Diversity care

The Discriminations blog notes that "HR3200, the health care reform bill introduced in the House, provides, in two places, for the 'COORDINATION OF DIVERSITY AND CULTURAL COMPETENCY PROGRAMS.' It provides 'CULTURAL AND LINGUISTIC COMPETENCY TRAINING FOR HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONALS.'

"A culturally competent workforce, of course, must be a diverse workforce, and so 'NURSING WORKFORCE DIVERSITY GRANTS' are also generously provided." (Subtitle D, Part 1, sections 2242 and 2243, if you're interested.)

Surprised? Did you really imagine this bid for the government to take over health care would be all about health care? Aside from being primarily in aid of making the population dependent on an army of federal desk surgeons, HR 3200 inevitably gets in a few more licks for social engineering. Who cares if you have an M.D. from Harvard Med School and have worked 16 hours a day for weeks at a time during your residency — first things first: Do you have cultural competency? Your Spanish we can take for granted, but how are your Swahili lessons coming along?

Just scrolling through the titles, subtitles, and sections of HR 3200 is an invitation to attention deficit disorder, but don't worry, you'll be covered for that, too, once you are approved (generally within five months of acceptance on the waiting list) thanks to the generous contributions of generations yet unborn and confiscation from today's middle class wage earners.

No one with a claim on sanity would devote a sizable chunk of his lifespan to reading HR 32o0 in its entirety. But do try a sample. Subtitle B, sec. 3121, for instance, on "National Prevention and Wellness Strategy." I copied and pasted the section and asked the computer to do a word count. That single section is 3,036 words. Ten double-spaced pages.

I suspect only God knows what the entire bill contains. It would not surprise me in the least if one of the countless drones who drafted bits of HR 3200 accidentally dropped his résumé in, and it is discovered a few years hence, like a preserved ice man in the arctic.

But for the moment, all you need to know is that you cannot know how diversity care will change your life, or perhaps put a cap-and-trade on your exhaling carbon dioxide and contributing to global warning. Liberty ends not with a bang or a whimper, but with a law too large and complex for any human mind to comprehend. From here, the sound of Big Government advancing is eerily like the menacing, long-drawn-out "invasion" theme in Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony.