Wolfgang von Skeptik

The Hidden Horror Of Kerry's Health Plan

THE EMOTIONALLY AND ETHICALLY compelling fact that independent analysis shows John Kerry's health plan would cover about 25 million more uninsured Americans than the Bush plan would (click here and here) obscures the horrific surprise that is in store for about 21.6 million people if the Kerry plan becomes law. These 21.6 million persons -- about two-thirds of them without any medical insurance at all today -- would be insured by an expanded Medicaid program. A Kerry administration would accomplish this expansion by raising the Medicaid eligibility cutoff, which currently approximates the federal poverty line: in 2001, $17,960 per year for a family of four. For insurance purposes only, this exclusionary barrier would be raised as high as 300 percent of the poverty line, about $54,000 per year for the same hypothetical family of four. The Medicaid-eligible population would thus be expanded approximately 71 percent, to 52 million persons or about one-fifth of the total U.S. population.

To anyone who is even minimally knowledgeable about America's worsening health-care crisis, the Medicaid portion of Kerry's proposed solution sounds simple, effective and even relatively painless -- especially since the requisite bureaucracy is in place, already fattening itself and feathering its own nest on the labor of the American taxpayer. But what Kerry and his campaigners aren't telling you is that Medicaid is welfare, pure and simple, and that -- as welfare -- it includes all welfare's inherent tyrannies: dictatorial controls imposed by bureaucrats who are absolutely powerful, endlessly vindictive, and often both vengefully feminist and bigotedly anti-male.

Unfortunately, to Americans who have never been so subjugated, it is extremely difficult to convey what it is like to be "on welfare," much less how it erodes your sense of self to live with the attendant fear and restriction for any extended time. The fear itself is all-consuming and thus ruinous: it is bred of a singularly rational paranoia of a bureaucracy that can literally do anything it wants and is utterly merciless -- especially if you are a white male. There is of course also the inescapable sense of shame, the guilt by association with all the self-destructive psycholinguistics embodied in the term "welfare bum," the accompanying sense that you have fallen into a cesspool and no bath or shower will ever make you clean again. And there is very often a huge component of shock at the magnitude of your downfall, as I myself can attest from my own two years on welfare -- an encounter with hitherto-unknown reality, the most politically eye-opening and infinitely embittering episode of my life.

Ironically, during my newspaper career I had written dozens of stories about welfare injustices, the frigid haughtiness of the welfare bureaucrats, and the plight of welfare recipients. I thought I knew most of what there was to know about the subject, but in truth I knew nothing at all. And what I learned after I became a welfare recipient transformed me entirely. I had been a presumably "lifelong" leftist-Democrat with a typically firm conviction that enlightened government could solve or at least ameliorate most if not all of humanity's problems. After two years on welfare, I became an outspoken and often angry skeptic, implacably hostile to the welfare bureaucracy and profoundly distrustful of government in general. The experience traumatically reshaped my political ideals from top to bottom. Today I try to avoid doctrinal labels, but the truth is I am mostly libertarian/conservative. Above all else -- perhaps as an instant defense against any impulse to backslide into leftist thinking -- I remain painfully aware of the U.S. welfare bureaucracy's malevolent penchant for perverting humanitarian intent into ideological empire-building.

Further investigation has merely renewed and reinforced my anger. For example, studying Statistical Abstract of the United States in 1995 for evidence to refute the conventional but false wisdom that out-of-control welfare costs were due to an exploding number of "welfare queens" ever more deftly defrauding the system, I discovered another kind of ripoff that -- had I still been working as an investigative reporter -- I would have labeled "the greatest welfare fraud of all time": From 1970 through 1990, the welfare bureaucracy had increased its own administrative costs by 5,390 percent (not a typo) even as it slashed the value of stipends and services to recipients by nearly two thirds. The administrative cost hikes of course included substantial salary increases and workforce expansions: there were "welfare queens" aplenty, but they were all members of the bureaucracy.

It was the sort of disclosure that would have made a fine Page One series, and via a computer-literate acquaintance -- my own computer initiation was then five years away -- I put the story out on the Internet at the height of the welfare-reform debate. I suppose I will never know whether it made any difference.

