John Couey finally died from his creeping anal cancer. I don’t know if Couey’s death was hideously painful, if he was screaming in agony to the very end, his face contorted by unimaginable suffering . . . I can only hope so. I’m a fan of cosmic justice.
By his own confession, at three in the morning of February 24th, 2005, forty-seven-year-old John Couey crept silently through the unlocked door of his neighbor’s home and into the bedroom of nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford, whom he awakened.
“Don’t yell or nothing,” he told the child. He told the sleepy girl to follow him out of the house. Couey led her to his trailer a hundred yards away.
In a videotaped deposition, John Couey admitted that he had raped Jessica in his bedroom and that he kept her in his bed until dawn, when he raped her again. Later, Couey put Jessica in a closet and went to work at Billy’s Truck Lot.
Couey kept Jessica captive for three days. When he was done with her, he tricked the child into getting into a plastic bag with the lie that he was going to “take her home.” After that, John Couey dug a hole and buried Jessica alive.
Jessica’s body was unearthed on March 19th, 2005 based on Couey’s confession. Jessica had poked two fingers through the plastic bag before suffocating to death.
The late John Couey had a prior history of sexual offenses.
As appalling as this story is, it is only one of thousands of gruesome true crime tales. Now imagine that after hearing one of these horrible accounts of sexual abuse you were also told that your tax dollars had been diverted to subsidize the crime. Here’s the nasty truth: for seven years our tax dollars subsidized prescriptions for Viagra and other erectile dysfunction medications for sex criminals on sex-offender watch lists. For seven years!
Somehow it makes sense that it all started with a letter from the Clinton administration back in 1998, which instructed governors of all fifty states that their Medicaid programs must provide all FDA-approved medications. The only exceptions were drugs for weight control, for cosmetic purposes or to increase fertility. So drugs to help childless couples could be excluded and drugs to lessen the dangers of obesity-related diseases could be excluded, but drugs to produce diamond-hard penile erections could not be excluded.
There were no exceptions or exclusions for the thousands of paroled sex offenders who had signed up for taxpayer-funded Medicaid benefits. Florida, for example, forked over $93,000 in four years to provide Viagra to 218 sex offenders. Amounts paid for other brands of similar drugs were undisclosed.
After seven years of neglect, while acting on a tip during a routine review, New York State Controller Alan Hevesi verified that 198 convicted Level 3 sex criminals had received Medicaid-sponsored Viagra during the previous five years. Level 3 offenders are convicted sexual predators whom the courts have determined are a continuing menace to public safety. Under Megan’s Law provisions, their photographs and addresses are in the public record. Mr. Hevesi speculated that there were probably thousands of Level 1 and 2 offenders who had received free Viagra or the Medicaid-approved Cialis and Levitra. The Viagra recipients had assaulted victims as old as 90 and as young as 2.
According to the Newark Star Ledger of May 27th, 2005:
“State prescription programs paid for Viagra or similar drugs for 55 of New Jersey’s most dangerous sex offenders over the last 18 months . . .”
And:
“The sex offenders who benefited from the drug coverage comprise more than a fourth of the 207 ‘Tier 3’ offenders in New Jersey – those who have been deemed by prosecutors and judges to pose the highest risk of committing another sex crime.”
A survey by New Jersey’s Department of Human Services and the Department of Health and Senior Services determined that 30 of the offenders obtained their prescriptions for penis hardeners through welfare; 22 through Medicaid or Family Care – state and federally funded programs for the poor – and 3 through the Pharmaceutical Assistance to the Aged and Disabled program. Call me crazy, but isn’t government-run “health care” supposed to enhance public health? The health-care bureaucrats were weaponizing demonstrated public enemies.
Following Hevesi’s revelation there was a show of concern from governors and lawmakers; the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services then dutifully informed states that they could henceforth deny penis hardeners to convicted sex criminals.
