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Friday, May 13, 2011 - 11:37amSanction this postReply
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And here's the hyper-link to the video:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/05/12/sen_rand_paul_right_to_health_care_is_like_believing_in_slavery.html


Ed


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Friday, May 13, 2011 - 12:13pmSanction this postReply
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yep - like I said before, here we have a black man SUPPORTING SLAVERY!!! Oh, the irony...........

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Friday, May 13, 2011 - 12:42pmSanction this postReply
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Senator Rand Paul would be my first choice for president, if he were running.

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Saturday, May 14, 2011 - 8:39amSanction this postReply
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I like this guy!

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Saturday, May 14, 2011 - 9:51amSanction this postReply
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We haven't had something in politics this refreshingly accurate and moral for decades. This guy is a modern-day Davy Crockett.

:-)

Ed


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Saturday, May 14, 2011 - 9:57amSanction this postReply
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Robert,

Someone once said that those with a victim-psychology do not want simply to be freed from oppression, they want to become oppressors themselves -- like a child beaten by parents, who becomes a bully himself (rather than a champion of non-violence in human affairs).

Ed
Sometimes, ironically, it can be quite appropriate to "blame the victim" (if and when the "victim" becomes a moral monster).


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Saturday, May 14, 2011 - 11:26amSanction this postReply
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Had an interesting discussion of this quote at Reason.com, with unusually heavy thread volume (458 posts and counting):

http://reason.com/blog/2011/05/13/rand-pauls-slavery#commentcontainer

I thought it would have been more accurate to describe the "right" to healthcare as "fractional slavery", to distinguish it from the full-on slavery practiced in the antebellum South and point out that there's degrees of involuntary servitude, but I'm mighty pleased that Rand Paul is living up to that first name.

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Saturday, May 14, 2011 - 11:49pmSanction this postReply
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A “right” to health care means the right to such care apart from and independent of anyone else’s willingness to provide it, which means the right to someone else’s labor — either the labor of medical personnel or of the taxpayers forced to subsidize it. If some people are entitled by right to the products of the work of others (either of the medical providers or of the taxpayers), it means that these others are compelled to work for them. A person who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave. Although a right to health care doesn’t imply that a physician will necessarily be conscripted to provide it, it does imply that he can (justifiably) be conscripted to provide it. And, in fact, doctors have already been subjected to a kind of medical conscription.

Consider, for example, the “Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act” of 1985 (EMTALA). As Dr. Paul Hsieh and Attorney Lin Zinser note:
This law requires that hospitals that accept Medicare patients diagnose and treat anyone who comes within two hundred feet of an emergency room, regardless of whether the person can pay for the treatment. The effect of this law is that anyone can walk into an emergency room at any time and receive treatment — without concern for payment. If a bum wants a free meal and a warm bed for the night, all he has to do is walk into the ER and say, “Doc — I feel like an elephant is sitting on my chest!’” By law, the emergency room doctor and staff have to run tests until they can prove that he is not having a massive heart attack and can be safely discharged. And the failure of a hospital or physician to comply with any EMTALA-mandated responsibilities can result in fines of up to $50,000 for each infraction. . . .

EMTALA enslaves doctors. They are required to treat patients who are not required to pay them. What other industry is required by law and under penalty of a fine to provide services on a regular basis without any promise of payment? How long could restaurants survive if a law required them to serve free meals to anyone who showed up at the door and said he was hungry? How many grocery stores could exist if they were required to allow people to walk out with food that had not been paid for? EMTALA is classic socialist doctrine applied to medicine: Each patient gets care according to his need from each doctor according to his ability.

EMTALA not only enslaves emergency medicine physicians; it also enslaves any specialist called to the ER to treat a patient. For instance, because hospitals are required to treat patients at the ER, a hospital will typically require a cardiologist who admits one of his own patients to the hospital’s cardiac care unit to also be on call to take care of any ER patient who presents with a cardiology problem.
(“Moral Health Care vs. ‘Universal Health Care’.” (The Objective Standard, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 22-23)


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Monday, May 16, 2011 - 1:20amSanction this postReply
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Bill -- re this: "A person who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave."

I suspect that you meant something like this: "A person who IS COERCED INTO producing while others dispose of his product is a slave FOR THAT PERIOD OF TIME WHEN THE PERSON SUFFERS FROM THE COERCION."

As written, the original sentence includes a wide range of voluntary as well as involuntary transactions, such as ordinary commercial tranactions involving production in exchange for mutually agreed upon wages, and doesn't include the stipulation that it is possible to be a fractional slave -- coerced for some portion of their life, free the rest of the time.

I certainly agree with you that EMTALA fractionally enslaves physicians, including my wife. In the thread I linked to, some leftists argue that that is not the case, because doctors are free to choose whether to step into emergency rooms, and to structure their career to avoid that, and thus that "free" care is non-coerced since it can be avoided.

That would be like saying that a young man in Hawaii who is automatically enrolled into the Selective Service merely by getting a driver's license (yes, the statists in the legislature recently passed a law that does that automatic enrollment), and who is subsequently drafted into the military in a future war, thus agreed to be drafted and thus wasn't coerced but rather volunteered to join the military.
(Edited by Jim Henshaw on 5/16, 1:29am)


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Monday, May 16, 2011 - 8:53amSanction this postReply
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Jim,

I don't think it's necessary to rewrite my original sentence. It means what it says. "If others "dispose" of my product, then they, not I, are determining its disposition. If I dispose of it, then I'm determining it.


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