-By Warner Todd Huston
The self-aggrandizing denizens of Hollywood constantly scold Americans over a lack of national healthcare. It is the biggest failure of American society ever that there is no cradle to the grave program for free health care, they constantly tell us. And now, in keeping with these nearly universal Hollywood “principles,” to prove how Hollywood is far more moral than we lowly citizens of flyover country, and to show that they are better than the great unwashed in the backwaters of America… Hollywood is closing its nearly 90-year-old Motion Picture Fund hospital and accompanying long-term living facilities for aging actors.
Yep, dumping it. Walking away from the facilities for free healthcare for actors. Fuggedaboutit.
Sean Penn has advocated for national healthcare in the U.S. basing his interests upon his close personal friendship with the dictatorial, socialist president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. The twin activists of Susan Sarandon and hubby Tim Robbins have claimed that healthcare is one of the most important issues facing the country today. Many of Hollywood’s biggest stars have been heard to lament about how healthcare is something that only the caring, you know, care about, and stuff.
And now, after 87 years, Hollywood is shutting down the facilities that have given succor and care to some of the most famous actors in filmdom’s history.
Yes, with the millions upon millions of dollars in which Hollywood is awash, they are dumping their own healthcare facilities. So, with the many millions with which they could easily fund it laying untapped, why exactly should everyone else feel that the idea is as important as these actors so commonly claim it is if they even refuse pay the bills for their own kind?
Is George Clooney so hurting for cash that he can’t pay a little to the healthcare fund? Is Marlo Thomas in the poor house? Is Ed Asner or Mike Farrell standing in a bread line somewhere?
Interestingly enough, the reason they are closing the facilities is because the trust funds arranged to fund them is running out of money. Sadly, they fail to see that this troublesome situation is just like the federal government’s!
“MPTF is initiating these changes because it’s the right thing to do, but the fact is that we have no choice,” said Jeffrey Katzenberg, chair of the MPTF Foundation Board. “Although we are in good shape today, the acute-care hospital and long-term care facility are generating operating deficits that could bankrupt MPTF in a very few years. . . . If MPTF doesn’t do something now, pretty soon it won’t be able to do anything.”
Katzenberg could just as easily have been speaking of Medicare or Social Security, couldn’t he? The simple fact of the matter is that these sorts of “free” health care programs neither work in the long run, nor are “free” in any meaningful way.
Again, these self-important Hollywood types have nearly unlimited amounts of cash, yet they can’t adequately fund a “free” healthcare system for their own fellows? Then they insist that the rest of us invest in a similar system with the federal government taking the same role that failed for them?
Hypocrites.
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, Human Events Magazine, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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Following up on your point, now Obama is trying to sell the idea that the solution to the upcoming Medicare funding debacle is “universal health insurance”. Like the Hollywood types who ran themselves out of money, the proposed Medicare solution is to drag all the rest of us kicking and screaming into their ponzi scheme just to keep the program going a few more years until the current crop of self serving politicians are out of office. It’s the next guy’s problem!
It seems that Democrats have a fixation about using ponzi schemes. They turned the Social Security Trust fund and Medicare Trust fund into a piggy bank from which to fund the federal budget. In a corporation, this behavior (Enron) would be illegal and land you in jail for mis-allocating money to operating expenses. Now that the cash flow is about to reverse where both Trust Funds would start getting their money back, the Democrats all of a sudden have to find another revenue stream to meet their financial obligations. By dragging the entire country into universal health care, the government can charge a TAX to fund the entire combined scheme. The point is to enlarge the tax base enough to tax in such a manner as to soak those with the most money to pay for the whole thing for a limited period of time.
The entire premise of Democrat taxation schemes is to take money from anyone who has in order to give it to enough people who don’t have in order to get credit for giving them something for nothing, i.e. purchase their vote. This type of taxation scheme is a violation of the principle of the US republic whose foundation principle is “Majority rule, respecting the rights of the minority”. Clearly those who are of means are in the minority. The founding fathers when they spoke of minority rights meant those who didn’t agree in principle with the majority opinion. Furthermore it is a legal concept within the Constitution that you CAN NOT single out any one group or person to treat them differently in regards to taxation. Democrats have openly stated they want those of means to pay for those without and IMO the premise is a direct tax which is disproportionate and therefore unconstitutional. Especially so when one considers certain states receive more federal tax dollars in proportion to the revenues collected from them and that is unconstitutional. http://www.lonang.com/conlaw/5/c54.htm#5 It’s called taxation without representation. And as I pointed out in an article regarding the funding of benefits for illegal aliens, We the People didn’t get a choice in the matter and the politicians have NEVER consulted with US on the matter. Tell us, did any candidate for Congress openly say they were for Universal Health Care? Then how can they be representing the people of their district when they didn’t bother to campaign upon the idea? This is not Democracy or representation, this is not even majority rule, this is lying by omission and rule by the elite.