Wolfgang von Skeptik. . .

. . .has updated with an extended piece on The Hidden Horror of Kerry's Health Plan, in which he relates his own personal experience in dealing with the welfare bureaucracy.

"I turned to the wanna-be Klansman and I said, not loudly, something to the effect of “man you got it all wrong. Look around you: there’s no blacks here. It’s not about race. The reason we’ve been here all day and we’re still waiting? It’s about gender. Gender-quotas and quota-mongering...”

The waiting room fell dead silent as the rank of normally undemonstrative bureaucrats behind the counter boiled into activity, a gallery of fat caricatures of sullen officialdom suddenly animated in their florescent-lighted frames, a coven of harpies shrieking and shouting and flapping their arms and pointing. A severely overweight supervisor buzzed open the electronically latched gate that separated her elitist preserve from the below-the-salt realm of supplicants, and she stomped toward me, dirty white sneakers yelping on the grimy beige linoleum floor, halting so close I could smell her: cloying flower-scented deodorant overpowered by female armpit sweat, cigarettes and cheap shampoo. “You!” she snarled; “You shut up. I don’t give a damn how many buses you’ve missed or how far you’ve got to walk, you shut your mouth. You EVER say anything like that again, you WILL go to jail. You got that? You understand?” She glared down at me, cheeks red with rage, gray eyes pitiless as winter skies, short straight mousy brown hair tumbling from where she had tucked it behind her unadorned ears.

“Yes ma’am,” I said."

Whether or not this is a typical experience (and mine was, admittedly, different), it certainly makes for absorbing, compelling reading, and enumerates plenty of reasons to fear Kerry's plans for America's healthcare system.