Beyond all that, at least for any American citizen accustomed to "liberty and the pursuit of happiness," the one sure constant of welfare is consciousness-wrenching disempowerment: utterly demoralizing, potentially a ticket to clinical depression and worse. Indeed, it is impossible for people who have not experienced the welfare bureaucracy's tight-lipped, glacial-eyed arrogance to even begin to imagine the anxieties evoked by being subject to such unchecked and ruthless authority. It is belittling beyond words, devastating beyond belief.

Even now I struggle for a properly telling analogy: of course I have never been a citizen of some newly conquered land -- at least not in this life -- but I did spend much of my childhood in the South, which was once indeed a conquered nation and retains many residual reflexes born of its time of subjugation. And I cannot but assume the shock of discovering the harsh reality of welfare is similar if not identical: one day you are a free man, theoretically your own master; the next day you are a non-person, a virtual prisoner, little more than a slave possessed by an especially hostile (and often deliberately sadistic) bureaucratic dominatrix. Any deviation from the bureaucracy's decrees -- any ''non-compliance'' -- and you are punished harshly. Any complaint -- again I am speaking from first-hand experience -- and you are punished far more harshly still. It is bad enough if you are a female, or a child of either gender who can be snatched from your parents merely by the whim of a clerk. But it is a thousand times worse if you are male, and a thousand times worse than that if you are a male who happens to be white as well.

From the moment you sign your application for assistance, the epicentral reality of your life is the fact the bureaucracy to which you are now subject is literally omnipotent. It has total authority over everything: your income, your job, whether you can change jobs, whether you can go to school, and all other such matters. The same bureaucracy, radical feminist from top to bottom, also controls the minutiae of your life -- even to the governance of who does the chores in your household -- all with an underlying "down-with-patriarchy" missionary zeal asserting the matrifascist hatred of American liberty, Western Civilization, the father-god, Judaeo-Christian religion in general, the traditional family, the male gender, and Caucasian males in particular.

Note again my own experience: during my years on welfare, 1987-1989, by far the most dreadful, miserable epoch of my life, I repeatedly encountered the frustrating humiliation of being obstructed at every turn by gender quotas. I was maliciously denied not only all my applications for help in returning to work (this after a demonstrably productive worklife of some 30 years), but I was denied too the very treatment I needed to recover from severe clinical depression, ironically the condition that had forced me onto welfare in the first place.

I also heard horror stories galore, all of them probably true or at least based on cores of fact. A typical anecdote recounted the declining fortunes of a family in which the male breadwinner had been disabled in an industrial accident and was denied workmen's compensation on one of the various technicalities that enable miserly employers (especially non-union employers) to escape liability. Did the welfare bureaucracy come to this man's rescue? No indeed: the bureaucrats decreed the man become a stay-at-home house-husband, missing leg and all, even as it forced his wife (who wanted nothing more than to remain a stay-at-home mother) into job training and eventually into the workplace. Forced? Absolutely: the bureaucracy would have seized the couple's children had she not complied with its edicts. Of course some time after that (as the welfare-office feminists all applauded with glee), the wife's "raised consciousness" led to a divorce in which she shed herself of the "patriarchal oppression" of caring for her crippled mate. And of the man? I know not. One version of the story has it he took his last remaining firearm and blew his own brains out.

But I do know for a fact that in the two unspeakably wretched years I was on welfare, disabled white male military veterans were routinely denied all vocational rehabilitation assistance, their applications repeatedly stonewalled until they withdrew in discouragement, while drug-addicted hookers with long rap sheets of crime and illegitimacy were granted admission to voc-rehab programs within 90 days, and sometimes even within 30 days. All a woman needed to do to get help was ask for it. There were even generous aid packages for women who were definitively middle class, many such offerings funded by the feminist bureaucracy's schemes for illegally (that is, in defiance of legislative intent) draining money from programs that served mostly males and -- by bookkeeping techniques so devious they would have made Meyer Lansky proud -- shifting these same dollars into programs for women only. Thus males -- even men wounded in Vietnam and suffering from the chronic sluggishness of the Veterans Administration in processing disability claims (another bureaucratic outrage) -- were routinely shoved aside. The welfare bureaucracy's most common tactic of delay and intimidation was repeatedly "lost" paperwork: it was used on me at least four times.

The same hatred-based gender-quotas applied specifically to Medicaid services. While the legislature had theoretically granted chiropractic care to everyone on Medicaid -- particularly individuals with documented back injuries (as I have had since a 1978 encounter with a drunken driver), in practice the bureaucracy rationed medical services in accordance with feminist doctrine, so that chiropractic, for example, was only granted to women. Ditto for dental care: no males need apply. But preventative, curative and even cosmetic dentistry was available to women under Medicaid, simply because the bureaucracy had deemed it "essential to women's self-esteem."

