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therieb hears the call of public service...

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Dear President Obama,

I couldn't help but notice that Tom Daschle, your nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, has gone down in flames owing to a misunderstanding regarding the taxes he owed on limousine services provided by a grateful client. That's too bad, but I believe this unfortunate and embarrassing oversight might yet have a happy ending. In short, you now have the opportunity to nominate me to the position.

You may well be asking about my qualifications. I'm neither a doctor nor an experienced policy maker. I do have intimate experience with our nation's health care system, both as an insured and an uninsured member of society. As a young man I was able to take advantage of my parents' medical insurance to be cured of cancer, while other uninsured patients spent their life savings for the same treatment. My father tells the story of waiting in line at the hospital pharmacy behind uninsured patients who were bargaining for as many of the pain pills in their prescriptions as their money would buy. God bless America! I also have experience as an uninsured American with an above-the-knee prosthesis. I know what it's like to face the choice of either coughing up thousands of dollars in yearly repairs or crawling. I call it my walking tax. Among my other qualifications I have logged hundreds of hours on the telephone with health insurance companies, both begging for coverage and fighting for my claims. I can proudly report that many of these conversations have ended in a torrent of explicitives, which demonstrates my passion for, and my commitment to providing health care to every American.

Mr. President, my most compelling qualification for the job is I believe that sick people in America have done nothing wrong. Whenever I speak to my fellow citizens about the necessity of health care for every American, the majority roll their eyes and complain about the cost. Why on earth should they have to pay to insure sick people? They reason that since they have never had a sick day in their lives, sick people must have done something wrong. They don't say as much out loud, but they mean it. Sick people in America are thought of as a different class, not the same as the healthy, and why should the healthy be made responsible for the sick? Of course the pathos in this argument is clear. I've heard it from enough people that statistically, more than one of them already has cancer or will soon get it. Or perhaps they will be in a car accident, or have a heart attack. America's healthy people have a serious lack of imagination. Just like the geniuses who took out $500,000 mortgages while they were collecting unemployment, America's healthy cannot possibly imagine anything going wrong.

You see, Mr. President, the most important job for the incoming Secretary of HHS is to convince Americans that insurance is a good thing, a necessary thing. The new Secretary needs to be able to say: “Hey idiot, look what happens to you and your family if you don't have insurance!” The Secretary should be a constant bearer of bad news. It's not easy to traffic in threats to people's health, but that is exactly the medicine Americans needs. Our countrymen fundamentally misunderstand what insurance is. Insurance is not a program for the poor. Insurance is a smart hedge against the bad luck that will find us: poor and rich, young and old, conservative and liberal alike. Those who would deny coverage to the poor must be made to understand that they are merely putting off the evil hour of paying for them. You can pay for preventative medicine now or the emergency room later, and the former option is a lot less expensive.

Who better to deliver all of this bad news than therieb? I hereby proofer my nomination. My credentials are impeccable, and all of my domestic help and private jets have been reported to the IRS.