Yesterday, Barack Obama took his dog and pony show on the road to highlight his push for nationalized health care. The Townhall event was a sham as all the attendees were hand picked and all the questions were pre-screened. The highlight of the Townhall event was a person by the name of Susan Smith from Virginia. She told a sob story of being ill for years and not being able to work. She told of the high cost of going to a doctor and her inability to pay for that cost. She then received a hug from Mr. Obama.

Susan told a great story. She did it with great emotion. Everyone in the audience at the Townhall meeting was moved, but they were supposed to be moved. The television cameras took it in and I am sure many people nationwide believed her story. When I heard it on the radio I believed it, until I heard the rest of the story. Susan Smith worked for Senator Tom Daschle during his hearings on health care. She chaired the meeting in Northwest Virginia. At that time, she exhibited no signs of any illness. She was the epitome of health and fitness. Those meetings with Tom Daschle were less than one year ago. Either a lot happened in one year or she is telling a whopper of a story right now. Since her story was supposed to cover many years, I tend to believe the whopper story. That makes that portion of the Townhall meeting completely false.

On Tuesday, the press was talking to the Press Secretary about how tightly controlled the audience was for this Townhall meeting. The Press Secretary tried to gloss over the fact, but Helen Thomas spoke up and said it was the most controlled audience she had experienced in her 50 years in Washington. That was quite damning evidence if you ask me. Helen Thomas is usually in the back pocket of the liberals, but I think that this controlled environment is getting to her. The other reporters were starting to chafe at the restrictions put on them by the Obama administration. The bloom may be off the rose for the Obama administration. At least, I hope the bloom is off the rose. We need honest reporting coming from the news media. What we have had is Democrat talking points coming from the news media. That is not reporting that is propaganda of the worst kind. The press was freer in the former Soviet Union than the press is behaving today.

The health care initiative of Barack Obama is as false as the Townhall meeting that tried to sell it to the American people. Obama constantly says that the public option is there to increase competition. When Medicare was started, there were a lot of insurance companies that served the older population. After Medicare came on the scene, these insurance companies quickly went into other lines of insurance. The same thing would happen if the public option ever became law. But, the public option would not have to become law for the government to control health care. They would just set very restrictive rules for the insurance companies and doctors to follow and it would amount to the same thing. The only difference would be that you would pay a company instead of the government. The final outcome would be the same.

What got us into the current mess in healthcare is government involvement. To get us out of this mess, we need to remove government from the healthcare industry as much as possible. That would allow competition to take place. In medicine where there is no government interference, prices for services have gotten cheaper or the quality has greatly improved. For example: Years ago, it cost about $1000 per eye to get your eyes fixed by a process called radial keratotomy. Now, it costs between $300 and $1000 per eye to get various laser surgeries. The radial keratotomy cut the cornea of your eye. These laser surgeries do no such thing. They are safer and more reliable. The cost is the same or less than the old procedure. What got us this reduced cost is competition.

In other medicine, government red tape costs doctors and hospitals millions of dollars to fill out forms. This drives up costs and lowers the quality of care. Under socialized medicine, this problem will get worse. Paperwork always gets worse when the government gets involved. When you take the government out of things, paperwork goes down and costs go down.

That is why we have to stop Obamacare from becoming law. If it takes hold the United States as a country of individualism is finished. We would become another European socialist state that will not defend itself. We have to keep America free. Our ancestors fought to give us this freedom. Let’s not give up the freedom our Founding Fathers fought for because of some lies from the White House. We are better than that. We deserve better than that. We need to stand up to this attempt at tyranny and say, “NO!” If we say we do not want socialized medicine at this time, it is defeated for at least a generation or more. That will save our children and our grandchildren the disasters that come with socialized medicine.