By ROBERT J. SAMUELSON Posted 09/29/2009 06:11 PM ET
What’s driving the great health debate of 2009 is not a popular clamor for universal insurance.
“Many Americans are balking again at the prospect of health care reform,” writes pollster Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center.
A new Wall Street Journal poll found 41% of respondents opposed to President Obama’s proposals and 39% in favor (the rest were undecided). The underlying driver is politicians’ psychological quest for glory.
Where is Liberty?
Given that every instance of collectivism…
Requires the Force of Government to initiate, regulate and administer; and
Eliiminates all rights of all individuals to determine and act in whatever they perceive as being in their individual best interest, and steals from the citizens whatever monies government, not the individual, deems necessary and appropriate, and
Eliminates the natural benefits of competition and choices always best provided by a truly free market, and
Sacrifices and removes all individual alternatives and incentives toward maximizing one’s life, then
Insist on an answer to this one Question:
The above was my reply to a TownHall post in Digg this morning, listing 10 questions to ask those who are pushing for, in this instance, Obamacare. The questions were great, designed to show any collectivist all the fallacies in this ruse but, as usual, missed the main point.
I have become simply exhausted and exasperated with every debate over so-called health-care or any other collectivist program deteriorating into a debate over
For many moons now, I have been writing about Morality, and more lately expanding to discussion of the Force and Sacrifice, as these are the basis of all governments, which have nothing to “give” except that which they steal from their citizens. This morality is not about some high-faluting worship of some lord or allah. It is simply our natural rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
This is clear and concise in our Declaration of Independence, yet so dispised and distorted and shredded within our Constitution. Over these 230 years, the collectivist / communist set have diligently set out to subvert these basic principles into a pity-pity society in which moral free market capitalism is said to be the villan, and that individual heights are to be subordinated to some nebulous “greater good”, productivity and self-reliance are less important than sloth, and the supreme “moral” value is to sacrifice one’s own life to anyone from anywhere merely because they hold out their hands and say “oh, pity me”.
According to the collectivists, each man, having his own mind and the unique human characteristic of being able to THINK, is now somehow to be denied that treasured characteristic and his mind deferred to any unknown other, who cannot prove and is not required to prove any superiority of Mind over You, the individual.
The brainless immoral collectivist “ethic” has now gained the foothold sought for at least the last century, and has set America on it’s long winding path to economic and moral devastation. America is leading the path to worldwide self-destruction, to such extent that we must question now whether humanity can survive.
You wonder why life has become poorer and holds little but nonsense and drudgery? You wonder why “Atlas Shrugged”? Well, at least we’ve got you wondering — the rest us up to You!
A is A, and Socialism by any Other Name…
that Obamacare isn’t socialism ignores socialism’s essential nature. Technical definitions aside, socialism is a form of collectivism, the doctrine that holds that the standard of value is the group, to which the individual is subordinate and can be sacrificed on any group whim, as represented by the state. Communism, Nazism, welfare statism, fascism, democracy, and socialism are all manifestations of collectivism. The sacrifice of individual rights under a statist regime is the political essence of collectivism, and that is exactly the nature of Obama’s health care plan.
But to advocate socialism openly and honestly is and always has been a loser in America. After the tyranny, wars, and unprecedented mass murder wrought by the socialist regimes of Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Red China, and the many smaller variants of the 20th century, socialism is dead as an intellectual force. That is why the champions of socialized medicine run from the socialist label as from the plague.
As the great Aristotle said; A is A. And socialism is socialism. We are headed toward totalitarian socialism in America, and have been for the past century. Under Obama, the trend is accelerating. But he is an empty suit, simply cashing in on the trend…the collectivists preferred method of American socialization…the back door of fascism. Step by step, through programs such as the Veterans Administration, Medicare, a myriad of government controls and taxes, etc., total government control of medicine (and, in fact, the entire economy) is and has been advancing in America…long before Bush-Obama socialism appeared on the American scene.
The fascist method was explained by a former leader of a major Western nation some time ago:
“The party is all-embracing…” said Adolf Hitler upon taking power, “Each activity and each need of the individual will thereby be regulated by the party as the representative of the general good…This is Socialism- not such trifles as the private possession of the means of production. Of what importance is that if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape. Let them own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the party, is supreme over all, regardless of whether they are owners or workers…Our Socialism goes far deeper…[the people] have entered a new relation…What are ownership and income to that? Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings.” (From Herman Rauschning’s The Voice of Destruction, as quoted in The Ominous Parallels, by Leonard Peikoff, page 231-232.)
We will maintain our illusion of privacy, while the state, through the medical bureaucracy, exercises total control over the medical and business decisions of patients, insurers, and providers alike. Doctors won’t be technical employees of the state (the communist brand of collectivism), at least not initially. But, fascism is socialism…and so is Obamacare…whether Mr. Schwalb, President Obama, or Bill O’Reilly want to call it that or not. Obamacare will “range men firmly within a [health care] discipline they cannot escape.” The medical bureaucracy will be “all-embracing”, and the people will be socialized…sooner (if the democrats have their way) or later (if the current GOP has its way).
The only antipode to collectivism/socialism is individualism/free market capitalism…the system based upon America’s founding principles of unalienable individual rights and textconstitution republican government…long absent from American health care.
