(Thanks to Doug Powers for giving me a sneak preview of the administration’s new health care service logo)
President Obama, back on the campaign trail, invited us to join him in “taking the greatest nation on earth and changing it". Recently much ado has been made about the health care bill currently before the House of Representatives and the Senate. And lately the fuss hasn’t been over the bills themselves as much as the American people’s response to them. All across the country at Town Hall meetings, the citizenry is speaking out in large numbers both for and against the bills. Conservative talk radio would have you believe that every speaker is against the bills, while the left-leaning media wants you to focus on the disruptions rather than the content itself.
This post is about the content of the bills. I’ll refer to them as Obama’s health care plan because, even though authored by Rep. Henry Waxman, the House bill serves up a full portion of exactly what Mr. President wants under the guise of taking care of those of us least able to pay for our own care.
Obama’s Health Care plan is as much about health care as Bush’s Patriot Act was about patriotism.
Follow up:
Let’s face it: if the issue were merely about the 15% of Americans without health insurance all you’d have to do to fix it is issue them Medicaid cards and raise all of our taxes (that last part will happen anyway). No it’s not about health care or even about health insurance. It’s about initializing America’s conversion to socialism. Buried deep within the thousand or so pages of the bills presented by the House and Senate are provisions limiting, restricting, even strangling Americans’ freedom of choice, a necessary step in leading the American sheeple down the yellow brick road to a government run society where all your needs are taken care of by Big Brother. Page 16: ‘if a health insurance plan is not in effect on January 1 of the year the law takes effect, a new policy cannot be written’. This means yes, you can keep your current coverage, but you can never, ever switch private providers because no one can write a new policy, except the government. So technically, the President didn’t lie when he said you could keep your old plan if you wish. He just failed to mention that your only choices are to keep your old plan or switch to Obamacare which means the government gets to decide how much care you get and how long you have to wait to get it. (This is where I’d ordinarily insert a statement about the government’s inability to run anything efficiently, but this should be a universally accepted tenet by now. If not, I challenge you to name one thing our government does efficiently.)
Another provision is for “End of Life” counseling. Maybe more rightly called End of Care counseling, as in ‘you’re old so we don’t care about you any more’. This is a provision that will pay doctors to counsel families about “ceasing treatment and managing pain” (I saw obama speak these words, meaning that Obamacare won’t pay to keep you alive if you can’t pay taxes). It’s been mentioned as not being a “burden on your family or your loved ones". Actually, with government health care there is no burden on the family or the loved ones, only on the government funds, so the outcry will be that old people are becoming “too much of a burden on society". They’ll be asked to do their civic duty by not hogging resources that could be used on more productive (tax paying) members of society. We’ve seen this before and it’s chief advocate was Dr. Jack Kevorkian. I would be mad as hell if I did jail time for something and then the President turned around and not only says it’s ok, but tries to ram it down everybody’s throat. Maybe Obama will change the Health and Human Services cabinet position to Life and Death and appoint Dr. K to the top post.
The simple solution is this: Fix the health care situation by leaving it alone. We have the best health care in the world, bar none. Don’t fix it ’till it’s broken. But too many people confuse health care with health insurance. Fix the health insurance problem by issuing medicaid cards to anyone that wants one, and mandate that any employer currently offering a health benefit may eliminate that benefit only if they give the employee the amount they were paying to insure them (and of course you get to tax those pay raises). Those employees may find, as I did when my wife lost her employer paid coverage, that they can buy better coverage cheaper on the open market than by putting her and my sons under my policy at work. Private insurance companies will scramble to offer better coverage at a better price in order to get those new insurance dollars coming on the market (there’s that pesky free-market economy at work again, damn capitalism).
There will be those people who will take the pay raise and the medicaid card and hooray for them. But I predict that in a period of 12 months we’ll see how many of those people will want to stay on government managed medicaid as opposed to private health plans offering more flexibility.
So Mr. President if you want to take care of 15 percent of Americans without health insurance, do it. But don’t punish the rest of us with your socialist agenda for generations to come. As JFK said: Ask not what you can do for your country, ask rather what you can get without earning! (At least that must’ve been what you heard.)
The BlacKnight
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