What I am about to relate next is even more revealing -- and every word of it is true, though the quotes, their voices hushed by the passage of time, are of course only approximations. Here is the story, a description of my most disturbing encounter with welfare-bureaucracy reality:

Sometime late in my dreary second year on the dole, I was summoned to the welfare office for bureaucratic interrogation: I no longer remember the specific issue -- it was after all nearly 20 years ago -- but I do recall that the questioning was provoked by the bureaucracy's careless loss of some information it deemed vital. Because poverty had forced me to live in the country far away from any town, because my automobile had died during my first year on welfare, compliance with the bureaucratic decree mandated a two-mile hike, next a two-hour journey of 30 miles on a rural bus than only ran Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and then another 25-minute ride on a city bus. My appointment was probably for 11 a.m., which would have left me something like an hour and a half to cope with the bureaucratic demands and maybe 30 more minutes to catch the city bus and ride it back to the connection with the cross-country bus for my return trip.

Of course the bureaucrats, feminists every one, were antagonistically indifferent to the imperatives of my schedule. An hour had passed and I had already apologetically complained that I feared their tardiness was going to make me miss my bus, but the bureaucrats told me to go back to my seat, shut my mouth and keep waiting -- and warned me that if I left to catch my bus, my stipends would be terminated forthwith. Obviously these bureaucrats couldn't be troubled to keep an appointment they themselves had scheduled; they had to take their coffee breaks and outdoor cigarette breaks and water-cooler time-outs, and of course their lunch-hours too, and in any case my needs didn't matter: I was one of the despised Pale Penis People, the sub-untermenschen of the wonderful world of welfare.

Eventually it was 1:30 p.m., which meant I had missed the connection for the return bus and would either have to sleep in a city park or try to hitchhike home in the late October dark -- the latter almost an impossibility when one is a scrufty-looking middle-aged man, in other words (and by all appearances) a hobo or a common bum. But it was rainy and cold and I had brought neither sleeping bag nor poncho nor tarp: hence returning home was really my only alternative. I could ride the bus some ways beyond the city limits, but I would almost certainly have to walk the remaining distance -- about 17 miles -- to the remodeled chicken-house my dogs and I called home.

The more I reflected on my circumstances, the more angry I became. But I dared not protest, lest the bureaucracy retaliate with a "computer error," a common form of punishment that deletes all your records, leaves you penniless, and (unless you have a very understanding landlord) makes you homeless as well.

This particular welfare office was like most establishments of its kind, arranged as if it were a small auditorium with a long windowed counter as the stage upon which its invariably tragic dramas played out. The prevailing colors were penitentiary yellow and insane-asylum green. Like every welfare office I have ever been in, it smelled vaguely of laundry hampers full of dirty clothing. Supplicants reported upon arrival to their official overseers at the various windows and then sat, waiting, in beige metal folding chairs. There were two sections of these chairs, the sections divided by a central isle about five feet wide and each section seating maybe 50 people.

When I had gotten there, at about 10:45 a.m., I had noted there were three other males and a total of only about a dozen people in the chairs and I had been both pleased and relieved, thinking this was a very good sign -- that (just as the bureaucrats had promised), I would be out of the welfare office in time to catch the return bus, which would get me home around 4 p.m.

Probably I had been picturing how my two dogs -- like all canines forever concerned about abandonment and banishment -- would be overjoyed when I returned. Both these dogs were big and black, the male dog half Rottweiler half Golden, the female dog Labrador and Newfoundland. I knew they would jump with delight, welcoming me back with wagging tails and sloppy kisses; I may have even smiled to myself as I thought about it. Such are the rare and tiny joys -- indeed the only joys -- of life enshackled by the welfare bureaucracy.

But now because of the bureaucracy's hostility to my gender and its consequent indifference to my circumstances, I was facing a hard slow hike in the nighttime rain along a serpentine roller-coaster of rural roads, and I could not even predict if I would arrive home before dawn the next day.