Until that moment, federal law had required Medicaid programs to cover all drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a point of law rammed home by that letter sent to the governors by the Clinton administration in 1998 – the same year Pfizer began to market the first penis stiffener, Viagra. Then came all the other “enhancement” potions. After that, the Law of Unintended Consequences did its thing. Nearly 800 convicted sex offenders in 14 states were reimbursed through Medicaid for Viagra, Cialis and Levitra. (Associated Press report, 5/28/05)
In Florida, the attorney general’s office estimated that of the registered sex offenders who received Viagra through Medicaid during the previous four years, 77% had been convicted of sex crimes against minor children. In Texas, at least two convicted sex criminals who were receiving Medicaid reimbursement for Viagra, committed yet more sex crimes.
It is in the very nature of the sex criminal to be devious and sly; far more sex crimes are committed than are ever detected. We may assume that many Level 1 and 2 sex offenders have secretly committed Level 3 sex crimes. They too were eligible for free “enhancement” drugs, courtesy of taxpayer-funded medical welfare programs. This went on for seven years before it caught the attention of a single bean-counting bureaucrat who raised an alarm. Well, hats off for Alan Hevesi, but it would have been far better if the potential for tragedy had been detected back in 1998.
The Menace of ObamaCare
Looming before us now is the threatening blob of ObamaCare – a cluttered rats’ warren of dictates so obscurely worded in dense lawyer-speak that it might as well be written in cuneiform on Babylonian clay tablets. To increase its opacity, its authors made it two thousand pages long – it’s incomprehensible.
If put into practice, the ObamaCare legislation would provoke ten thousand lawsuits. Barack Obama’s overseer of federal regulations, Cass Sunstein, has declared his belief that the interpretation of the black-letter texts of all federal regulations should be wrested away from federal judges and vested in the president and the president’s hand-picked lieutenants, which would make Obama and Sunstein the final arbiters of matters that would touch the most intimate aspects of our lives. The ObamaCare legislation is overbearing; it is invasive; it is consequential – almost certainly in ways that no one has foreseen. Not a single congressman has read it; it is a crude patchwork stitched together by collaborating congressional aides and well-oiled lobbyists.
If the Fable of Free Viagra for Rapists has a moral for us it is this: every road to a socialist Utopia takes a detour to the Landfill of Disenchantment. The control freak who lurks in the heart of every socialist utopian will spin the solution to even the most humble human need into a baroque clockwork of intricate regulations riddled with internal contradictions.
First the congressional socialist utopians in the House trotted out the Pelosi Plan, which was a witch’s stew of the Rangle Plan and the Waxman Plan and the Miller Plan. Then the Senate utopians wheeled in the Reid Plan – a gumbo brewed from the Harkin Plan and the Dodd Plan and the Baucus Plan that was later seasoned with the Lieberman Plan and the Nelson Plan and the Landrieu Plan and a generous sprinkling of other amendments.
The final goo was presented to Prince Obama. As a sign of respect, the congressional chefs dubbed it the Obama Plan. With enough votes to pass both houses of Congress it would become the law of the land.
The Massachusetts Miracle
In a special election, Massachusetts voters elected Republican Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate seat that had been occupied by one of the Kennedy clansmen since 1952. Brown’s vote could stop Congress from drowning our liberty in the witch’s cauldron of ObamaCare. Brown had campaigned on the promise that he would do just that, which is curious because Brown had voted for the passage of RomneyCare – the legislation that imposed a mandate to purchase insurance policies on the residents of Massachusetts. RomneyCare was the inspirational model for what became ObamaCare. Will Senator Brown keep his promise to vote against ObamaCare? Only time will tell.
On the morning following Brown’s election, the Wall Street Journal reported that
“House Democrats signaled their most feasible alternative after Republican Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts was to pass the Senate version of the bill and later put through additional modifications that require fewer votes to clear the Senate.”(WSJ, 1/20/10, p.A6)
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D., Md.) chimed in, “The Senate bill clearly is better than nothing.” Democrats had planned to merge the House and Senate bills and then seek approval for the hybrid bill in both chambers of Congress. With only 59 seats in the Senate, Democrats scrambled to have the House pass the bill approved by the Senate on December 24th.
