That the Democrats “government option” is in trouble showed another sign. The White House website is asking for people to make comments to the White House if they hear or see any comments against the healthcare proposal. Basically, they are asking people in the United States to snitch on one another. When you stoop to that level of activity, you have lost the debate.

Democrats continue to be hammered when they hold Townhall meetings in their districts. They continue to complain that the people that are giving them trouble are paid by the insurance industry. They are wrong. These people are local people. They are motivated to do something because they see a loss of liberty and feel a need to act.

Last night, I had to move my car and heard Mark Levin talk about why people are turning out to these Townhall meetings. I wish I could repeat what he said because he put it so powerfully. Basically, Mark said that people are motivated by that same force that helped us win WWII and all the other wars. Americans are a forgiving people. We can take a lot of abuse without reacting. People continually mistake this lack of reaction as a lack of resolve. As Admiral Yamamoto put it after Pearl Harbor, “I fear we have awakened a sleeping Giant.” The reaction that the Democrats are getting at these Townhall meetings is the awakening of the sleeping Giant. We have taken all we are going to take. From now on, we will fight for every inch of ground. Anyone who opposes us will be defeated, just as the Germans and Japanese were defeated at the end of WWII.

The Democrats have not figured out what is happening. They look out at the landscape and see an America that will take a lot of abuse. They also believe that America will take this abuse because she has been conditioned to take it after 70 years of liberalism in our schools and courts. They cannot see what is happening because it is not happening to them or to their liberal allies. It is only happening to conservatives, independents and even liberals that believe in liberty. The Democrats are looking at the America they want to see, not the America as it is. That will be their undoing. They are acting defiant in the face of this opposition. That would be the correct action if this were isolated grass fires. This is not a situation where there are isolated grass fires. This is a situation where there is a truly mass movement.

This mass movement is not a Republican movement or a movement by any other group. Whoever gets out in front of this movement and grabs the reins will have a platform to truly make major changes in 2010 and 2012. That would take a politician with vision and one that is willing to take risks. Right now this movement is still in its infancy. Getting in front of it now will reap great rewards down the line. Waiting until it is fully formed might yield big results, but much less than getting on board in the beginning. The risk is also there if you get in front in the beginning. You have to read the American people clearly. You have to articulate what they want. If you get it wrong, you will crash and burn and never be heard from again. It is much safer to wait until the movement has taken form. You also take the chance that someone else might take the lead. This is a great opportunity for someone to show us his/her mettle. Who will be that person?

I hope that the Democrats continue to misread the movement up through the 2010 elections. If they continue to misread the movement for that long, conservatives will be elected to erase much of the terrible things done in 2009 and 2010. Notice that I said conservatives, not Republicans. It remains to be seen if the Republicans can harness the energy this movement is generating. If they can, then Republicans will be transcendent. If not, some other party will take over for the Republicans.

Last night, Barack Obama held a press conference about his health care initiative. He appeared articulate and in command of the issues when he was presenting his information. When you check his facts, on the other hand, you find that they were made up or completely false. The news media did its usual job of rolling over so Obama could rub its tummy. Just when a couple of them start to ask tough questions, you think they might ask one in the press conference. If they asked a mild question, Barack Obama danced around the issue without answering it for about 5 minutes. As a result, this press conference had to be one with the fewest questions asked since the invention of the radio.

I did not get to hear the press conference. I work nights and so was at work during the conference. I did get to hear Hugh Hewitt make a comment about the opening statement. Hugh said that the opening statement was completely false. On the way home from work, I did get to hear part of the Mark Levin show where he went over the press conference as it was happening. When I was listening the show was delayed by at least 3 hours. The little I heard told me that Obama sounded like he knew what he was talking about, but the facts I knew were completely different than the facts he was giving at the press conference.

The first point that stuck out to me was when Obama was talking about the deficit. I may get the numbers wrong as I was driving in the dark when I heard them. He mentioned that he inherited a deficit. That is a true statement. The projected deficit when he took office was around $200-250 billion. He projected Bush deficits over the next 10 years and came up with a figure of about $9.3 trillion. He then said that he had done wonders with the economy and that the deficit over those same ten years was only going to be $7 trillion. That was a savings of $2.3 trillion. As I remember, the deficit for the first six months of office is about $1 trillion +. The only way his figures can be correct is if he did not expect Bush to collect taxes and that all those taxes went to paying down his debts. Then, I might believe his numbers. Obama is going to rack up deficits in one year that will dwarf all the deficits of all the Presidents from Washington to George W. Bush, combined.

