February 22, 2015

Katy Sorenson

Good Government Initiative – Box 248254

University of Miami

Coral Gables, FL 33124-6625

RE: Your fatal “tell” in your unlinkable mini Op-Ed I today’s Miami Herald.

Ms. Sorenson,

A “tell” in poker is what the player across the table is always looking for. A tic, a twitch, a scratch, an eyebrow, a sigh…the list is endless. Among some of the universal rules of poker is that you never get rich trying to fill inside straights and bet the way your opponent “tells” you.

Your “tell” this morning was in your choice of words. You say, with no hint of sarcasm, that “a single-payer [health] care system would be closer to perfection….” And, yes, the italics are mine.

Modern American Liberals, people who believe in the efficacy of Midnight Basketball, people who believe that, yes, you can tax your way to prosperity, people who became tumescent when Barack the Good said he would “cool the earth and calm the seas”, believe, deeply and absolutely, in the perfectibility of man. Further, they believe that if enough people of good intentions and good will want it to happen Sisyphus will get that Goddamn rock up the hill and KIng Canute will yet prove his fiefs right.

Orwell reminds us that “the solid world exists. Its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet”

Perhaps you were enjoying some of Justice Ginzberg’s amber restoratives, perhaps not, and speaking of modern American Liberals can you imagine the keening caterwauling if Justice Thomas had said that he was half in the bag, but you chose to ignore the evidence of your own eyes in re “single-payer system[s] would be closer to perfection”. 

If that is so why did the Premier of the Province of Nova Scotia, a proud part of single-payer champion Canada, go to Chicago, the Baghdad of America, to have some valve work done on his heart?

When my daughter was training at Baylor University Hospital in Dallas she told me there was a wing dedicated to wealthy émigrés from single pay countries. In Broward County hospitals bi-lingual people – Spanish/English -  with finance backgrounds are highly paid as recruiters of Latin American patients who, despite being from single-payer countries, come here and pay up front for even the most routine procedures.

Let me bring Orwell back into the conversation. I’ll paraphrase him.

“All patients are equal. Some patients are more equal than others”

I am conducting a poll of modern American Liberals who believe that the economy is the root cause of terrorism.

Do you think if FDR had been able to get his New Deal programs into Germany in the 1930s that Hitler would have gone back to being a house painter? Do you think if the blond haired, blue-eyed youth, the kind that were featured in “Cabaret” had been offered the all the goodies from the NRA, from the WPA, from the CCC that they would have been incapable of invading Poland and, further, would have found it impossible, despite their devotion to mass transit, to build the high speed express to Auschwitz?

Kevin Smith

PS - The President said “Religions don’t kill people. People kill people.” Is that the same as “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” Please explain the difference.