My recent column extolling the vices of the Department of Motor Vehicles prompted several readers to send me their own DMV horror stories. One Escondido writer noted that, unlike my Temecula trip, no separate and shorter line existed for her appointment—making the entire system a farce.
Another wily reader mentioned how he trekked up from Oceanside to the San Clemente DMV where he was able to get in and out in only one hour—not counting the travel time.
Other readers focused on the health care analogy I was making in the article and provided anecdotes about medicine across the pond where, in England, “they do have to wait months for surgery, unless it’s life-threatening.”
Even in critical situations things might not go so well according to one writer whose friend with chest pains had to drive himself to the hospital when no ambulance responded to his telephone call. In another case a chap suffering from what turned out to be a bowel obstruction reportedly waited for hours after requesting an “emergency” home visit—a delay that could have been fatal.
Then there were those folks who saw no useful analogy between the DMV and a program for national health care because, as one critic noted, the former is a “state” agency. Presumably this gentleman would have had no problem with the argument had he been reading a column where I mentioned a very long line at an Oceanside post office that at one point was being served by exactly no one.
Now that Congress has passed, by hook or by crook, this much-touted more-for-less health care legislation, we will see if the law lives up to its billing—and down to its projected cost.
It was hardly an auspicious sign that approval of this bureaucracy-on-steroids construct was made possible by yet another ruse—the idea that an Executive Order about abortion (without legislative force) would prevent federal funding of that deadly procedure.
The glee in the Twittered bill-signing message of Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards suggests that, like so many statements and representations coming from this White House, the pledge that abortions will not be funded with taxpayer dollars was just another piecrust promise by folks who seem to have a good deal in common with the author of that “made to be broken” statement.
I predict, with bitter confidence, that this no-abortion promise will be broken (or “circumvented”) the same way Obama broke promises about public funding of his presidential campaign and about C-SPAN coverage of the tawdry legislative process that resulted in this landmark “Louisiana Purchase” health care legislation.
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