Stand Still, Little Lambs
The Medical Care Mess
and Other Economic Dislocations
by Jeremy Miller
and
Kevin Alfred Strom
Free Speech, August 1996
Volume II, Number 8
This article was adapted from an essay entitled "Stand Still, Little
Lambs, and Prepare to Be Shorn." The author, Jeremy Miller, also wrote
"The New Slavery," which was serialized by
American Dissident
Voices and
Free Speech earlier this year. Mr.
Miller is a graduate student in economics who has worked at high levels
in major U.S. corporations. He has devoted much of his energies in
recent years to public education regarding the destructive effects of
so-called "equal employment opportunity" on our economy and society.
Question: Why do you have to pay $8.00 for a wooden tongue depressor?
WHAT???
Here's why.
Let us begin with a brief quiz.
You will be asked to compare Situation 1 with Situation 2.
Situation 1: Group A, consisting of 100,000 individuals, visits the
doctor for a certain medical procedure, and each person pays his own
bill.
Situation 2: Group A and Group B, each consisting of 100,000
individuals, visit the doctor for the same medical procedure as in
Situation 1. However, in Situation 2 you have persons in Group A paying
not only their own bills, but also picking up the tab for the members of
Group B as well.
Now for the question: How much more will the members of Group A in
Situation 2 pay for their procedures?
Will they pay double the amount that they pay in Situation 1?
The answer is:
No!
The amount paid by Group A in
Situation 2 will be significantly more than double
that of Situation 1. In Situation 2 you have 200,000 individuals
visiting the doctor, and this is a clear case of "higher demand"
relative to Situation 1 in which there are only 100,000 doctor visits.
Simple supply and demand analysis tells you that higher demand results
in higher prices. So in Situation 2, Group A members are harming their
own interests by picking up the tab for Group B members because when a
member of Group A visits his doctor, he will have to face higher prices.
Isn't Situation 2 similar to what we see in the United States, with
White people picking up the tab for the underclass's medical treatment?
Actually, the reality of what goes on is much worse than Situation 2:
The medical procedures demanded by the underclass are not quite the same
as those needed by traditional Americans; and the per capita demand for
services on the part of the underclass is out of proportion relative to
their numbers.
For example, you will see many more gunshot wounds among the underclass.
Each case can cost $200,000 or even more!
As another example consider maternity cases. These are likewise very
expensive. The underclass is reproducing at a rate nine times greater
than the American portion of the population, and we are picking up the
tab for this reproduction. When White couples consider the inflated
price tag of a new delivery some decide that they cannot afford it,
thus contributing to a lower White birth rate and even the ultimate
extinction of the race.
One more example is lung cancer. Smoking is more prevalent among the
underclass, so they will be overrepresented in lung cancer cases. So
when a White American faces cancer treatment the price is sky-high, due
in part to the treatment demanded and given to the alien races we
subsidize.
Now consider AIDS, and the disproportional number of non-White AIDS
victims in the United States. Consider also the fact that even most
White victims of this plague are part of a self-selected, coddled, and
subsidized minority. Need I say more?
There are other factors which add even more upward pressure to the price
of medical treatment. One of the greatest evils is the nature of the
administration of medical insurance -- whether public or private.
Let me digress here. When you dent the fender of your car and you take
it to the body shop the first question you will hear is: Are you insured
or not? This is because the body shop operator is going to quote one
price if you are insured and another price if you are not. The body shop
operator knows that he can easily inflate the price if you are insured
because you will not care since someone else will be paying the bill,
with that someone else (the insurance company) being so far removed from
the situation that it finds it easier to pay the bill than to haggle.
You will find the very same thing happening in the medical profession.
The first question you will be asked is: Are you insured? Don't kid
yourself. Bill-padding is extremely prevalent in the medical profession,
and it contributes to extreme upward pressure on medical prices for the
insured and uninsured alike -- with Medicare and Medicaid being as much
to blame as private insurance companies.
What you will also see when someone else is picking up the tab for
medical services are indiscriminate visits to the doctor for the most
trivial of cases. People go running to the doctor for the smallest
splinter or hangnail -- visits for which they would never be willing to
pay themselves, thus raising overall demand for medical services and
hence raising prices. The ramification of this is that many doctors find
they can earn big bucks for the easiest of work.
This writer lives in an area which is rapidly going Third World. The
prevailing price here for first-time doctors' visits ranges from $200 to
$300 plus extras.
Why should a doctor bother with brain surgery or trauma burns when he
can earn $800 per hour pulling out splinters? This means that brain
surgery and burn treatment will be left to a dwindling minority of
doctors who will charge astronomical prices as their supply dwindles.
