The Quiet Conservative January 29, 2008
Thoughts on the State of the Union Address
While watching the President’s last State of the Union address to the nation you could take note of
several key points. The Democratic Party does not want to renew the tax cuts, so that translates to
you paying more taxes without anyone having to say so outright. They want to praise the troops, but
will not allow success to be considered as possible in Iraq. The surge is working, but that only
seemed to make Senator Obama and his compatriots unhappy. Finally, they do not, in any way,
want you to have any control of health care.
When the President suggested tort reform and allowing people the right to control health care options
and have personal health savings accounts, the liberal portion of Congress sat on their hands. They
had sour faces even more hostile than when the President said that poor inner city children should
have a choice other than failing union controlled schools. But it was health care that truly frosted the
future Democratic contenders for the oval office. “Universal Health Care” is a misnomer. What it
means is that people are voting to give up control of their medical decisions to the Federal
bureaucracy.
In Massachusetts the vaunted health care plan by Republican presidential candidate Romney has
grown into a monster out of control. It is expected to cost between two and four billion more than
projected over ten years and only seven to eight percent of the new subscribers are paying full price.
Insurance premiums are expected to rise ten to twelve percent, double the national average. Who
would have guessed? People were taking advantage of the system and sucking it dry.
Can you think of a single Federal program that has been held in check? Any that have been deemed
no longer necessary? Or do programs, once funded, grow each year as more and more people latch
on to the taxpayer gravy train? Take out your paycheck and look at the stub. See how much in taxes
are being taken out before you get your money home. When a politician throws around talk of
millions and billions he is talking about money from your wallet. The government produces no
income. You produce it all.
When it comes to health care “Universal Health Care is the exact worst thing you can do hold down
costs and make health care affordable. Say a medical procedure costs X amount of dollars to
perform. The doctor and the hospital know that the government is going to fund 40% of X.
Therefore they charge three times X for the procedure in billing. Even if you don’t pay they make a
profit. There is no incentive to reduce any prices because then the government won’t be paying.
And, by the government I mean you, the taxpayer.
Contrast that with a pure market driven product...say a DVD player. When they first came out
they cost hundreds of dollars. But soon other companies began making them and the competition
heated up. Now you can find a DVD player better than the original expensive ones for thirty bucks
at Wal Mart. Competition drove the prices down. Competition brings new products to market.
When President Bush in his speech stated that clamping down on John Edwards ambulance chasing
and opening up competition would drop the cost of health care, and with personal savings accounts
make health care affordable for all, he was dead on. Just as his message was dead on arrival to a
Democratic Congress. The liberals don’t care about your health. They want control of your life.
Welfare reform was fought tooth and nail by liberals in the press and in Congress after the ’94
Republican takeover of the house. President Clinton only signed it when presented with numbers
that would override his veto. Yet since that time the effects can be seen in the phenomenal drop in
child poverty among African Americans. According to the Heritage Foundation for the preceding
twenty five years before the reform the statistics for African American children living in poverty
remained constant.
Since the reform there has been the greatest drop in history in that category and over 1.6 million
poor African American children have been lifted out of poverty, dropping the group to the lowest
level in history. You would think that people that regularly tout their “care” for minorities, women
and children, would seize on this and wish to promote the general welfare of it’s constituents by
strangling welfare itself. Yet, that is not the case. Democrats are fighting to extend unemployment
benefits that you, the taxpayer, pay for. They seek to increase entitlements to those that do not
work. Because it is all about power. What the government gives you, they can take away. And that
brings us back to health care.
Government run health care is a socialist idea. So it is important to contrast our future system with
those already in practice. So let’s start with Britain. The National Health Service (NHS) system is a
swollen monster employing 1.3 million people. The hospitals are in shambles and the horror stories of
waiting months for treatment, or dying while waiting for care, are legion. Recently in the news was
the proposal by some NHS doctors to refuse treatment to the elderly or the overweight as a
budgetary consideration. The system is so broken they hire foreign doctors desperately trying to fill
the unattractive vacancies. Sometimes they get more than they bargain for. Seven of the eight
Glasgow airport terror bombing suspects were NHS doctors. Sounds like a great system to emulate.
Ah, say the liberals. But what about Canada? How about there? That’s socialism lite. It could work
here. Sure it can, as long as there is a rich and independent nation next door to flee to when you
don't want to wait months. I’ll illustrate this by copying a section of Mark Steyn’s recent essay “Is
Canada’s Economy a Model for America? “Canadian dependence on the United States is particularly true
in health care, the most eminent Canadian idea looming in the American context. That is, public health care in
Canada depends on private health care in the U.S. A small news story from last month illustrates this:
A Canadian woman has given birth to extremely rare identical quadruplets. The four girls were born at a U.S.
hospital because there was no space available at Canadian neonatal intensive care units. Autumn, Brook,
Calissa, and Dahlia are in good condition at Benefice Hospital in Great Falls, Montana. Health officials said they
checked every other neonatal intensive care unit in Canada, but none had space. The Jepps, a nurse and a
respiratory technician were flown 500 kilometers to the Montana hospital, the closest in the U.S., where the
quadruplets were born on Sunday.
There you have Canadian health care in a nutshell. After all, you can’t expect a G-7 economy of only 30 million
people to be able to offer the same level of neonatal intensive care coverage as a town of 50,000 in remote, rural
Montana. And let's face it, there’s nothing an expectant mom likes more on the day of delivery than 300 miles in
a bumpy twin prop over the Rockies. Everyone knows that socialized health care means you wait and wait and
wait—six months for an MRI, a year for a hip replacement, and so on. But here is the absolute logical reduction
of a government monopoly in health care: the ten month waiting list for the maternity ward.”
(If you get the chance you should Google Mark Steyn’s writing at every opportunity. Read the rest
of the article listed above. This Canadian writer is the absolute best essayist of our current
generation.) The gist of what I’m trying to get across to you is that national health care is not going
to help anyone; because it is going to bankrupt the country, destroy the quality of care, and take
away your control over your own health and give it to the state.
Finally, what is lost in the false zeal of ‘doing it for the children’ is how many children will be killed
under nationalized health care. Both Senator Obama and Senator Clinton are passionate abortion
fans. If we have a national system we will have nationalized abortion providers. Every single
taxpayer will fund abortion on demand. Just as the left does not want religious exemptions for
pharmacists in prescribing the morning after pill, the leftists will not tolerate any Judeo-Christian
hesitation in putting a needle through a woman’s belly into the heart of a baby and injecting it with
poison.
So you watched with some depression as the factual solutions to sustainable and affordable health
care were dismissed with contempt and the people that considered themselves elitist marched on with
what they thought the people should be allowed to have. Then the next day you saw the everyday
people of Florida cheering in a crowd for the elitists while holding Hillary placards as she was
declared the winner of the Florida Democratic Primary.
You watched Alcee Hastings, congressman and co- chair for Senator Clinton’s presidential
campaign on the podium with Senator Clinton. The people seemed delighted to see the former
federal judge, (A man impeached and removed from office for corruption and perjury; one of only
six in the entire history of the United States.) holding a Hillary placard. You could have had a wry
thought about how she tended to surround herself with impeached perjurers. You watched the
senator herself, the architect of nationalizing health care, speaking to the people and you could have
had the sudden desire to find your Roman history books that were packed away in some back
bookcase. You should read again what happened when the people voted for themselves bread and
circuses.