The road to socialized medicine
By"America, America, God shed His grace on thee."
Many demoralized souls felt over recent months that this famous appeal in "America the Beautiful" had been falling on deaf ears.
But we’ve had a miracle. The socialized medicine freight train, chugging down the track with seeming insurmountable inevitability, has been, for the moment, derailed.
And, miraculously, the derailment has occurred because of values as well as economics.
Conservative Democrats have parted company with their liberal colleagues because the health care legislation in process will bust our federal budget and deliver new federal abortion funding.
Subsidized health care delivered through a proposed government insurance plan would inevitably mean abortion funding in the standard benefits package. The only way around this would be explicit language to prohibit it.
Attempts by Republicans in three House committees to insert such language were defeated, despite a handful of conservative Democrats joining them.
Now a broad coalition of pro-life organizations has initiated a campaign to fight any health care legislation permitting new government abortion funding.
President Obama has called this an attempt to "micromanage" health care benefits. Planned Parenthood has echoed these sentiments.
Is the concern of these pro-life groups legitimate? You bet it is.
Pro-abortion forces have been forever calling abortion health care. Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, defines its business as providing "reproductive health care."
Or consider our president’s thinking.
Then Senator Obama stated his disagreement with the Supreme Court decision banning partial birth abortion because it "departs from previous precedents safeguarding the health of pregnant women."
Partial birth abortion is a procedure in which a doctor kills an infant near birth by smashing its skull and sucking out its brains. The Supreme Court acted in 2007, thank God, to make this illegal. The decision permits the procedure if the life of the mother is danger.
Yet this is unacceptable to our president. He wants vaguely defined health considerations, beyond the question of the life of the mother, to permit what is essentially murder.
For pro-aborts, murder, if the victim is an unborn child at any stage of development, is health care.
So, yes, we can be sure that, without specific prohibiting language, legislation that directs new federal funding to individuals for health care will cover abortions.
There is particular irony that Obama and others championing health care reform insist that it’s unrelated to abortion concerns.
We hear a lot of talk about eliminating waste and having more preventative health care. But the most powerful health care initiative we could get is the last thing they will propose: Traditional family values. The same values undermined by the liberal abortion regime and moral relativism they promote.
A wide array of studies shows married individuals physically and mentally healthier than singles.
Among the 47 million uninsured that we hear so much about, two thirds are unmarried.
And, according to a recent study on the uninsured published by the Employment Policies Institute, "lack of health insurance is not likely to be the major factor causing higher mortality rates among the uninsured." The higher mortality rates tie more closely to behavior that leads to poverty, such as poor education and dysfunctional lifestyles.
Let’s capitalize on the miracle that has occurred with a truth initiative about our health care crisis.
New government bean counters, programs, taxes, spending, and subsidies are not the answer.
For those currently on private plans, we need less, not more government. More competition and health savings accounts.
For the uninsured, break the cycle of poverty with school choice and rebuilding families in poor communities.
Health care is not about bureaucrats but about individual human behavior. We should be talking about a culture of life and the traditional values that sustain it.
(Star Parker is an author and president of CURE, Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education (www.urbancure.org). She can be reached at parker(at)urbancure.org)
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With one side of your mouth you applaud efforts at using laws and bureaucracy to stop partial-birth abortions. And with the other side of your mouth you say, “Health care is not about bureaucrats but about individual human behavior.”
Was it the best of times or the worst of times, Mr. Dickens? You can scarcely have it both ways.
Gazelle
I was born with nothing and I have most of it left.
An exercise in mealy-mouthed double-speak, nothing more. That the health insurance industry is calling in their markers among these bought-and-paid for political lackeys is no surprise, anymore than this on-going assault on the truth (waaaaaaaa, it’s ‘socialized medicine’).
All of this diversionary abortion bilge is just that; diversionary bilge. The insurance industry wins, thanks to duplicitous, weak-willed politicians and a tsunami of money spent to keep the status quo.
Score card: insurance industry 1, Americans 0.
Nothing but an anti-abortion screed by an anti-abortion cultist regurgitating all the myths canards, and outright lies.
On that there is no such medical procedure, anyone using the term ‘partial birth abortion’ is either completely ignorant or intentionally lying.
I’ve upped my standards….now up yours! – Pat Paulson
This argument about “socialized medicine” is a bit tiresome. No one is arguing for socialism, but we do have “socialized medicine” in this country.
When a soldier is wounded on the battlefield, he receives treatment from a government-employed medic, using government-provided medicines and equipment. That is “socialized medicine.”
When he is evacuated to a field hospital by government-provided transportation, he is treated by government-employed physicians and nurses in government-owned facilities using government-provided medicines and equipment. That is “socialized medicine.”
He can be treated in the US at the Walter Reed Medical facility in Maryland under “socialized medicine.”
Every military fort, base, ship at sea practice “socialized medicine” in their hospitals, clinics and sick bays.
Veterans have long praised the superb treatment from the Veterans Administration in government-owned clinics and hospitals, with treatment by government-employed physicians and nurse, using government-provided drugs and equipment. That is “socialized medicine.”
