Avoid Nursing Home Abuse by Avoiding Soviet-Style Medical Care

Yesterday on the weekend edition of NPR’s All Things Considered, there was a story about an increase in nursing home workers beating residents, and a rise in unreported homicides in some of those cases. Here is the story by reporter Sandra Bartlett.

As I’m listening to this story, I am sitting there in disbelief that there are actually people who would do something like that to elderly people, to people who are vulnerable and can’t fight back. It’s sick. (And this isn’t an S.E.I.U. rally we’re talking about.)

This is the kind of situation that concerns me when it comes to government usurpations of private matters, such as in retirement and medical care provision, especially in the case of ObamaCare. Because non-accountable bureaucrats take over various aspects of medical care, including doctors themselves becoming government bureaucrats which will be the case under the Soviet-replicating ObamaCare, the quality of workers in America’s medical-related establishments will be reduced, as is the case with many other government-controlled sectors of society.

And ObamaCare is a takeover of the medical industry by the government, via the back door — eventually, because of the fascist mandates, dictates and strangulating regulations, it will become all government-controlled, unless it is completely repealed immediately, and replaced by further repealing all other controls, restrictions, licensure, regulations, fees, red tape and bureaucracies that already exist that the State intrudes into Americans’ private medical matters.

Because of the “economic calculation problem” (pdf article by Mises), unlike their counterparts in the dreaded private sector, government bureaucrats do not have any competitive incentive to genuinely serve the interests of their clients or customers (or, merely of their fellow citizens, for that matter) — and, yes, even in “human services” are such “profit motives” necessary. That is because you have to take into account “human action” — to be perfectly honest, most people are just not saints, and act in their own self-interests, whether they will admit it or not. And for some people who are insecure, their interests are in acting out their need for control and domination over others, particularly those who are more vulnerable in society. My point is, a competitive market in the human services industries, including medical care and nursing homes, weeds out the bad workers, while State-controlled services protects them.

Related to this, yesterday I linked to an article by Sheldon Richman on left libertarians,” who, as Richman notes, have an emphasized concern for workers being exploited by businessmen. I, however, am not as much concerned for workers exploited by businesses and corporations as I am concerned for citizens — workers and non-workers alike — being exploited by governments. That is exactly the situation we have now, and will especially be the case with a totalitarian scheme like ObamaCare. I dread the thought of hospital workers and nursing home staff becoming government workers, as was the case in the old Soviet Union.

For those reasons, we must all make sure to eat our fruits and vegetables, and take extra vitamins and nutritional supplements, and exercise every day for the sake of prevention. To protect ourselves from the tyranny of ObamaCare and other fascist and socialist State usurpations and intrusions, prevention is key.