Welcome To ACORN General Hospital

American Thinker ^ | December 15, 2008 | Carol Peracchio

[neverdem]

I've been a registered nurse for 30 years, so the future of American health care is one of my greatest concerns. Now that Mr. Obama has won the election, I decided to investigate what may be facing patients and health care workers.

I started my research at Barack Obama's website and his Plan for a Healthy America. What a waste of time.  It read like a treatise from a beauty pageant contestant.

What kind of medical expertise does Barack have? Remember this youtube  where his teleprompter malfunctioned?  He stumbled through an excruciatingly inept explanation of how health care costs can be lowered if kids with asthma could just be provided "breathalyzers," or "inhalators" instead of cluttering up emergency rooms.

This brilliant (as we're told ad nauseam) Ivy League lawyer-savant wants to run our health care but apparently is ignorant of the word inhaler. (There must have been more than one nurse in that crowd shaking her head and thinking, "Great. Another dunce.")

Certainly Obama is not the first politician who clumsily attempts to feign a molecule of medical knowledge in order to sway voters who know even less. Obviously, he is not capable of writing (or possibly even reading) any health care legislation. I decided I'd need to find out the views of his advisors. Since his wife Michelle had actually worked for a hospital, I began with her.

Let's start with her resume.  Michelle came to the University of Chicago Medical Center from The University of Chicago, where she ran something called the University of Chicago Community Service Center:

which offered new opportunities to student, staff, and faculty for service learning, volunteerism and civic engagement. This was a first step for the University to engage students in community service activities.

Looks like Community Organizing was an Obama family affair!

In 2002 Michelle was recruited by the Medical Center, where she first was hired as the Executive Director of Community Affairs. After three years, she was promoted to Vice President for Community and External Relations and her salary was tripled to over $300,000.00 a year.  It is entirely coincidental, we are assured, that her husband was elected to the US Senate the year of her promotion.

When she was promoted, Michelle said:

My goal in this position is to continue to broaden the Hospitals' relationships with our neighborhood and with our city. We have an obligation to ensure that we use our resources on behalf of our neighborhood and our city. In this new role, my goal is to better integrate community engagement into the culture of this institution and to expand our partnerships with local organizations and institutions.

Nowhere in this mishmash of goalspeak is there any hint of taking care of sick people.  It looks like Michelle's view is that the hospital has "an obligation to ensure we use our resources on behalf of our neighborhood and our city."  Community organizing meets health care.

And what did Michelle accomplish as a hospital Vice President? According to her resume:

She grew a staff of two into a diverse, 23-person team that carries out a threefold mission of improving community-based health care, increasing business opportunity of South Side businesses and enhancing the Medical Center's considerable service to the surrounding community.

So her first accomplishment was increasing the size of her own department eleven-fold! Forget the use of the word "diverse". The sheer amount of expenditure involved in a 23 person department with a Director earning over 300K is breathtaking! I can just imagine the response to clinical department heads submitting budget requests in the Era of Michelle: "Sorry, there's no money for (write your request here). Vice Presidents married to US Senators don't come cheap!"

Michelle declared she had a threefold mission for her position at the hospital. First, "improving community-based health care." At least this claim involves health care.  However, I doubt it took a very expensive Senator's wife to do it. I've known social workers who accomplish this every day with much less support and no fanfare.

Her second mission was "increasing business opportunity of South Side businesses."

Increasing business opportunity? Call me crazy, but for 30 years I've been under the impression that hospitals exist to take care of sick people. The patient comes first! (At least that's what they always told us during those interminable new employee orientation days.) Sometimes the hospital hires area businesses in order to improve the delivery of care. But the businesses aren't the focus. The patient is.

Next, Michelle enhanced "the Medical Center's considerable service to the surrounding community." So how did Michelle enhance the hospital's community service? Here's a partial list from her resume:

Service Learning Initiatives, Day of Service and Reflection, Adopt-A-School programs, Principal for a Day and Real Men Cook celebrations.

Sounds like a $300,000.00 agenda to me! Seriously, most of these "accomplishments" sound exactly like the Eagle Scout projects completed by my son's Boy Scout Troop!  The difference being my son and his friends didn't charge the local hospital.

For all the glowing praise heaped upon Michelle for her External Relations work, I can see that she did seem to have one problem. Her day of Service and Reflection drew less than 300 volunteers. (I'm sure that's including the diverse staff of 23). Out of a workforce of 9,500 Medical Center employees, this is a dismal turnout.

But it's predictable when a country has a free market health care system. It works like this: The nurse goes to the hospital that hires her for, let's say, 1/6^th the pay of an External Relations Director. The nurse agrees to practice nursing for 40 hours a week, more if the floor is short-staffed.  At the end of her 8 or 12-hour day the nurse goes home.

The last thing 9,200 Medical Center employees want to do after a tough week is to spend a day "reflecting" with Michelle and her diverse staff. And because, at the moment, the nurse works for the hospital and not for Barack's federal government, she has the freedom to say "No thanks."

But this free market setup was all wrong for Michelle's goal: to mine the rich resources of money and hospital personnel for the necessary work of community organizing. The money wasn't too difficult -- just divert those resources that have been set aside for raises, or equipment, or education. Then tell the staff how broke the hospital is because "reimbursements aren't keeping up with expenditures."

The problem is that health care workers aren't college students. Forced "service learning hours" aren't part of the job description, and if one hospital tells me that taking part in Michelle's "Adopt-A-School" program is part of my contract, I'll head over to the hospital down the road.  And I'll deck the first limousine liberal who tells me that health care workers need to be forced to help their communities.

Drop by any health fair, Relay for Life, blood drive, or free clinic. All staffed by volunteers, many of them health care workers. Think back to 9/11. I knew of so many nurses, paramedics, and other health professionals who jumped in their cars and just drove to New York and DC to serve. 

