The Gettysburg Address: Reformulated as Health Reform Parody

August 2, 2011 – Here, in a parody of the Gettysburg Address, I anticipate the coming Civil War over health reform that will follow resolution of the Debt Crisis dispute as surely as dawn follows dark.

Twenty score and 97 days ago, our President and his party brought forth on this continent a new health plan, conceived in Washington, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and deserve equal health care although their representatives are spared and are more equal than others.

Now we are engaged in a Great Civil War, testing whether this nation’s health system so conceived and so dedicated can long endure its future cost. Now in Congress we are met on the battlefield of this Great War. It is altogether fitting and proper that we do this if we are to advance the causes of access, affordability, and quality for all our citizens.

We have come to dedicate our time and our debating skills to the effects and aftermath of that plan – its assumptions, financing, ripple effects of greater taxes, unforeseen consequences, economic dislocations and casualties, bankruptcies, subjugations, and exchanges of sovereign States; creation of the individual mandate, announced intentions of millions of small and large businesses to drop present employee coverage by 2014, introduction of universal managed competition, payment for compulsory comparative effectiveness but not for individual choice and personal judgment, imposition of physician fines for non-compliance, phasing out of private practice and fee-for-service medicine, scaling down of hospitals as the centerpiece of our health care universe, social engineering required to revamp one-sixth, soon to be one-fifth, of the economy of our great nation, and viability of a hybrid health system, half-private and half-free, and half-public and half-slave.

The world will long note, and long remember what we say here, but it cannot forget what we say here. It is for us, the living and future debtors, rather to be dedicated to the great task for the unfinished work so far ignobly advanced, that those who protested did not do so in vain – that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom – and that health care of the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.