Too frequently doctors are providing substandard treatment to patients,
and they take the attitude that the patient has no right to complain
because, after all, the patient got the services free! (That's not
really true, of course. Someone else is paying the bill.) Then these
doctors simply advise the patient to go elsewhere for further treatment,
and the patient rarely protests because he knows that his bills will be
paid until his condition goes away.
So now we see patients visiting two, three, four, or more doctors before
they receive the proper treatment or the proper diagnosis. This likewise
contributes to higher demand for medical services, and again higher
demand results in higher price pressures.
Equal employment opportunity's ruination of jobs and wages at lower
levels has caused an upward invasion of people into higher professions.
In other words, people will run to whatever profession still enables
them to eat. When people are strictly motivated by financial gain to
enter the medical profession, then you will see many marginal performers
among the bunch, and as a further consequence malpractice will rise, and
so will malpractice insurance rates.
These higher rates will be spread out among all medical practitioners,
who will just pass the higher costs on to their customers: that is, to
the patients in the form of higher medical bills.
At this point you may think that the only salvation from all this is
personal medical insurance. However, this is not quite right.
First of all medical insurance can cost several thousand dollars per
year, and this expense applies even if you are lucky enough to never use
your medical insurance. If you think your employer should provide you
with group insurance, the cost of this will just be deducted from the
gross pay that you would have been making in the absence of this
benefit.
Anyway, efforts at cost containment are being made, with the pendulum
swinging to the opposite extreme to some extent.
Some insurance companies, in a desperate effort to rein in escalating
medical costs, are now indiscriminately disallowing certain expenditures
instead of indiscriminately approving them.
Similarly, HMO's are cutting allowed treatment to the bone, but these
actions are hardly a solution and hardly in the best interests of
patient care.
Enter the government! Bill and Hillary wanted, and pending re-election
probably still want to institute a national health care system which
will bring virtually everyone under its umbrella of protection.
But wait a minute! Didn't we already establish that guarantees of
medical care to the underclass or anyone who wants it is a great evil
which sends everyone running to the doctor, thereby raising demand
drastically, and thus raising prices dramatically? Not to worry, says
the administration. The government will impose medical price
restrictions which will prevent the projected rise of prices. But wait
another minute! Didn't Richard Nixon clearly demonstrate that government
price controls were a total disaster?
Let me tell you what I predict will result from governmental price
controls in the field of medicine. You will see the emergence of a
two-tiered market for medical services. The first tier will be the
legitimate, above-ground market in which you have the price controls and
in which you will see severe shortages of available services and
supplies. Long waiting lists will develop. As a result a second tier
will appear, an underground black market in which it will be possible to
immediately obtain the desired high quality services just as long as the
going rate (that is, the exorbitant rate) is paid. You are already
seeing something akin to this under Canada's governmental system of
health care.
Instead of resorting to a black market, Canadians are bypassing the long
lines in their own system of so-called "free" medicine and crossing the
border to obtain desired services at the going rate in the United
States.
Conclusions: If Whites in America subscribe to the equalitarian tenet
of picking up the tab to provide the underclass with health care
services in any given market, then White America may very well find
itself going broke trying to keep the remarkably ungrateful dark ones
healthy, while at the same time unable to afford to keep its own
families well. This is exactly what we are seeing in the field of health
care today.
It is interesting to note that the daily in-patient rate in a municipal
hospital near here, which caters to an increasingly Third World
population, is $1,450, but if you can't afford it, you don't have to
pay!
The socialistic idea of guaranteeing everyone a certain standard of
living -- or level of medical services in the immediate case --
regardless of the worth that person is ascribed in the free market is a
faulty one indeed, and it has failed miserably wherever its
implementation was attempted. The idea is bad enough when it is
attempted within a relatively homogeneous and advanced White society.
When it is applied to the boiling pot of multiracial America the result
is corruption, theft, and ultimately destruction and collapse of what
used to be the finest health care establishment in the world.
If the government makes an attempt to provide certain services which an
individual could not afford on free market determined wages, then the
government is giving that individual an incentive not to work and not to
save, and this is another fatal bug in the system. Even the concept of
insurance is a little socialistic. But remember that the rational men in
charge of insurance companies would never voluntarily assume the risks
of covering the subhuman behavior and chronic inability to pay common
among the underclass. Equalitarian laws demanding coverage for those who
can't pay their way and who engage in animalistic, unhealthy behavior
are going to destroy the system to the extent that decent, hard-working
people will lose out completely. We are heading in that direction very
quickly.