Obama also went on and on that his health care plan was going to save money. He must be the only person on the planet that believes that. The Congressional Budget Office, ran by Democrats, says that the plan will increase costs by $1.3 trillion. And, those costs will not keep down the regular costs of medicine. We all know how accurate the Congressional Budget Office estimates are. When they estimated the cost of Medicare, they said it would cost $9 billion by 1990. By 1990, Medicare costs were over $66 Billion. Other estimates have been even worse than that one. Using that as the baseline, would peg the actual costs of this health care bill at about $9.1 trillion. That sounds a lot more like what the actual costs will be. The $1 trillion figure just seemed way too low.

There is a way to almost instantly reduce the cost of health insurance and then the resulting cost of health care in this country. Right now, health insurance is a highly regulated business. Policies have to contain certain things in order to be sold in a particular state. That means I have to purchase maternity insurance even though my wife and I are both over 60 years of age. We should be able to drop that coverage and then reduce our insurance cost by that much. Other provisions in health insurance are also required by the states and federal government. If we eliminated those requirements, health insurance costs would drop dramatically.

The other related item that would greatly reduce the cost of health insurance is to make health insurance completely portable. Right now, my policy in Arizona covers me if I go to other states. If I move to Georgia, I have to buy a different policy based on Georgia’s requirements. I should be able to find a policy that I want at a price I want to pay and buy it. Say I live in New York where insurance costs are about the highest, I should be able to buy my policy from a company anywhere in the country. Then, I could pay the same low cost for insurance that they pay in Wisconsin.

If those are the only things done to reduce costs, it would greatly reduce the cost to the consumer. There are a lot of other ideas that would get more people insured and reduce the cost of medical practices. Those will have to be the topic for another post. I have lots of ideas on the topic. Strangely, none of them involve the government, except to remove it from the scene.

One thing that the Obama administration does that really bothers me is to declare everything an emergency. Then, after declaring it an emergency the solution is to ram a bill through Congress that no member of Congress has read.

Congress does not take orders from the White House. Members of the House and Senate are expected to be knowledgeable about the bills they vote on. A great example of how this system is broken is the health care bill currently being rammed down the throats of Congress. Even the White House has no idea what is in the bill. I have not heard or read one member of Congress or the Executive Branch who has said they know what is contained in the health care bill. This includes the President. Who said yesterday that he had no idea what was contained in the bill. Since nobody knows what is in the bill, shouldn’t we take a step back and let everyone read it first? That would seem to be the prudent thing to do. If a member of Congress did not want to read the actual bill, they could assign a member of their staff to read the bill and prepare a summary for them to read. This second method would get them over the hump, but is clearly not the best option.

We all saw what happened when nobody reads a bill. The stimulus bill was passed because it was so important for the country that it passes immediately. Come to find out that most of the bill will not even take effect for years. When you do not read a bill, you can expect to be surprised at what is contained in the bill. You cannot rely on the White House, regardless of which party holds the White House, to tell you the truth. You have to do your own research to find out if there is anything in there that you object to. If you oppose funding abortions, you better know if the bill proposes to fund abortions or your credibility is shot with your constituents. The people that vote for you expect you to read each and every bill before you vote on that bill. If you want government funding of abortions and the bill prohibits government funding of abortions, you had better know about it before the vote.

Is it me, or have members of Congress gotten lazy about reading each bill. It used to be that you could guarantee that each member of the House and Senate had read and was familiar with all aspects of a bill before it was debated before each chamber. Now, you can tell that some have not read the bills from the comments they make in the debates. One of the problems is the voters. We keep electing these politicians that do not take the time to do their job. The reason we keep electing them is that we do not do our job. If a politician messes up big time in year one of his term, by the end of his term people have forgotten about it altogether. We need to make sure that we keep after these politicians to keep them honest. If we do our job better, you can guarantee that the politicians will do their jobs better so they can keep their jobs.

Politicians understand votes very well. If they perceive that if they vote a certain way that they will lose their next race, they will not vote that way. This is true, even if the politician believes strongly in the idea. That is because most politicians are not “true believers”. Politicians will jump from issue to issue and flip-flop on both sides of an issue. What keeps them in check is a block of voters that believe strongly in an idea and threatening the politician’s job. The threat does not have to be in the open. Just having a group together that will support an idea is enough to get political support from the politician. You also have to make sure that the politician knows that you support a particular issue and that you have votes behind you. That will change a politician’s mind faster than anything else.

