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. .

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