If these right-wing crazies are so against “socialized medicine” let them try to end “socialism” on the battlefield, in field hospitals, Walter Reed and the VA where their stupidity and hypocrisy will be exposed more than they already have been.
There is a difference between military and socialized medicine. Those soldiers have traded their freedom and often their health for a chance to serve their nation (us) and in return they get free care. What has a socialist traded or sacrificed to get socialized medicine?
Mostly just money out of others pockets.
‘
Well, the troglodytes are alive and well!
They are so concerned that pathetic mistakes may see the light of day — before they immediately die!
http://health2u.exteen.com/images/blog/090302Anencephaly2.jpg
http://www.geocities.com/anencephalygabriel@sbcglobal.net/anencephalicinant.jpg
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woddy188
Everyday people who never fought in Americas wars, drive on socialized roads, and over socialize bridges. They send their kids to socialized schools. Some may drink water from socialized water systems, and get their electricity from socialized utility companies. So why guys like you freak out about socialized medicine is beyond me. There has always been a mixture of government and private entities in this country.
I could point out the roads, bridges, schools, water, and electrical systems are failing. But I’m not against using some taxes to pay for infrastructure if it is needed and not some bridge to no where in Alaska. I hear Japan has 3 bridges to no where and they are much more socialist than the United States. Well they were anyhow…
I just took extreme offense at the suggestion that military health care was some pure socialist institution. They earned that care. That and I know lots of veterans that would question the praise leveled at the care they receive. It’s been getting better recently but it has been totally inadequate in the past.
And hey, you too can join the military and get that health care for “free.” Obama just happens to be looking for 30,000 more good men and woman to surge in Afghanistan so put up or shut up. Or do you not want that “free” health care so much after all?
Let’s take a walk down reality lane…
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/13158
Reality?
Now THAT is the ultimate in irresponsible journalism and posting. The URL to which you point us lists dozens of sins being perpetrated upon the American public, things like this:
• Page 22: Mandates audits of all employers that self-insure!
• Page 29: Admission: your health care will be rationed!
• Page 30: A government committee will decide what treatments and benefits you get (and, unlike an insurer, there will be no appeals process)
And this:
• Page 127: The AMA sold doctors out: the government will set wages.
• Page 145: An employer MUST auto-enroll employees into the government-run public plan. No alternatives.
• Page 126: Employers MUST pay healthcare bills for part-time employees AND their families.
• Page 241: Doctors: no matter what speciality you have, you’ll all be paid the same (thanks, AMA!)
• Page 321: Hospital expansion hinges on “community” input: in other words, yet another payoff for ACORN.
Page 1131: Those who are not registered Democrats will have to prove they had been born (and not born again) before that can get any services other than prefrontal lobotomies. I added this one to see if anyone was paying attention.
There is just one little problem, dear lady. There is absolutely NO CITATION to show us whence these excerpts were taken. NOT ONE!
Here is the author’s revelation at the bottom of this list of sins:
A tip of my hat to my friend, Ben Cerruti, for providing this look at the Obamanation called Obamacare.
WOW! Wonderful. Ben Cerruti. A man with a name like Ben Cerruti must be a prime source for information about the health care bill.
There were several comments appended to the URL you cited. Here’s one of them:
“This excellent list of hidden info will help me spread the word of specifics of Obamacare. People need to see around the slick speeches and know what they’re really in for. Thank you!”
I applaud such critical thinking. This list will go around and around, gaining a toehold in our national psyche, because someone named Ben Cerruti, whoever the HELL that is, passed it to some Canadian right wing kook named Alan Caruba.
You have been sold a real bill of goods.
The health care system is and will always be ruled by the insurance companies. This circus that we have been watching over the last few months is nothing but a political scam. Every politician in D.C. owes their souls to the insurance companies and drug companies. Do you think for a moment that the working class is going to win out???? The “puppet show” will continue for a few months, but in the end, nothing will be different.
Just like China. By arguing that the government has the right to prohibit abortions based on moral grounds, you acknowledge that the government has the right to force abortions on moral grounds. Just like China.
Ben Cerutti is a Brentwood, CA real estate agent and a self-proclaimed “lifetime conservative”. The following is a sample of his writings on the internet.
“B.O. is an economic ignoramus or a devious Marxist” – wherein he postulates that it wasn’t Wall Street that caused the current economic crisis, by taking unnecessary and excessive risks, it was the Federal Reserve! “The economic crisis that occurred … was initiated when the Fed placed an excessive amount of money into the economy… This inordinate amount of money deposited into our banking system HAD TO BE LOANED OUT (my emphasis) since that is how banks make money …and the result was the accelerated development of creative loans.” So, you see, the Fed loaned too much money to the banks FORCING them to make bad loans, like the devil makes good people sin. It’s all so clear.
“Madrassas and American Public Schools” – In this little piece, he equates American public schools with Maddrassas (Islamic schools) ”since they both graduate students that have been indoctrinated with a unilateral social ideology…[the U.S.] can tie the funding to those in the private sector [to] a basic curriculum that meets the requisites of the three R’s and does not teach subject matter advocating anarchy.” Damn the federal government for not funding schools to teach anarchy!
I don’t know about anyone else but my schools taught us to appreciate American ideals and good citizenship.