The Most Needed Victims of the RH Bill: Businessmen and Doctors

March 17, 2011
The RH bill supporters don't have a clue...
Our government planners know very well how to pass every intrusive, rights-violating political measure intended to allegedly serve the public.
Consider the curious case of the Reproductive Health bill, now euphemistically named Responsible Parenthood bill, concocted by some leftists and statists in Congress. Instead of talking of how they would provide public goods and welfare to the poor, these statist politicians prattle on about how their altruistic measure would help the poor, inferior women, and anyone who doesn’t have the mental or physical capability to improve his/her life on earth. In short, they talk about nice-to-hear terms and phrases like equality, social justice, freedom of choice (as if we don’t have freedom of choice in these parts), overpopulation, extreme poverty, social inequality, the tragic rate of unwanted pregnancies, the sorry fate of women, among many others.
These scheming, altruist-collectivist lawmakers won’t definitely run out of soothing words and political platitudes when it comes to fooling the people. This is how they sell fascist, mediocre laws. This is actually what most tyrants and despotic politicians did in the past. To sell socialism in Russia, Vladimir Lenin promised equality and fantastic socialist programs in order to get the support of the Russians. Mao Tse Tung promised the same measures, including quick progress through collective farming and his genocidal program ‘Great Leap Forward’, in order to con millions of unthinking Chinese. Our very own tyrant Ferdinand Marcos promised economic progress through his New Society and to defeat the Reds in order to keep himself in power. Barack Obama promised what he calls “change”, as well as redistribution of wealth and the gospel of “sacrifice”, in order to get the support of majority of American voters. In short, these statist politicians, who are all mass psychologists, know what they’re doing and talking about.
When Rep. Edcel Lagman, proponent of the RH bill, talked about “freedom of choice” and the “verifiable link between overpopulation and poverty”, he was simply out to sell his mediocre, fascistic legislative proposal in order to fool the unthinking Filipinos who are mostly schooled and professionals. Lagman’s political platitudes are a big insult to the entire Filipino nation that somehow embraced rational political ideals and principles. Is “freedom of choice” non-existent or not guaranteed by the current setup? Lagman is simply playing the hero, as he’s trying to make it appear that we badly need his political measure since all of us Filipinos are currently deprived of our “freedom of choice.” This “freedom of choice” is part of our human nature, thus there’s no need for any political measure to make it possible. Indeed, Lagman is either an idiot or dishonest. Perhaps he’s both.
When Lagman talks about the connection between overpopulation and poverty, it seems that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. What’s the context of his overpopulation? Is it local or global? In this blog post, I tackled about the fallacy of Lagman’s overpopulation-poverty connection.
I stated, to wit: “Global and domestic indicators show that the most touted and most abused word in this RH bill debate— “overpopulation”— is indeed a BIG myth. Scientific reports show that there is a foreseeable decline in global population in the next decades due to the fact that most countries are at or below the “replacement level of fertility” of 2.1. What then is the context of their “overpopulation” rhetoric? Is it local, global or both?”
In this blog post, let’s talk about the most needed victims of the RH bill. They are the businessmen or employers and doctors or health-care providers.
Why is it that for every social program, it is the successful, the competent, the rich, the able, the creators who are most likely to be sacrificed or immolated?
When some brilliant lawmakers in Congress proposed to tax texting, their number 1 victim are telecommunication companies. The new UP president proposed to increase corporate income tax and other taxes so to finance his academic vision for the greatest university in the Philippines. In the mind of this Marxist UP president, it’s better to tax corporations and rich individuals because they have more in life. An absurd think tank called Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS), in a published highly mediocre, unscientific, anti-economics study, recommended ‘tax financing’ as the only way to achieve the government’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG).
Why is this the psycho-epistemology of most of our statist politicians? The answer lies in the seldom-talked field of ethics. It is the altruist-collectivist morality that motivates our politicians, social planners and statist intellectuals.
Altruism does not simply mean kindness or benevolence toward others. In fact, altruism makes kindness, altruism and even charity impossible. It means selfless concern for the welfare and interest of others.  This type of man-sacrificing ethical system conceptualized by Auguste Compte, states that it is the moral duty or obligation of individuals to serve the good and welfare of others and put their interests above their own.”
