One of my least favorite occupations is sitting in a doctor’s office waiting for the chap with the stethoscope and prescription pad to appear. Waiting in the reception area is plenty tedious. But it’s somehow more tiresome, not to say more anxiety producing, after you’ve gotten past that first triage to sit alone and slab-like on some uncomfortable medical table staring at artwork a Holiday Inn would have turned up its nose at alongside posters describing all the things that can go wrong with your circulatory/pulmonary/etc., etc., systems. I’ve always hated those posters, not least because I cannot contemplate their descriptions of symptoms without beginning to feel that I, too, may be suffering from whatever grave malady they outline.
There is one other invariable species of decoration festooning the walls of examination rooms: the framed and mounted medical certificates proudly informing you that Dr. Sawbones is a graduate of Expensive University Medical School. I’ve never paid much attention to such advertisements, other than to be slightly, if also irrationally, reassured when the institution named on the document is Yale, Harvard, Columbia, or some such. A recent article in Crain’s Chicago Business, however, will make me scrutinize those declamatory escutcheons more fiercely. “Loyola Med School,” the headline reads, “To Admit Undocumented Students.”
“Undocumented.” That’s big-government bureaucratese for “illegal alien.” So: Loyola Medical School will henceforth admit all those Juans, Ahmeds, and Mohammeds we’ve been reading about. “The university’s Stritch School of Medicine not only intends to waive legal residency as an admissions requirement for applicants but aims to offer a financing plan through a state agency.” Yes, that’s right, not only is Loyola admitting illegal aliens to its medical school, it is also handing you, the Illinois taxpayer, the bill for their education.
How did this happen? If you said “Barack Obama,” go to the head of the class and collect your diversity certificate, which is printed on sustainable paper created in a green, smoke-free, PETA-sanctioned workplace. “Dean Linda Brubaker and Mark Kuczewski, director of the school’s Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics, decided to open the school to undocumented students after President Barack Obama signed an executive order in June 2012 making it possible for young adults brought to the United States as children to temporarily live and work legally in the U.S.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRdLpem-AAs
Currently, illegal, aka “undocumented,” aliens are not eligible for federal aid, but that too is likely to change:
Next month, the Illinois Finance Authority may consider a measure that would allow it to make loans to any of the state’s medical or dental schools, which the schools would then disburse to undocumented students.
Oh goody.
One commentator described Loyola’s decision as “huge.” It is that. Whether it is also a good thing, as this particular leftist implied, is something else entirely.
What is perfectly clear, however, is that Loyola’s action is part and parcel of larger movements afoot in our society, movements that are eroding national sovereignty, the rule of law, limited government, and individual liberty. Those changes are also affecting the nature of medical care: its quality, its efficiency, its cost. Way back in the 1960s, Ronald Reagan pointed out that “one of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism upon a people has been by way of medicine. It is very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project.” Prescient, no?
Reagan’s point hasn’t escaped the administrators at Loyola, which has not only the umbrella of medicine but also, being a Jesuit institution, the canopy of religion under which to crowd its efforts at enforcing “social justice.” The article in Crain’s underscored this point: The decision to admit illegal (“undocumented”) aliens, it pointed out, is “in keeping with the institution’s religious principles that call for social justice.” Quoth the dean “If a Jesuit Catholic school doesn’t do something like this, who would?”
Having been to school with the Jesuits, I take her point. I can’t say that I am reassured by it, though.
****
Cross-posted from Roger’s Rules
image courtesy shutterstock / RazoomGame /
Join the conversation as a VIP Member