Time dragged on. Eventually it was approaching 3 p.m., more than four hours after I had entered the welfare office for my 11 a.m. appointment, and now there were at least 25 people waiting. The women who had been there when I arrived had all left, having presumably been interrogated and granted permission to depart, but the other three males were still waiting just as I was, and among them was a scrawny blond man of about 20, a pale-faced hollow-cheeked man who had the dead hair and grubby clothing of a street junky or a newly homeless person and the involuntary twitch and glinty stare of a hard-core speed freak. The man had caught my attention immediately because the whole time I was there he had been muttering, speaking to no one in particular, repeating over and over again that we were all of us the "wrong color." I should note here that everyone in the room was Caucasian, and now after the additional arrivals there were still only four males. We had all had pre-noon appointments, and it was mid-afternoon and we were all still waiting.

For some reason known only to himself the mutterer began to speak more loudly, and his comments became more provocatively racist. "It's all about race," he said. "That's why they won't do nothing here for us whites." He stood, now obviously addressing the entire room and emphasizing his remarks with vaguely spastic gestures. "It's all for the blacks. They're takin' everything. They're takin' the jobs, the schools, the trainin' programs, the welfare, everything. We're all doomed. You gotta understand. The whole white race is doomed."

Soon you could hear him in the entrance foyer beyond the waiting room, and it was obvious his oration was beginning to offend and perhaps even frighten some of the women who were hunched onto the hard metal chairs awaiting their turns to be interrogated at the windows. Yet the half-dozen or so welfare bureaucrats behind the counter did nothing, nothing at all, acting as if they were stone deaf to the blond man's ranting and blind to his increasing and ever more potentially dangerous agitation.

Finally, my idle mind prodded by some devil of perverse curiosity about what might happen, I decided to attempt a minor provocation. It was now 3:15 p.m. Four hours and 30 minutes of this Ku Klux babble was more than I could take. Perhaps I could reason the babbler to silence. Perhaps I might start a riot. I turned to the wanna-be Klansman and I said, not loudly, something to the effect of "man you got it all wrong. Look around you: there's no blacks here. It's not about race. The reason we've been here all day and we're still waiting? It's about gender. Gender-quotas and quota-mongering..."

The waiting room fell dead silent as the rank of normally undemonstrative bureaucrats behind the counter boiled into activity, a gallery of fat caricatures of sullen officialdom suddenly animated in their florescent-lighted frames, a coven of harpies shrieking and shouting and flapping their arms and pointing. A severely overweight supervisor buzzed open the electronically latched gate that separated her elitist preserve from the below-the-salt realm of supplicants, and she stomped toward me, dirty white sneakers yelping on the grimy beige linoleum floor, halting so close I could smell her: cloying flower-scented deodorant overpowered by female armpit sweat, cigarettes and cheap shampoo. "You!,"she snarled; "You shut up. I don't give a damn how many buses you've missed or how far you've got to walk, you shut your mouth. You EVER say anything like that again, you WILL go to jail. You got that? You understand?" She glared down at me, cheeks red with rage, gray eyes pitiless as winter skies, short straight mousy brown hair tumbling from where she had tucked it behind her unadorned ears.

"Yes ma'am," I said.

Interesting lesson, this. The welfare bureaucrats, radical feminists all, had no objection whatsoever to four and one-half hours of racist distortion. From their perspective, it was absolutely safe: this was after all a locale nearly devoid of blacks, a mostly white/Asian college town, with probably no blacks at all on welfare. So in that sense it was "harmless" for the bureaucrats to let the man rant on. But note how my nine seconds of political truth triggered instant threats of nightsticks, handcuffs and jail.

The blond man, by the way, never spoke again while I was within hearing. The bureaucracy saw me 40 minutes later, barked its intrusive questions, noted my answers and dismissed me. My welfare stipends would continue.

When I left the welfare office the day was dwindling toward dusk and the blond man was still waiting his turn. I caught the city bus to the town's transit center, waited for the bus that would take me as far beyond the city limits as I could get, then enjoyed a rare moment of good fortune: an acquaintance from my lost respectability saw me, offered me a ride and went well out of his way to drive me home despite his obvious embarrassment at my radically reduced circumstances.

Inside the door of my chicken-house-cum-cottage the dogs leapt and wiggled just as I had anticipated, the only truly dependable love in my entire world.

