MICKEY KAUS: Woke Health Care Should Terrify Liberals:

You may have assumed that woke activism was a sideshow, destroying academic institutions and The New York Times. Yet here it had pentrated an important, once-revered government scientific agency and it was affecting, not who gets to edit the Times op-ed page but basic questions of life and death for millions.

For liberals, this should be especially terrifying–most crucially for backers of “Medicare for All” and other ambitious health plans. I think I’m one of them — I’ve always supported some kind of universal, national health insurance. Medicare seems like a program that works–why not expand it? Claims from conservatives that this gives government too much power have always seemed like a rote application of abstract dogma. Did Medicare — run by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — have too much power? Hard to see how. There’s no obvious rationing. No death panels. Of course there are always worries about cost-cutting, and the insidious culture of “good death,” including creepy end-of-life maneuvers (like the UKs infamous Liverpool Pathway). Yet we could seemingly rely on voter demand for care to overhwelm lugubrious proponents of medical austerity.

But what happened last week was not abstract: The near-hijacking of a universal medical instiution, and a potential denial of care, not in the name of budget-cutting but in the name of two-wrongs-make-up-for-racism social justice. Fight it and you’re not just self-interested and wrong. You’re self-interested and wrong and racist.

Where’ll this line of argument crop up next? Do I have to worry that in the future, when I’m wheeled into the ER, some Ivy League bioethicist will have decided I’m too white to get care? Or — further up the medical supply chain — that valuable medicines won’t even be developed because’If the government paid for this procedure it would save lives, but they would not be diverse lives …’

If you thought Woke CDC was bad, wait till you see Woke CMS. I’ll stick with Blue Cross, thanks.

Yes, I’m quite paranoid about this, for good reasons. Put crudely, our colleges have been churning out these Woke folk for many years now. They’ve infiltrated themselves into every institution of society — including the state, apparently– where they reward each other with tenure and civil service protections. They’ll be hard to root out! You can’t fire a civil servant without months, or years, of due process. Even then you can’t fire them just because their loony views clash with the policies endorsed by the voters. That would violate the First Amendment! (See Elrod v. Burns, 427 U.S. 347). Now I know how Joe McCarthy felt.

Actuallly, the Woke have a weapon that 50’s Communists never did — the power of cancellation, which works in some contexts at least, including agencies that are terrified of even a day’s bad PR. (Ask Shirley Sherrod.)

And if Wokeness gained power under Trump, what about under a Democrat? Here is Biden’s historic opportunity to perform a service for his party. If you’re a Big Government liberal, you want to strangle the Woke baby in the bathtub, before it grows up to thoroughly undermine public support for finishing the great Democratic project (including universal health care, but also ending exclusionary zoning and stratified schooling, providing a safe environment, etc.).

Biden’s not ‘the perfect man for the job’–that would be 1992’s Bill Clinton. (Ask Sister Souljah.) But Biden’s a solid candidate.

Good luck with that. I’m not sure he’s even got solid poops these days.