Vision: Overhauling Medicare for Benevolent Cancer Profiteers Vision: A Comprehensive 21st Century Medicare Policy for All Who Deserve One Vision: President's Fitness Initiative to Combat Rampant Obesity in America Vision: Full Medicare Coverage for Preventative Embalming & Cremation Vision: Combatting the Scourge of Self-Abuse: Operation Infinite Purity

Today, our nation's armed forces are being called with increasing frequency to administer the world's affairs. As a result, the American empire, like the invincible British and Roman empires before it, is bringing peace and prosperity to its leaders, along with a certain degree of "wiggle room" for those fortunate enough to be dominated.

Yet as America has reached out to the world's unfortunate, a great wound has opened up in the homeland: the health of our poor people, our lowest-tier homeland consumers.

As doom-and-gloom liberals so breathlessly observe, the health of America's poor is vastly inferior to the poor in every other developed nation. Our poor suffer from infinitely higher rates of cancer, heart disease, and other disagreeable conditions - not to mention violent non-illnesses like gunshot wounds and lethal injections. In fact, the American poor still routinely die from such 19th-century scourges as miscarriages and tuberculosis. Truly, their existence is a veritable gulag of preventable afflictions.

Sadly, inasmuch as the poor bring this misery upon themselves through their unforgivable failure to realize the American Dream, their plight continues to worsen each and every year.(1)

The lack of free health care is one obvious reason for this stressful situation. Another is the fast food industry, which caters especially to the poor, bringing disproportionate obesity rates to that socioeconomic stratum. Then of course there are the dreadful living conditions in which our poor must survive - veritable cauldrons of disease serving to propagate the vicious cycle of chronic illness resulting in unemployment, leading in turn to poverty that is deeper still.

Now until recently, this situation was not very important. Our movers and shakers benefited from the best health care on Earth, and the fact that it wasn't available to the rest had little or no impact on America's Gross National Product. A busboy in Tennessee perishing from a curable tumor? A waitress in Kentucky missing all her front teeth? A sweatshop worker in New York City dying of tuberculosis? Regrettable turns of events, to be sure - yet still directly attributable to the professional shortcomings of the afflicted. If only such folks could just muster enough dignity to pull themselves up and become fabulously wealthy.

But today, President Bush feels that this sort of reasoning is no longer adequate. As our nation sets off to fulfill its imperial destiny, and as the business of administering the world's resources gets underway in all earnest, the costs are mounting-the costs in people. President Bush knows the figures. His advisors see them on TV and tell him. If President Bush (and America) is to retain the position of omnipotent swaggering bully on the global playground, he needs more soldiers, more people to do his bidding. And as coincidence would have it, among the very few Americans to enjoy unfettered access to universal health care are those who make up the armed forces.

Thus is borne a unique opportunity for President Bush to demonstrate "Compassionate Conservatism." Or in the President's own words, "It is compassionate to want to provide health care to people who can't afford it, and it is conservative to want to slaughter Arabs who will not cower at the altar of American magnificence."

This is why President Bush has vowed, if re-selected in 2004, to work closely with the Republican-controlled House and Senate to replace Medicare and Medicaid entirely with a compulsory military conscription for every American - regardless of age or infirmity - who has failed to achieve a station in life wherein they can afford to pay the highest health care costs in the world. The benefits are plain to see: tens of millions of poor people are not only fully insured at no cost, they are finally put to good use - shipped out from our homeland* to far flung hot spots throughout the global American empire, where they will have the opportunity pay back the health care handout given them by America's worthwhile citizens - or nobly perish.

With such a mighty force in place, a reasonable foreign policy, in which America can impose its will on the world effectively and indefinitely, becomes very easily attainable within a matter of two to three fiscal years. In short, it's a win-win situation, and yet another example of President George W. Bush's long-term vision thing.

* Effectively depopulating entire depressed regions of predominantly colored persons and freeing up vast tracts of blighted real estate, thereby clearing the way for reinvestment, gentrification, and untold Starbucks franchising opportunities.