There are a lot of things coming out of the Obama administration as a smoke screen for the real goal of taking over the healthcare system in the country. The goal of taking over the health care system is not to improve the delivery of health care or even to provide health insurance to those that are uninsured. No, the goal is to give the federal government more control over the lives of every day Americans as possible.

If you read between the lines on what is said by the Obama administration, you can figure out what they are talking about. They are talking about reducing the cost of delivering Medicare. There is only one way to reduce the cost of delivering health care to the elderly is to reduce the health care to the elderly. That means that the elderly will not get the same level of medical care as they get today. Instead of treating them as long as they live, they will stop receiving medical care over a certain age for the high cost services. For routine services, there would be no change. The only change would come if the person needed a hip replacement or something like that. Today, that person would get the hip replacement. Under Obamacare, that person would be denied care because they were too old for the country to receive a benefit for their hip replacement. That would mean a shorter live span for those getting up there in years. You know it is a bad deal when the Congress votes to include everyone except for Congress under this government option.

Once Obamacare becomes entrenched, they will start making lifestyle changes for people receiving government health care. They will deny care for lung cancer if the person had been smoking or some other lifestyle choice that is out of favor with the Congress. This is the scary part. They could mandate changes in lifestyle that people would not agree with. The people could fight back, but would have no chance at winning because they have no power. I do not care to have the government tell me what I should do or not do with my life. I want to be the boss of me as Walter E. Williams likes to say.

The cost of Obamacare is another objection. The Congressional Budget Office has put the cost of Obamacare (House version) at over $1.3 trillion. Max Baucus in the Senate has kept that plan under wraps, so nobody knows what is included in that plan. We all know how the Congressional Budget Office consistently underestimates the cost of programs. They will estimate that something will cost $1 billion over at 5 year period and at the end of 5 years it is costing at least $10 billion for just one year. That means that within the 10 year lifespan of the Congressional Budget Office estimate, we can expect that the cost will be a minimum of twice $1.3 trillion and more like 10 times that cost. That is just the cost that will be added to what we would already spend on health care. The other dirty little secret is that only about ½ to 2/3 of the estimated 40 million uninsured people would receive insurance. The other 1/3 to ½ would still be uninsured at the end of the 10 years. All that cost and you do not even do what the supposed goal of the program is. That program would have to be considered a failure and we haven’t even taken it out on the road for a test drive.

There is only one reason the Democrats and Obama want this health care bill passed and that can be summed up in one word, POWER. It has nothing to do with insuring the uninsured as their plan states. It has everything to do with giving the government power over individuals, so they can tell those individuals what to do. It also is designed to guarantee that people will vote Democrat. The Democrats would go into every election telling people that the “evil” Republicans want to take your health care away. That system of envy works very well in keeping the voters from voting for the other party. After a while the other party adopts your socialist agenda and you have won the war.

The time to defeat this “evil” plan is now. Right now, before the Democrats implement it. If it gets implemented, it will be too late to go back to what we have now. We would be stuck with the socialist plan until some country shows us the way out. England and Canada are both starting to move away from their socialist plan that we are trying to adopt. How ironic, we are trying to emulate England and Canada and England and Canada are trying to emulate us.

Sign this petition to help put a stop to Obama care. Just click on this link, http://www.freeourhealthcarenow.com/.

The Democrats unveiled their healthcare plan to the world yesterday. It has a price tag of $1.3 trillion. Everyone knows that the price tag is about 5-10 times below the real cost of the plan, but it is the official cost that everyone will use in the debate to come. The plan takes every bad idea that has been floated over the past 6 months and makes it worse. About the only good thing I can say about the plan is that they printed it on American paper and the printing is clear and correct.

Officially the plan only taxes the “rich” to pay for the huge cost. The problem is that if you took all of the income of the so-called “rich” you would not pay for the plan at all. So, the plan has escalators built into the plan to make sure it does get paid for, and that it includes everyone, not just the “rich”. But, the Democrats will claim that the plan only taxes the rich, which is partially true if you buy their rich argument.

Barack Obama has made a big point of saying that nobody will be forced out of their health insurance plan into the government health insurance. This plan of the Democrats puts 119 million Americans into the government health insurance plan and out of their insurance. Either they will have to change their plan or Barack Obama has been feeding us a pack of lies during this initial debate on health insurance. Of course, Barack Obama feeding us a pack of lies is nothing new, but still it is not something the Democrats should want to highlight like this.

