The idea that America needs transforming, and that he is the man to do it, did not start with Barack Obama. The grandiosely named Center for Health Transformation (CHT) was started by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

In 2003, Newt Gingrich wrote Saving Lives & Saving Money: Transforming Health and Healthcare. It does offer some “free market” solutions. But doctors are apparently free only as long as they do what Newt thinks they should.

The backup plan is: “When all else fails, mandate.” Specifically, physicians who “insist on doing it the old way…should simply not be allowed to practice medicine.” As far as I know, even Obama doesn’t go this far.

In developing his plans and strategies, the CHT boasts a lot of allies: along with top leaders in federal and state governments, it includes “key corporations, top hospitals, disease advocacy groups, professional and industry associations, and leading research institutions.” Many if not all of them probably endorsed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“ObamaCare”).

Newt has embraced the key fallacy that “the number of uninsured in America is a threat to our civilization.” He thinks that medical errors are “morally unacceptable,” and that they could somehow be prevented by forcing everybody to use the health information technology that his supporters, just coincidentally, happen to sell. He speaks favorably of outgoing CMS director Donald Berwick, an avowed admirer of the British National Health Service’s rationing system. He is convinced that “disease management programs” can” dramatically improve outcomes.”

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The national campaign against bullying and hate may be in the news, but it’s nowhere in evidence as an American university wreaks revenge, not just on a dissenter who ran for Congress—but on his children, and on a brave professor who blew the whistle.

Michelle Obama may deplore playground name-calling, humiliation, and taunting. But she says nothing about powerful administrators wrecking the careers of our most promising students and distinguished professors, by actions and not just words?

Here’s the background: In one of the most astonishing races in the 2010 election, renowned scientist Arthur Robinson took on 12-term progressive incumbent Peter DeFazio for his congressional seat in Oregon’s District 4. DeFazio won the 2008 election with 82% of the vote. When the polls showed Robinson coming very close to winning, DeFazio unleashed a last-minute smear campaign.

That much is not unexpected. Americans have gotten used to vicious lies by politicians. Character assassination seems to be protected political speech.

But on November 4, after the election results were known, another campaign took off: against the three younger Robinson children, who are working toward their Ph.D. degrees in nuclear engineering at Oregon State University (OSU). The stellar academic records of all six home-schooled Robinsons (a Ph.D. in chemistry from Caltech, two veterinary medicine doctorates from Iowa State, and undergraduate degrees in chemistry or mathematics for the younger Robinsons) were an embarrassment for DeFazio, who is strongly supported by public education unions.

The twins, Joshua and Bethany, have nearly finished work that would qualify them for a Ph.D. at any normal university. They are highly regarded by the scientists and engineers who have worked with them. They continued to work hard, while noticing some oddities—that made sense when Professor Jack Higginbotham alerted them to plans hatched in closed-door departmental meetings. Political ideologues in control of the department had decided that Joshua and Bethany, and if possible their younger brother Matthew, would not be allowed to complete their degrees at OSU.

Getting good grades, following all the rules, working hard—and achieving mastery of a difficult, important field in which few Americans can qualify—are not enough, if your name is Robinson.

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It is mentioned, almost in passing, that the “healthcare reform” on the verge of becoming law starts collecting premiums and taxes immediately, and promises benefits only in about four years.

What kind of emergency is that?

It’s not a healthcare emergency. It’s what might be called a Madoff emergency.

Whether starry-eyed utopians or cynical malefactors, the unnamed, possibly unnameable they have high ambitions for Washington to achieve their objectives. The stars are aligned for their coup d’etat, but there is one little problem: the country is out of money.

This problem threatens to stop not only their agenda, but the whole game. Washington has 2 million employees on the payroll, earning on average twice as much as those in the private sector. And probably more than a hundred million dependents—recipients of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and grants and subsidies of all types. What happens if the checks stop coming?

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Uninsurance is portrayed as being like a disease; it has even been called an epidemic. At a minimum, it puts you one medical bill away from bankruptcy, and you might even die from it, they say.

Yet some people I know, even doctors, do not want to buy health insurance.

And I know of at least one person who was very lucky to have had hers cancelled.

Here’s her story. She told an acquaintance, who happened to be a physician, about her eye symptoms. “Wouldn’t you know! I lost my insurance a couple months ago, and now this!”

The physician happened to have an ophthalmoscope in her truck, and took a look in the patient’s eye. Then she called a retinal surgery practice and told the receptionist the patient’s history, and the results of the limited examination she could do. She thought the patient might have a detached retina.

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Nobody outside the inner halls of Congress really knows what’s going on in the negotiations on health care “reform. Every now and then, someone emerges from the formerly smoke-filled rooms and throws another 2,000 or so page “bill” out into the public and then disappears to continue talks to carve up one-sixth of the nation’s economy.

But we do know some of the critical unforgiving numbers. And we have strong reason to suspect that radical changes to Medicare Part E (as in Medicare for Everybody) is the real endgame, whatever the interim steps are called: public option, cooperatives, or mandated Insurance Exchanges.

We have the unmentionable truth that Medicare is insolvent. And the common dogma that Medicare is efficient, popular, and impregnable. Is it a Hegelian thesis and antithesis? With the synthesis being to throw the whole rest of the system, which is also allegedly bankrupting the country, into Medicare?

Are our leaders stark, raving mad? Or diabolically clever?

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