A further thought: As the underclass expands, average intelligence of
the population decreases, as does the understanding of what constitutes
quality health care. If the patient population becomes more dumbly
complacent about the level of service it receives from the medical
establishment, then what is supplied will be adjusted accordingly to
meet that which is demanded. To put it a little differently, as the
minority becomes the majority, the treatment provided to everyone becomes geared to the lower expectations of those who
receive the most treatment. The bottom line is lower standards!
It looks as though sometime soon we may have to return to the system as
it was in the days of Dr. Dan, when everyone managed his own health care
decisions according to what he could afford, and if he couldn't afford
it, he pulled his own teeth and set his own broken bones.
And if you still think that the politicians will pull a rabbit out of
the hat and make everything okay again, then all I can say to you is:
Stand still, little lambs, and prepare to be shorn.
Upward Invasion of the Professions
With equal employment opportunity's downward wage equalizing effect
suppressing wages to the value of the least preferred job candidate
within each job category you have a situation where workers will
perceive a powerful incentive to upgrade their skills and invade higher
professions to recoup their losses in purchasing power.
The ramification of the above is that you will start to see situations
of oversupply of labor in certain higher job categories, thereby driving
down the compensation levels of those job categories. With the exodus of
the best and the brightest from each lower profession, you will see
average capability levels in all professions decline. You will start to
see an economy without substance, because it is in the lower professions
where much bottom-line productive work is done. You will have a society
approaching the "all chiefs and no Indians" anti-ideal. You will see
over-emphasis on education to the point where a mere college degree
becomes virtually worthless. Only a "brand name" degree (e.g. Harvard,
Princeton, Yale, etc.) will count for something, thereby increasing
demand for "brand name" degrees and sending their prices through the
roof -- while wages still continue to head south. Eventually holders of
even "brand name" degrees will face a job market with declining,
downwardly-equalized wages.
Aren't we seeing all of the above in the United States labor market?
For example, consider medicine and law. Because job and wage
opportunities are being extinguished elsewhere in the economy,
applications to medical and law schools are up even though compensation
levels in medicine and law are going down.
For you computer people out there, consider Web page design. Companies
are frantic to develop Web pages, but not just because they are fans of
state-of-the-art technology. Far from it.
What they are eager to do, above all else, is the ultimate downward
equalization of their customer service representatives by eliminating
them and getting their customers to do their own data entry on a Web
page. What will become of the displaced customer service reps? They
might go to a two-bit commercial school on a government grant and study
Web page design and invade that job category thereby creating an
oversupply of labor in it. Just look at all the promotion on TV for
people to upgrade their computer skills -- promotion that is chock-full
of fallacies.
The socioeconomic hierarchy is like an organization chart, which is in
turn like a triangle -- wide at the bottom and narrowing at the tip.
What you have now is a rush of persons from the wide bottom squeezing,
shoving, viciously vying, and undercutting each other in order to secure
a position near the narrowing tip. The low paid jobs in the wide bottom
(where wages are still being depreciated due to EEO) go begging.
What is the response of the world manipulators to this state of affairs?
They go running to the government to open the floodgate to immigration
to fill those jobs at wages below the poverty line (at least by U.S.
standards). The dumbest student of high school economics knows that the
worst thing to do is to allow immigration when there are declining wages
in a country. After the immigrants have become established the best and
brightest of the second generation feel the pinch of downward wage
equalization, and they too go on an upward invasion into prestigious
universities and professions!
Let us take one last look at the racial angle to the economic morass we
are sinking into: From the analysis of downwardly equalized wages we see
that labor buyers will not pay White wages to lesser preferred job
candidates (at least not for long). Well, what about sellers of products
or services?
If a seller is required to charge equal prices to preferred and
non-preferred buyers alike, will we see:
- Landlords charging White rents to Blacks, or will they charge Black
rents to Whites?
- Doctors charging White rates to Blacks, or will they charge Black
rates to Whites?
- Hotel owners charging White room rates to Blacks, or will they
charge Black room rates to Whites?
- Theme park operators charging White admission fees to Blacks, or
will they charge Black admission fees to Whites?
Sellers will almost always raise prices to reflect the higher costs of
doing business with non-preferred buyers.
When we cannot make free choices, when we are forced by law to treat the
unequal equally, then there is a terrible price in wealth and freedom to
be paid -- a terrible price that cannot be hidden much longer. It is not
exaggeration to say that it is making our society dysfunctional.
The high-tech American economy and booming stock market may seem, in
some ways, to contradict the picture I have painted. But remember, there
is a lot of momentum built up from the days of freedom and of White
America. The American economy and equity markets are like the ocean with
the crests of the waves getting higher and higher. But if you look
closely, the tide is going out, and as the inevitable forces of Natural
Law wreak their vengeance on those foolish enough to disregard them, the
undertow is pulling us down, down, down.
.