And such is life on welfare. My encounter with it occurred, as I said before, from 1987 through 1989. It was in Washington state: the Department of Social and Health Services, an agency I had written about many times, almost always adversarially, a decade earlier. But the name of the agency and even the name of the state is irrelevant. I have covered social issues in four states and in at least a dozen cities and counties and have talked with enough other people who have covered social issues elsewhere and also read enough of their work to know it is the same everywhere in the United States: the feminists infiltrated the welfare bureaucracy during the 1970s, and they used the Reagan Administration's welfare cutbacks in the 1980s as a cover for radically restructuring the entire welfare system "in accordance with feminist doctrine" -- i.e., to deny stipends and services to as many males as possible. Hence everywhere the gender quotas, everywhere the racial quotas, everywhere the vindictively arrogant bureaucrats with their private enemies-lists of white males or black males or Hispanic males or Native American males and everywhere the feminist agendas of viciousness. The dates are irrelevant too: the patterns of oppression I observed in the late 1980s are many times worse today.

Predictably so, I might add. The core principle of radical feminism's stance on welfare -- and radical feminism or matrifascism is the only feminism allowed in the welfare bureaucracy -- is that males should receive not one penny of stipends or services (not even veterans' benefits or Social Security) until such time as women have absolute economic parity.

This is the quintessential doctrine of the feminists who run the U.S. welfare system in any and all of its forms. Thus the expanded empowerment with which John Kerry wants to reward his matrifascist supporters -- the alleged boon John Kerry wants to "give" the electorate as a central part of an expanded health care system.

But surely it can't be as bad as I describe.

Oh no? Read the following, an excerpt from the eligibility regulations provided to all supplicants for DSHS stipends and services including Medicaid. It is clearly intended to belittle and intimidate. The mere tone is offensive:

8. If the proof that you give to us is questionable or confusing, we may:
a. Ask you to give us more proof, which may include providing a collateral statement. A "collateral statement" is from someone outside of your residence who knows your situation;
b. Schedule a visit to come to your home and verify your circumstances; or
c. Send an investigator from the Division of Fraud Investigations (DFI) to make an unannounced visit to your home to verify your circumstances. 9. By signing the application, eligibility review, or change of circumstances form, you give us permission to contact other people, agencies, or institutions.
10. If you do not give us all of the proof that we have asked for, we will determine if you are eligible based on the information that we already have. If we cannot determine that you are eligible based on this information, we will deny or stop your benefits.

In other words, there it is in black and white: once you are on welfare, the bureaucracy has the right to turn your life upside-down, to question your neighbors, to interrogate your children, to pry into every corner of your history. Your former privacy is violated to nonexistence. Your former expectation of being treated with respect is but a memory. Your children may be tracked for all their lives, exactly as if they were criminals on parole, an intrusion probably justified in the name of "evaluating the impact" of various experiments in "altering familial dynamics" or some other such feminist psychobabble. And your constitutional rights are effectively abolished. Item "c" above specifically repeals your Fourth Amendment right to due process. If you are a parent, and you attempt to exercise your Fifth Amendment protection against compulsory self-incrimination, your children can be taken from you. If your children refuse to testify, they can not only be institutionalized indefinitely but forcibly drugged as well. And heaven forbid you should attempt to exercise your Second Amendment right to retain the firearms you owned before you signed your welfare application: in many states, the welfare bureaucracy regards firearms ownership as especially damning evidence you are an unfit and (probably abusive) parent.

Thus the hidden implications of just this one aspect of Kerry's healthcare proposal: beneath it all, a massive scheme for radically expanding the number of traditional families subject to destruction by forcible feminist indoctrination; for dramatically increasing the oppressive grasp of what is already the most brazenly, viciously tyrannical bureaucracy in American history; for denying 21.6 million Americans the very rights Kerry so hypocritically pretends to defend by his denunciations of the Patriot Act.

I say this fully aware of the limitations and dangers of the health insurance business and capitalism in general. There is no Santa Claus in the marketplace, and the only Golden Rule you find there is that the rules are made by whomever has the most gold. But the marketplace at least offers the potential of freedom. And no privately held or stockholder-owned insurance company or even the most Enron-minded, market-manipulating consortium of insurors would ever dare launch such a direct attack on the rights and liberties of so many. It is one thing to deceive and defraud -- something at which far too many corporations are far too adept. It is quite another to attempt what this Kerry proposal attempts: the defacto enslavement of 21.6 million human beings -- enslavement from which there would be neither much likelihood of escape or any great hope of manumission.

Posted by Loren at October 19, 2004 03:04 AM