The premise built into the plan is that people are “evil”. Why I say this is that there are multiple penalties throughout the plan for people who will not follow the plan. If this plan is so great, everyone should want to participate and these penalties will not be needed. These penalties are built in as part of the way to pay for the government health insurance. Whatever happened to the American principle of freedom? This forced compliance with a law that is supposed to be for our own good is just not the type of thing that is in line with traditional American values. This is more the kind of thing you saw in communist countries, not in freedom loving countries like America.

There are boards set up to control every aspect of health care. These boards are responsible for their portion of the health care system. They are not responsible to the people. Their job is to control costs as their first priority. Their second priority is to see that people get the best care available. In the case of a conflict, cost wins over quality every time. At least that is how it works in every other country that has this type of system. That is why the health care in countries with single-payer systems and multiple boards have health care that is second class at best. People wait for months or even years for treatment. The hope is that the person will die or get better before treatment is provided. That way the government can reduce the cost by not providing the service. It is much cheaper to bury someone than it is to keep them alive in the last stages of life. The government position in ALL single-payer system countries is to let the person die, thereby saving a lot of money that can then be used elsewhere. My experience with the health care system in England in the early 1970’s was eye opening to say the least. The clinics looked like the kind of clinic that I saw in movies about doctors in the 1930’s and 40’s. At that time, the health care was not to the point where people had to wait a long time for treatment, but the quality was definitely below what I was used to in the United States.

Why anyone in the United States would want to follow England or Canada into the morass that is the single-payer system is beyond my understanding. There is no medical reason for it to occur. The only reason to go to a single-payer system is so the government will have more control over our lives. We have too much government control over our lives at this time; we do not need more control. We need to get rid of some government control and get back to the freedoms that our Founding Fathers fought for.

I listened to a You-Tube video of a Mike Wallace interview with Ayn Rand. In the interview, she predicted the time we are living in right now. That was really scary to hear her basically tell Mike Wallace what a future America would be like if we did not correct the error of our ways. Her solution was to have a separation of commerce and state, just like there is a separation of church and state. If we followed that principle, we would be the strongest country in the world and nobody would ever want to mess with us in any way. Terrorists would pick other targets. Dictators would make peace with us and try to live with the regulations we put on them. The world would be much better off if we just separated commerce and state. That was a great idea when she said it. It is an even better idea right now, especially with Barack Obama dropping the ball every time he gets the chance.

Today on my drive to work, I was listening to Bruce Jacobs. He started reading an article from the newspaper Pravda. The Russian government owns Pravda and tells it what to print. So, it was a bit surprising to hear hard hitting journalism actually coming from that newspaper. It was a better summation of what is happening in the United States than I have heard from any newspaper or online source to date. This report from Pravda can be found at KFYI.com.

Pravda said that America is now moving away from capitalism and toward Marxism. This happened because the American public has been dumbed down because of a poor education system. The education system teaches pop culture instead of the classics. So that the American public know more about American Idol than what is going on in their own government. The article also said that the final step in the change from capitalism to Marxism was the election of Barack Obama.

They praised Barack Obama for his lavish spending ways. They said that if this spending continues for another year, which seems likely. Nobody is stepping up to stop him from spending. The United States would resemble the Weimar Republic at best or Zimbabwe at worst.

The Weimar Republic was Germany prior to 1932. It had high inflation and high unemployment. The unrest that resulted from those problems led to the election of Adolf Hitler. Part of the problem with the Weimar Republic was the restrictions placed on it after World War I. Those restrictions and payments that it required made Germany go broke.

Zimbabwe is an African country that should be the richest country in Africa that does not have oil. Instead it has an inflation rate that is over 1000%. Everyone is poor and the government is in power only because it has all of the guns. Mugabe, the ruler, kicked the white landowners out of the country and put city people on the land and told them to live there. The country had fed the southern part of Africa. After he kicked out the people who knew how to grow food, the country had to import food to survive. Now, everyone is living in a state of constant starvation.

The American media sees no problem with anything that the Obama administration has done. They have hidden all the faults (however large) and emphasized any potential benefit (however small). It has gotten so bad, that I have a rule of thumb. That rule is: If the main stream media reports it as true, it is false, unless I confirm it as true from a trusted source.