For the president and the congressional Democrats, the failure to realize ObamaCare would leave them without a significant accomplishment to brag about, despite their muscular majorities in the House and Senate. No matter the blowback, some Democrats imagined that they would be weakened politically if they did nothing. In the words of Senator Ron Wyden (D., Ore.), “To just throw up your hands and say you’re going to walk away from health reform would be a significant mistake.”
House Democrats pondered the possibility of passing the Senate version, then adding House amendments later, with the Senate’s approval, which would require only 51 votes. That was the quickest route to getting the bill to Obama. “The Senate has passed the health care bill. The House has to make a decision how they want to proceed,” announced Senator Patty Murray (Wash.), a ranking Democrat.
An editorial in the Wall Street Journal informed us that
“Progressives of the world are demanding that the House stage a Pickett’s charge and pass the Senate’s Christmas Eve bill, as if it were all merely a matter of political will. They argue for ObamaCare as is, perhaps with sidecar amendments that address liberal objections . . .”
Over at the New York Times, Paul Krugman opened an article titled “Do The Right Thing” with these two paragraphs:
“A message to House Democrats: This is your moment of truth. You can do the right thing and pass the Senate health care bill. Or you can look for an easy way out, make excuses and fail the test of history.“Tuesday’s Republican victory in the Massachusetts special election means that Democrats can’t send a modified health care bill back to the Senate. That’s a shame because the bill that would have emerged from House-Senate negotiations would have been better than the bill the Senate has already passed. But the Senate bill is much, much better than nothing. And all that has to happen to make it law is for the House to pass the same bill, and send it to President Obama’s desk.”
The liberals want it all – the whole crazy clockwork of ObamaCare, no matter how severely it will infringe our liberties. To their credit, there is an internal logic to their insistence on nothing short of everything.
Here’s the logic: If Congress did no more than compel insurance companies to stop excluding people with frightening medical histories, then the whole system would start circling the drain in a downward “death spiral” of economic collapse because healthier Americans would remain free to forego the purchase of health insurance, which would elevate the cost of insurance for those who chose to remain in the risk pool – only it wouldn’t be a real risk pool anymore because it included so many people who were already diseased or very likely to become diseased. So it’s really a welfare system masquerading as a healthcare system.
To prevent this death spiral, Congress must dictate that every citizen purchase the insurance products of private insurance companies. Such a dictate is totally unconstitutional and therefore totally illegal; if Congress can compel us to purchase the products of private companies, then Congress can compel us to do anything; our liberty is lost.
Of course, once Congress has dictated that we must all purchase insurance packages, the taxpayers will be dunned to subsidize those folks who can’t afford the cost of their policies, which means tax increases for the rest of us.
So, by the logic of the liberals, nothing less than the entire creaking clockwork of ObamaCare will suffice; if even a single element is removed, then the rest of the drive train will stop.
Paul Krugman of the New York Times spurs the Democrats onward; he says that “Mr. Obama has conspicuously failed to rise to the occasion;” he says that “. . . members of Congress, who were sent to Washington to serve the public, don’t have the right to hide behind the president’s passivity.” He concludes: “Ladies and gentlemen [of Congress], the nation is waiting. Stop whining, and do what needs to be done.”
In other words, the end justifies the means; screw the Constitution of the United States; our socialist Utopia is within our grasp. If only our lawmakers would go rogue . . .
A Deer in the Headlights
After the regular folks of Massachusetts plopped a Republican into “the Ted Kennedy Senate seat,” a stunned and bewildered Barack Obama did his “what-the-hell-just-happened” interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in which he explained that no “scaled back” version of ObamaCare was possible because everything in ObamaCare is there to solve a problem created by some other aspect of the bill. “It turns out that a lot of these things are interconnected,” Obama conceded. When did he get a clue?
Recent polling demonstrates that only 39% of Americans approve of ObamaCare; only 13% believe that healthcare should be a legislative priority. In his Inaugural Address, Obama had declared that “there are some who question the scale of our ambitions – who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans.”
Yup. We call those people the adults. The adults of Massachusetts have expressed their educated opinion of Mr. Obama’s oversized ambitions.
What part of “You’ve been pimp slapped” doesn’t Barack Obama understand?
Thomas Clough
Copyright 2010
January 25, 2010