Obamacare: Health highway or avenue queue?

Back in my high school days, when the Russians were our big buddies and communists were a fringe band of wackos plotting the overthrow of democracy, a best friend of mine (later to be an icon in the Radio Hall of Fame) used to do a satirical monologue in which he impersonated one of the latter loonies.

In his strident skit, a rabble-rousing speaker in Central Park shouted, "Comes the revolution, everybody gets to eat peaches with cream, double-thick!"

"But, Comrade speaker, I don't like peaches with cream, double-thick," responded one of his listeners. In reply, the orator thundered, "Comrade, comes the revolution, you'll eat peaches with cream, double-thick!" Fast forward to today and substitute the speaker of your choice (yes, I do have one in mind).

As this is being hunt-and-pecked on my trusty keyboard, a flimsy majority of our elected reprehensibles in Congress is pulling out all the stops - including a stoppage of normal procedure - to pass the most massive overhaul of health care in our nation's history.

Never mind, unless you happen to care, that the language of the proposed law has not yet been published or that nary a single member of the opposition party will vote for it; or the majority of we, the sheeple, do not want it to become the law of the land.

Sure, we know our current system is flawed, just as we know that "until death do us part" is a fading fantasy; but tainted bath water and the babies therein clearly require different handling.

That is to say - and most of our citizens are saying it - there are things about the delivery of health care in America that need changing, and there is a plethora of anecdotal evidence that this is a deplorable fact. However, the necessary surgery requires a scalpel, rather than a machete.

Neither I nor any thinking person I know is in a mad rush to join the queues awaiting critical care in other nations or being denied such care because providing it is economically unfeasible or having their doctors' decisions overridden by someone buried in the bowels of bureaucracy.

Thanks, but no thanks, sez I.

Were it not for the system that is now being vilified by those with the hots for Obamacare, I would probably be dead today - or, even worse, existing without several members of my extensive family including a woman I love like a cat loves catnip.

Let's face reality now - as face it we will have to if the proposed legislation is force-fed into the congressional hopper:

Aside: "Hopper" is a word my dad and some of his peers used to describe the bathroom throne.

Back to the blog: Neither we nor the aforementioned reprehensibles know what's in the bill or how it will be paid for or by how many future generations, starting with the immediate descendants now depending on us for guidance and support.

What we do know, if we give it more than a moment's thought, is that if you add more patients to the waiting rooms of fewer doctors, costs will go up, the quality of service will go down and the address of future health care will be Avenue Queue - waiting lines at death's door.

You don't believe me? Ask your doctor - unless you customarily call a congressperson when you get sick!

Meanwhile, if you're reading this before the health care bill has been flushed into the plumbing of our governance, this moment is your very last chance to put the brakes on a legislative juggernaut that threatens to both revolutionize and further screw up what is an admittedly imperfect system.

It is, though, a system from which we tend not to flee to other lands when we don't feel good.

What to do? Call both the local and Washington offices of Democratic members of the House and warn them that drivers of, or riders in, the pending juggernaut may become pedestrians after next November.

If the proposed overhaul of health care is a good idea, it would survive a sober review of its component parts, followed by a sensible and affordable plan for financing each one.

Peaches with cream, double thick, does not suit every taste, nor does such a delicacy come without cost - sometimes including acute indigestion.