Right now, the main stream media is hiding one of the biggest scams to come along since global warming. That scam is Obamacare, the Obama administration takeover of health care or 1/7^th of the American economy. If this happens as rumor has it, we will all be sorry. The rumors have the plan as some form of one payer system, disguised as an insurance plan. It will be rolled out as government insurance, to compete with private insurance. It won’t take long and the only health insurance you will be able to buy will be government health insurance. Then, we have a one-payer system, just like England and Canada. They do not like their system and are trying to think of ways to get rid of it. We will not like this one and will complain, but it will be too late. After the fact complaining will not do the trick. We have to stop it before it becomes the law, rather than after.

Their might be a silver lining to the Obamacare plan. It would be that the wealthy would have a health care plan that would be cash only, no insurance. That would be a market based system and would be the envy of the world. Unfortunately for the great unwashed in the US, only the wealthy would be able to have access to any doctor they wanted. Most of us would have to go to the doctor that the government insurance plan told us we would see.

Our problem in the US is that we have a media that is not acting like the “free” media it is supposed to be. A free media would be a watchdog media on both liberal governments and conservative governments. Our media is a watchdog only on the conservative governments. On the liberal governments, it is their lapdog. It is like they become our Pravda, only a willing Pravda, not paid Pravda. That is much, much worse than the real Pravda.

The third of the disasters awaiting the country under this President is the complete and total destruction of our health care system. As a reminder, the other two are the appointment of the Supreme Court Justice and the implementation of a form of the Fairness Doctrine. Any one would be cause for alarm; all three are definitely a call to arms.

Our health care system is the best in the world. For evidence, I give the example that people in other countries come here to get health care, not to socialist countries. People come from Canada, England, Germany and France, where they have socialized “free” health care, to get treatment. Why do they come? They can get treatment right away and get the latest technology.  Countries that have socialized medicine always end up rationing treatments because of cost. Countries that have socialized medicine always postpone adopting the latest technologies because they cost a lot. Here, we adopt the latest technology and have treatments available to anyone.

Are there problems with our current system of health care? Sure, there are lots of problems. The biggest is that the government has become a player in the health care system and messed it up. The government needs to step back and let the system work. Government should be there when there are problems with health care, like poor treatments and the like. Government should not dictate what insurance may and may not cover for a person. Government should not dictate what a doctor should be paid. The health care system should determine those for itself.

We could easily reform the current system and not lose anything. We would still have the latest technologies and have it readily available. One of the problems is that people are not able to choose the coverage they want on their insurance. For instance, I am 60 and my wife is 61, yet we are paying to cover us for possibly having a baby. That is unlikely. We would like to have a policy without maternity care. If people could choose what coverage they want, insurance costs would go down. Also, everyone should be able to pick from the same list of things to cover. Policies would be portable, in that the insurance you buy in Arizona would be the same that you could buy in New York. This would make things easier for everyone. The insurance companies would save because the complexity would go down. People would save because they would not pay for things they do not want or need.

The second thing to do is have people set up health savings accounts. From these accounts, the people would pay for primary care. Catastrophic care would be covered by insurance. Doctors would then receive payments from the people’s health savings accounts instead of insurance. The doctors would be competing for patients instead of taking insurance payments. If you wanted more patients, you could lower your price and get them. If you felt you had enough patients, you could leave your payment the same or raise it. This would put market forces at work in medicine. Look at what market forces have done to eye surgery. When it first came out it was $1000 per eye. Now the cost is $300 per eye, for more advanced surgery. That is the kind of thing that would happen in this case.

There are other things that can be done to tweak our current system to make it better. These are a couple that I thought of. We do not have to take our system and make it socialist. Under socialism, the costs go up, the quality goes down and rationing goes into effect. That has happened in every country it has been tried. We would not be the one exception. The people that would feel the effects first would be the handicapped and the elderly. Those people would have their health care curtailed first to save costs. Their death rates would go up. The regular public would not see anything, except maybe to an elderly or handicapped loved one. By the time it filtered to the general public, the sense of entitlement would have become ingrained and it would be impossible to get rid of socialized medicine. That is the problem the countries that have it are having. They want to get rid of this massive problem, but everyone feels entitled to the care, even though it is terrible. We cannot let it happen here.

