves and their family is as much a danger to society as a meth addict in the gutters of skid row.

The Las Vegas Sun, the liberal newspaper in my area, had an article this morning about a doctor who prescribed pain medication in an irresponsible manner. Well, doctors happen to be human, and humanity does act irresponsibly, sometimes more often than not. That does not mean that in order to solve that problem, you eliminate the ability of those doctors who do prescribe responsibly to help their patients. If you are liberal, that is exactly how you deal with the problem. You punish the patients. You create laws that make it illegal to even think about doing what caused the actual harm. Punish the wrongdoer only? What do you think we are, conservatives?

The best way to solve the healthcare problem and to lower costs is not by adding innumerable layers of regulation, but by making a few responsible changes to how things are done.

One: remove the profit motive. It is fundamentally un-American for a few people to become wealthy off of the misery of others. A hospital or a health insurance company can offer their employees a very good living while supplying their patients with high quality products and services. The Mayo Clinic is a prime example of this. In healthcare the profit motive is what prompts the greedy to order their employees to eject patients from their hospital rooms the second the coverage lapses, or to force nurses to use needles on more than one patient. The profit motive is what causes insurance carriers to refuse contracted benefits on the flimsiest of excuses while granting their board members multimillion dollar bonuses. If you think these examples are absurd, every one of them happened right here in Nevada over the past few years and every one of them was defended by the liberal elite in my legislature. One of the chief supporters of the companies that committed these atrocities was Nevada Assemblywoman Sheila Leslie, the recipient of the Consumer Advocate award. Now that is irony. To the media, it is not what you do that counts, it is what you say.

Two: allow doctors and patients to develop a true working relationship where prescribed medications and procedures are concerned. A doctor has enough to do without spending additional hours filing multiple copies of reports to faceless bureaucrats. Don’t remove avenues of help simply because some people may abuse the medicine. People can be idiots, but don’t punish the responsible for the actions of the irresponsible. And don’t make medications that work unavailable for the same reason.

Three: pull the weeds. Sometimes people turn out to be bad, and that includes physicians. The liberal elite think that the best way to deal with that problem is to tighten the regulations so that it is harder to do the bad things. This is the way they deal with everything. The ridiculous gun laws are an example. Making it harder for a doctor to do the job only makes it hard on the patients. If a physician violates the oath that begins with “do no harm”, and it turns out that this was done intentionally, yank the license. There will be plenty of candidates to fill those shoes. We will not have a shortage of doctors if the profession is regulated in a responsible manner. We will though if we allow the liberal mindset to run our lives.