
I’d like to think that there must be – has to be – among clear thinking Americans, a festering anger waiting to explode into full-blown take-to-the streets outrage. In the hearts and minds of Americans who value the free-market system – the very one that has built this nation into the most successful the world has ever known – there must be a bubbling animus on the brink of detonating.
As the nation continues to be reinvented thanks to its 21st Century Marxist makeover, I simply cannot believe how much my country has been transformed in six short months. And save for a few notable moments over the course of that span (like the hundreds of April 15th Tea Parties held across the nation), there have been agonizingly few public displays of fed-up Americans making themselves heard … and a whole host of reasons why they should be.
With the promised Obama transformation of a country founded on limited government and individualism in full-swing, the tenets of self-reliance and liberty are being pushed aside in favor of a more powerful, intrusive state. It is simply inconceivable to me that reasonable Americans, with any sense of the liberty they are privileged to possess, or with any real understanding of how that liberty exists inversely to the amount of government involvement in our everyday lives, could ever consider the nationalization of health care a legitimate path to follow.
But here we are the day after House Dems disclosed a 1,000 page plan for a mammoth expansion of government-backed health care insurance, dangling a $1.5 trillion price tag, slated to boost taxes on the “wealthiest households” over the next ten years, and all I can think is, “This is America?”
Indeed, I know there are tens of millions like me who cannot begin to believe that the health care system that is the envy of the world – the system that provides the medicines that save countless lives and the doctors that provide the highest quality care on earth – could ever (or should ever) be reconstructed to replicate the inefficient European models that Obamacrats are so enamored with. What is it that is so damn appealing about the rationing of what will evolve into sub par, assembly-line health care?
Indeed, it is an inevitability once the government sets the rules.
A small percentage of Americans who wish to have health insurance do not; that should be enough to have the best and brightest minds figuring out how to improve the system, not overhaul it. As usual, liberals don’t seek to elevate those at the bottom to better their circumstances; they wish to punish those at the top for having more.
At the risk of drawing the barrage of poison arrows I will surely take (and I am more-than-prepared to be branded a heartless, soulless, miserable excuse for a human being) the “health care” situation in this country simply isn’t the dire, cataclysmic national predicament it is made out to be.
Sorry.
The belief that the American health care system is in bad enough shape to warrant a complete change in the way it works from top to bottom is categorically untrue. No evidence exists, and no reason can justify (other than the need to appease liberal emotion) such a catostrophic change.
Is it imperfect? Can it be improved?
Undoubtedly.
To say otherwise would be a lie.
Still, the American health care system – flawed as it is (like any other system developed by human beings) – is simply the best on earth. And if one factors automobile-related deaths and murders out of the equation, Americans have the longest life expectancy of any nation on the planet. It is free enterprise and competition that enable life-saving innovations to take place.
And despite the media spin, the socialization of American health care is not just about taxing the “wealthiest” among us to pay for the distressed few who are without health insurance – because that, too, is a misnomer (which I will explain in a moment).
It is really about the bewildering Democrat notion that health care insurance is as fundamental an American right as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The orifice from which this preposterous concept was drawn from must be as deep as it is wide, because no matter how many hysterical whine-time leftists claim it is so, health care insurance is not a right, nor is it something to be provided by government to the public at large, like police or fire protection.
What next?
The right to have one’s electricity paid? The right to have one’s rent taken care of? The right to a job? The right to have the expensive name-brand chocolate pudding over the generic store-name brand?
And, of course, as with all Obamacratic initiatives, there is no time to waste on frivolous debate and political grandstanding. Those who would oppose health care coverage for someone like a single mom with six kids from the inner city are heartless, cold-blooded, politically-motivated right-wing zealots anyway. These transformations, so we are told, are necessary measures that require implementation as soon as humanly possible, lest millions of people start dropping like anvils in the streets of America.
In reality, Dems are looking to rush this through before Americans get wind of what’s really in there.
From Erica Werner of the Associated Press:
Under the House Democrats’ plan, the federal government would be responsible for ensuring that every person, regardless of income or the state of their health, has access to an affordable insurance plan. Individuals and employers would have new obligations to get coverage, or face hefty penalties.
The legislation calls for a 5.4 percent tax increase on individuals making more than $1 million a year, with a gradual tax beginning at $280,000 for individuals. Employers who don’t provide coverage would be hit with a penalty equal to 8 percent of workers’ wages, with an exemption for small businesses. Individuals who decline an offer of affordable coverage would pay 2.5 percent of their incomes as a penalty, up to the average cost of a health insurance plan.
The liberal-leaning plan lacked figures on total costs, but a House Democratic aide said the total bill would add up to about $1.5 trillion over 10 years. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private calculations.
Three House committees will begin voting on the bill Thursday. Changes in the legislation are likely to satisfy a group of moderate and conservative Democrats who are withholding support.
The 1,000-page bill is unlikely to attract any Republican backing, and business groups and the insurance industry immediately assailed it as a job-killer.
The business groups also warned that the U.S. health care system could be damaged by adding a government-run insurance plan and a federal council that would make some decisions on benefits, as called for in the legislation. Thirty-one organizations signed the letter, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable representing top corporate CEOs and the National Retail Federation.
And of course, the idea that “taxing the wealthy” (at the heart of a liberal’s conception of “fairness”) will somehow make this fairy-tale, one-and-a-half-trillion-dollar government phony band-aid an effective elixir to help curb the ills of the current American health care system is as disingenuous as anything that has ever escaped the lips of any Obamacrat anywhere.
This fantasy-land leftist snow job is predicated on the theory that employers, medical providers and “the rich” will be footing the bill, keeping it all “affordable” to regular, everyday Americans.
But medical providers will almost assuredly raise their rates. Employers will then be forced to cut salaries, or even jobs. The “wealthy,” who create and own the businesses that employ people, will scale back operations as their costs grow.
And in the end, who will wind up paying?
The very people Obamacrats are trying to “help” with their socialization of the American health care system – the everyday taxpayer.
Thus, costs go up while quality of care goes down.
Plus, if “everyone” is to be covered, limitations are inevitable – from time and resources, to medications and providers. The bureaucracy that would be guaranteed to follow would be almost incomprehensible.
Rationing is guaranteed.
In short, $1.5 trillion doesn’t just grow on the trees of the wealthy. This potentially economy-crushing disaster cannot be paid for by just taxing the so-called “rich.”
And if there is anyone who really believes that the cost of such a destructive plan will cost only $1.5 trillion, I’d like to offer you a tunnel to go along with that bridge the Dems are peddling.
The bottom line is, this is not about health care reform, or even fixing the economy.
This is only about having more people dependant on government.
Nothing else.
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