But try to imagine health care in the world of Obama. All of us will be enlisted in the Community Service army, where patient care is merely ancillary to your job. Now we will leave work to go staff the after school program at the new community center. Next weekend it's over to the mall where we will work the voter registration table. It's all part of "enhancing the hospital service to the community."  Because in Barack and Michelle's world, there's no individual patient.  Only a vast, nebulous "community."  Welcome to ACORN General.

[DieHard the Hunter]

Bookmarked. God bless all nurses!

[skr]

Health care workers already serve the community by doing their jobs and sometimes at great personal risk. Anything else they want to do is up to them.

[RC one]

Carty Finkbeiner is the Democratic Mayor of Toledo, Ohio (and a moron). His wife had a position created for her by the Medical College of Ohio (a hospital) that amounts to about the same thing as Michelle’s BS position. Needless to say, she comes with all sorts of baggage and is a general PIA.

[Darkwolf377]

Yes, but Obama wants to CHANGE THE SYSTEM--and that's all his supporters want when you talk to them, too.

No ideas, just the child-like desire to make THE SYSTEM different.

[Nateman]

Great article, slices through all the double think mumbo jumbo with a chainsaw revealing the beating looter heart in the center of it all.

[DieHard the Hunter]

> Great article, slices through all the double think mumbo jumbo with a chainsaw revealing the beating looter heart in the center of it all.

Most nurses I’ve met are matter-of-fact. Quite a few of them are friendly and pleasant, too: but they’re matter-of-fact and have no time for BS. I guess changing bedpans and wheeling around ill patients all day knocks any gas out of them after a while, an makes them very practical.

This article was obviously written by a nurse: cuts right to the point and nails it beautifully.

God bless all nurses!

[DiogenesLaertius]

Indeed. Obama’s plan is a series of mandates. Expect shortages and long wait-times as well as a decrease in innovation. In the short run it will increase coverage. In the long run, it will decrease the quality of healthcare for everyone, like every other socialized health plan.

We need to increase the supply of primary care doctors as well as find ways to decrease the cost of medical care for the elderly quickly if our healthcare is to improve as a whole.

McCain’s plan was a smart plan that had a lot of cost-containment measures in it. Too bad he was a doofus that could never adequately explain it.

[Eye of Unk]

Michelle wants from what I hear a $100,000 salary just by being the First Lady, I have never in my life heard of any Presidents wife getting paid, I cannot say that that it did not have perks but I am constantly appalled at the enormous issue that the Obama clan is out to pillage the office of President of the United States.

[DieHard the Hunter]

> Michelle wants from what I hear a $100,000 salary just by being the First Lady

I have no problem with that, providing they deduct it from the President’s stipend.

Paying Michelle an additional $100,000 would be a case of double-dipping.

[MissDairyGoodnessVT]

With this salary she can also buy those $600.00 ipair of earrings she likes,too.She won’t have to wait for her gubmint rebate check,’cause she don’need it girl,she upgraded

[stocksthatgoup]

All Health care workers will be unionized!

[Lilith Incubus]

*sigh*

That's the problem with the new socialist dictators, they just know, deep inside their own heads, that they are so much more important than all those minions that do productive work, we need their enlightened guidance in order to survive, so we must pay the exorbitant salaries, after all, where would we be without their superior intellectual input?

[Loud Mime]

This was an article worth reading; as you mentioned, it was direct and efficiently worded.....it was a nurse addressing a problem.

I get the feeling that the FBI is going to be very busy for the next four years.

[freeangel]

saving

[livius]

Excellent observations by a medical insider. Michelle Obama creeps me out and reminds me of the director of an adult literacy program I once worked in. Instead of actually teaching people how to read, we were supposed to help them “reflect on black consciousness” and create solidarity, whatever that was. Most of the people who had come to the program were black, but they had absolutely no interest in the consciousness-raising meetings to which they were subjected. One of them complained to me, just before dropping out of the program, that what he had really come there for was to learn how to read.

But that was not even on the agenda on this publicly funded program, which specialized mostly in trying to get the white volunteers and the few non-black participants in the program to make public apologies for being white and get the black participants to “express their rage.”

All of these programs, whether in education or health care, become nothing but Marxist social manipulation programs that use the words health or education to lure people in and mask their real goals. I think Michelle is even more Marxist and white-hating than her husband, and aside from that, she’s dumber but equally power-hungry. A dangerous combination.

[jazzlite]

...”Great article, slices through all the double think mumbo jumbo with a chainsaw revealing the beating looter heart in the center of it all”...

Looks like those big bucks now being used to heal people in the finest health care system in the world will soon be siphoned off into the pockets of politicians and their corrupt interests. Only a real national disaster can derail this awful train because like the story of the frog being boiled in small increments without realizing the terminal predicament he was in, Americans will not act as long as they lose freedom a little bit at a time, thinking the government is doing something for them. My husband made this comment to me only yesterday..”The government is bankrupt, both figuratively and literally, and when that becomes obvious, I just do not know what will happen.”

[JavaJumpy]

Beautiful article - thank you for posting it.

[rawcatslyentist]

"Obama’s plan is a series of mandates. Expect shortages and long wait-times as well as a decrease in innovation."

But on the bright side MeesHELL will get a bigger raise!

[Bluebird Singing]

“Day of Service and Reflection”

+

“Looks like those big bucks now being used to heal people in the finest health care system in the world will soon be siphoned off into the pockets of politicians and their corrupt interests.”

= Obama is going to require us to work (Michelle’s words) Any shortage of funds for healthcare workers will be replaced with their “voluntary” service under this team’s “reform”. Nurses around the country, who I think overwhelmingly voted for Obama, are going to have a rude awakening.