The altruist-collectivist ethics that is the dominant morality of our self-sacrificing country and enshrined in the 1987 Constitution.  We as a nation accepted that it is the role of the government to be our nanny state- to be the provider of our daily needs- to be the benevolent ‘God’ that protects the poor, the meek, the weak from the strong, the dominant, the productive, the rich. We as a nation believe that the government, in performing its altruist-collectivist goals, must redistribute wealth, provide the needs (e.g., education, health care, transport, etc.) of the poor, the lazy, the weak, bar or limit the entry of productive economic actors not born in our land, deliver and guarantee the leftist mantra of ‘social justice’, ‘equality’ and ‘egalitarianism’, and make the state/government the ultimate source and distributor of wealth, of fiat rights (e.g., rights to education, health care, transport, subsidy, etc.), and all forms of public goods. For this reason, we, in 1987 and the years before, established a welfare-statist, altruist-collectivist, politically correct, semi-socialist, egalitarian Constitution that is the source of all political and economic evils in this semi-free country.
When it comes to the controversial RH bill issue, the top two victims are businessmen and doctors.
In Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, in the chapter, “Is Atlas Shrugging?” Ayn Rand, a Russian-born American philosopher, identified a nation’s persecuted minority- the businessmen, who would be the victims of the altruist-collectivist corruption.
“Businessmen—who provide us with the means of livelihood, with jobs, with labor-saving devices, with modern comforts, with an ever-rising standard of living—are the men most immediately and urgently needed by society. They have been the first victims, the hated, smeared, denounced, exploited scapegoats of the mystic-altruist-collectivist axis.
The second group of individuals, after businessmen, who would be the victims of the altruist-collectivist political measures are doctors. Ayn Rand further states:
Doctors come next; it is precisely because their services are so crucially important and so desperately needed that the doctors are now the targets of the altruists’ attack, on a worldwide scale.” [Emphasis added.]
It is very unfortunate that most people, in fact even most doctors, are unaware of the degree of oppression today’s health-care providers or clinicians work under. For instance, the RH bill proposes to control the entire industry and the medical profession. The bill seeks to put doctors in both public and private sector under the direct control of the Department of Health. Section 23 (Implementing Mechanisms) of the bill enumerates the power of the DOH and the local health units over the medical industry. The following phrase under Section 23 (h) tells the extent of the health department’s sweeping and vague power: “perform such other functions necessary to attain the purposes of this Act.” This general provisions means that the DOH may promulgate additional guidelines that could directly or indirectly impact the entire medical profession and industry so to achieve the purposes of the measure.
The ultimate goal of the fascist bill is to socialize both the business industry and the medical profession. Socialized medicine simply means medical services are paid with government funds, and, therefore, medical practices are controlled and regulated by the state.
In his article titled “Doctors And The Police State” published in The Objectivist Newsletter in 1962, Dr. Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand’s literary and intellectual heir, wrote the following eloquent statement:
“In a free society, a man cannot force his terms on others; those who dissent are free to deal elsewhere. A patient who disapproves of a doctor’s methods of treatment can seek out another doctor; a doctor who considers a patient’s demands irrational is not compelled to give in to them. And, in the long run, it is the best and ablest doctors—those who achieve the cures and demonstrate their value—that rise to the top and set the example for the rest of the profession.
“But when the government sets the terms, they are enforced by the police power of the State. The standards of the government become the laws of the country, and no others are legally permitted. Should any doctor object to the decrees of the officials who staff the State Health Board—should he attempt to act on his own best judgment and make an unauthorized use of the drugs, the hospital beds, the operating rooms being paid for by the State—he becomes thereby a criminal, and he is legally subject to retribution: to loss of license, or fine, or jail-sentence. There is no one to whom he can turn: the government is his sole employer. He either submits—or he leaves medicine—or he escapes from the country.
The proposal to pay medical expenses with State funds has only one meaning: it is a proposal to enslave the doctors.” [Emphasis added.]
We have to oppose this bill at all cost before it’s too late!