Republished from Source: Original Article by J D Longstreet Socialized Medicine in the United States! : WesternFront America May 27th, 2009
So the big push has begun! The big push for socialized medicine in the United States. Altho, there is little funny about this boondoggle, it is sorta funny to watch the socialists in the US government, including the Obama Administration, tie themselves into knots to avoid using the words “socialized” and “medicine” in the same paragraph, let alone the same sentence. Nevertheless, that is exactly what they are proposing… socialized medicine. And again, I expect ignorance to overcome logic and sound reasoning as the government shoves socialized medicine down the throats of American citizens and, in so doing, bring about the collapse of the best healthcare system in the world.
If you are one of those who actually think they are doing this because they care about you, you really need to see a shrink about your mental health, I mean your “delusions.”
America is about to experience something we have never had before in our history. Rationing of healthcare. There is simply no escaping it. Costs of healthcare will have to be brought to heel by the Obama administration and there is only one way to do that… and that is to ration it. In other words you will be placed on a waiting list and your ailment will be treated whenever they get to you, in a couple of weeks, a couple of months, or a couple of years, or maybe never. If you don’t get the care you require and you die, so much the better. That is the other way of bringing healthcare costs down.”
My wife had surgery a few days ago. The surgery was performed by a robot. Yep! A well-qualified doctor was supervising the robot, of course, but the robot did the work. The machine, we were told, costs 2 million bucks per copy. I pleaded with my wife, in the few minutes we had before she was whisked away to the operating room, to take extreme care, and for goodness sake, do not damage or break that 2 million dollar robot.
The machine is so complicated it sometimes takes hours to set it up between procedures and, as a result, it can only perform two surgeries a day.
It took only a few days, less than a week, to have the paperwork, blood work, radiological workup, and the surgery performed and return home, in my wife’s case. I was left sitting in one of those uncomfortable chairs in an ultra-modern waiting room, surrounded with huge TVs with drive-in movie size screens and stereo sound, plus a progress board, all lit up, and hanging on a wall, showing the progress of your patient in the surgical process as the hours dragged by. Those of us waiting had the option of relaxing in an area of the “pavilion” where hot coffee and snacks were offered. We were given a “beeper and every hour or so, the beeper would go off and someone from the surgical team would come out and bring us up to date on where, exactly, our patient was in the process and how, generally, the patient was tolerating the supreme invasion of a knife, even a knife wielded by a robot.
The kind of “express’ healthcare we experienced and described above, will be a thing of the past if Obama and the Democratic Socialist Party gets their way and they create and install a government run healthcare system. Of course, they are going to deny that and tell you that folks like me, who actually tell you the truth about such things, are “full of it” and don’t know what we are talking about. The sad thing about all of this is that by the time you find out that those of us warning against a government system are, in fact, telling you the truth, it will be too late and healthcare in the US will be scraping the bottom of the barrel like so many other socialized medicine programs around the globe. In other words it will be too cussed late to do anything about it!
One other thing: Do not feel secure, if, like me, you have your own private health Insurance, Why? Because the government run plan will run the private plans out of business. The private plans will not be government subsidized. The government plan(s) will. How can the private plans even be expected to compete against the government plans when the deck is so stacked against them? The simple answer is… they can’t. Soon you and I, with our private health care plans, will eventually wind up on the government health dole — whether we want to or not — and that’s the ultimate plan!
In an article titled: “Obama’s ‘Public’ Health Plan Will Bankrupt the Nation” Lawrence Kudlow says: “And does anybody believe Obama’s new “public” health-insurance plan isn’t really a bridge to single-payer government-run health care? And does anyone think this plan won’t produce a government gatekeeper that will allocate health services and control prices and therefore crowd-out the private-insurance doctor-hospital system?
Federal boards are going to decide what’s good for you and me. And what’s not good for you and me. These boards will drive a wedge between doctors and patients.” Kudlow goes on to say:”…. the Obama Democrats are determined to force through a state-run system that will bankrupt the country.” Read the entire article HERE.
Currently, there are four plans under consideration. One would simply expand Medicare. It would be a fully government run program and would not have to remain solvent to remain in business. The second would be set-up by the government and be required to remain solvent while establishing their own networks and payment schemes. Then there is the plan to have each state create it’s own state insurance following government guidelines. And the one with the least chance of making it out of committee is to have no government plan at all — and instead — clean up the current private insurance programs and police them better than they have in the past.
If all this sounds like a mess, believe me when I tell you that it IS a mess!
Look, you get nothing for free. Everything has a price, a cost. The cost may be hidden, but, believe me, it is there. The price of socialized medicine in America will be so unbelievably high if will be impossible to hide. The government will have to choose between continuing to raise taxes to pay for it, or reduce the amount of healthcare available to the patients.
There is always the threat of a tax revolt in America if the government continues to raise taxes. Many believe the tax revolt has already begun with the American Tea Parties. The first round if those tea parties saw an estimated one million Americans meeting, all across America, to protest taxes already levied by the government on her citizens. Another wave of Tea Parties are expected on July Fourth, the birthday of the nation, and many in the Republican Party now suspect the American Tea Parties are simply the birth of a third political party in America.
The GOP is between a rock and a hard place here. If they do not put up an extremely good fight against Socialized Medicine in America, there is good reason to believe there will be a mass migration of conservatives from the GOP and into other conservative political parties. The American Tea Party will be perfectly positioned to welcome those migrants into their conservative party.
The Democrat Socialist Party would be well advised to tread lightly on socialized medicine. It could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for them.
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J. D. Longstreet blogs daily at INSIGHT on Freedom … … http://csadispatch.blogspot.com/
