Cost isn't everything.  Elizabeth Warren's outlandish $52-trillion price tag for her Medicare for all plan has appropriately been the subject of much media coverage.  However, there is another largely unreported disturbing twist that may lie buried beneath the sticker shock.

For nearly 60 years, Great Britain has been idolized by progressives for its cultural contributions, spanning the mid-1960s British musical invasion to present-day "woke" attitudes that dominate Oxford and Cambridge Universities.  Now the NHS — the British National Health service — has unwittingly bestowed the gift of a canary in the coal mine to conservatives, if only our ears are attuned to its song.  A disturbing article that first appeared in RT, Russia Today, on November 7 has been picked up by other news outlets.  The essence of the piece is that the NHS is instituting policies to ensure that the political and social views of captive patients will now be ongoingly evaluated and punished as deemed necessary.

Patients who direct racist or sexist abuse at hospital staff could have their treatment withdrawn — as soon as is medically safe — under a new disciplinary system which would see 'red cards' handed out to repeat offenders.  The 'Red Card to Racism' scheme was recently implemented by the NHS's North Bristol Trust (NBT) in response to increasing incidents of racist behavior from patients toward medical professionals.  But the proposal has triggered mixed reactions.  "A message that there's zero tolerance towards [racism] will lead to a level of self-control," Weyman Bennett, co-convenor of the Stand up to Racism campaign told RT, adding that, "most of these people will find that once their behavior is deemed unacceptable, they realize that they can no longer behave like that."  Under the scheme, a patient who is sexist or racially abusive toward staff would be warned and receive a "yellow card" initially — but if the behavior continues, they would be given a "red card" and have their treatment withdrawn as soon as it is medically safe, NBT chief Andrea Young told the BBC.

Imagine an elderly WWII-era patient asking a Jamaican nurse "what that funny smell is" if he were to get a whiff of the jerk chicken curry she had for lunch.  Is that racist, and who decides?  A betting person might wager that the patient would get a yellow card at the very least.  If on the following day our theoretical patient were to remark about the attractiveness of her shoes or hairstyle, would a red card be in the offing, heralding premature discharge?  Again, who decides?  Think it couldn't or wouldn't happen in a U.S., one-size-fits-all health care gulag administered by the Deep State?  We've seen how an anonymous "whistleblower" peddling secondhand grievances has been able to create an imbroglio of unprecedented proportions for our president and our Constitution. 

Imagine if Mark Levin, Tucker Carlson, or Steve Bannon were a patient in a New York City, Boston, or San Francisco hospital, where the majority of the staff reflected surrounding community attitudes and values.  Can anyone guarantee that snowflake health care professionals inclined toward immediate and perpetual offense would not jump at the chance to misconstrue or even concoct "racist or sexist" umbrage?

Death panels have been warned against and with good reason, but what about "wrong thought panels," where anonymous reports can dictate that a cancer patient awaiting a bone marrow transplant must be released once stabilized on chemotherapy, back to his home, in what would essentially be a death sentence — all because of real, imagined, or fabricated indignation or even just annoyance?  A grudge against a white sexually normative patient by a transgender minority orderly in a fatal form of discrimination can easily be foreseen.

Anyone who has ever dealt with the DMV, the IRS, or the Social Security Administration will be quick to comprehend the terrifying possibilities inside a new health care system where, for all intents and purposes, all recourse and alternatives will have been outlawed.  "The doctor will see you now" might depend instead on factors controlled by those who have their own tyrannical agenda.