A couple of examples of rationing that I would like to point out from the recent past from Canada. One I saw when I was in Spokane last Thanksgiving. Canadian women were being sent to the US to have babies because the province (Alberta or British Columbia) had reached their quota for babies for the quarter and could not accommodate any more. Where would they go if we had the same system? Where would our women go if we had the same system? The second example is from back east. A man had a growth on his brain and needed an MRI according to his doctor. He was going to have to wait for 3 months to have one in Canada. He went to Buffalo and had the MRI. He brought the MRI back to his doctor and was told he was going to have to wait 6 months to see a specialist to determine if he would take the growth out. So, the man went back to Buffalo and had the surgery. He would have died without going to Buffalo. That is exactly what the Canadian health system wanted him to do. It is easier to pay for a dead person than a live one.

Socialized medicine would be the end of America as she has been for over 200 years. She would still be called the United States, but her heart would be cut out. Innovation and individualism that has been the thing that has made the difference in the last 100 years would end. We would turn into another Europe. We would exist. We would not try to excel. There is a huge difference between the two. I would rather try and fail than not to try at all.

Democrats are focused on giving us socialized medicine, whether we want it or not. Based on an article I saw written by Hugh Hewitt, the Democrats have a speeded up timetable to deliver socialized medicine by the end of the year. They will meet in conferences in the House and Senate in June. Vote on the bill in July and August. Since the two bills will not be the same, they never are, they will meet in conference in October or November and vote on the finished bill in December. That would put the bill on the President’s desk before January one.

Exactly what they have planned at this time is not completely clear. You can be sure that it is a form of single-payer health care. That is the type they have in England and Canada. This is ignoring the fact that in England and in Canada, patients have to wait for long periods of time to get regular health care. If you have some life threatening illness, the wait time will probably be longer than your life expectancy. That is deliberate because the system is trying to save money. The easiest way for them to save money on health care is to not give it to you when you absolutely need it.

The most expensive time of a person’s health care life is the last six months. That is because the person is in the process of death. The person and the family are trying hard to save the life. So, everything possible is tried to try and save the person’s life. If the government gets in charge of health care, you can be sure that this type of measure will be the first casualty of the budget knife. That would save a lot of money they could then use on other health care measures.

Another problem is whether to give transplants and other expensive operations to people that are elderly at the time. These expensive operations would give that person a new life, but for how long? If you cut out these operations, you could save a lot of money to be used elsewhere. The people would die soon anyway, so who cares if they die a year or so early. That just means less population to take care of.

Handicapped people require a lot of medical attention. If you ration their health care, you could save a lot of money. I could go on, but I think that you get the point. The sick, elderly and handicapped will be the ones to feel the budget crunch first. For the first couple of years, we will probably not notice that much of a difference, if they do it right. But, over time, the system will fail just like it has in England and Canada.

The biggest problem in England and Canada is that they do not have enough doctors. Doctors are now government employees. As government employees, they unionize like all government employees are doing. They strike for higher wages and better conditions. Fewer people go into the medical field because they can make more money elsewhere. The doctors that we do get out of medical school are not as good as the doctors we turn out today. The reason is they are not as motivated to be doctors and they see it as a job, not a calling. That problem is already turning up with younger doctors. Older doctors see the medical profession as a calling and are willing to put in long hours. Younger doctors want a life as well as medicine. There is nothing wrong with that, but it means you need more doctors than we have today to serve the same number of people. We will be producing fewer doctors, not more.

I will probably not live long enough to see the system collapse like it is in England and Canada. It will take 30-40 years before the system cannot provide even basic services to the public. Canada regularly sends patients they cannot serve to the US for medical attention.

When I was in Spokane, Washington, there was an article in the local paper about women being sent to the US from Canada. The reason they were sent to the US was because Canadian hospitals had reached their quota of babies for the year. To serve the excess, they had to use US hospitals. The Canadian health service would not provide funds to allow these babies to be born in Canada like they should have. Where will the Canadians go when we have a system every bit as bad as theirs?

Socialized medicine can be stopped before it sees the light of day. Unfortunately, the Republicans are afraid to stand up to anything labeled health care reform. The AARP and other groups that should be interested in this reform are sitting on their hands. They either are hoping the Democrats are not serious or are waiting to see what the Democrats are coming up with. It does not matter what they come up with. If it is a single-payer system it will ration health care. If it rations health care, those who need health care the most will feel the brunt of the rationing.

Our current system is the best in the world. It has problems. Those problems can be addressed without throwing the baby out with the bath water. You do not have to destroy the best medical system in the world to correct some relatively minor problems. This is just madness that anyone could be serious about changing the system. But, Democrats want to control your lives. One of the best ways to control your lives is to control your health care. That is why they are changing the system from the best to the worst. They want to control the American public. You can be sure that the Congress and President will not have the same medical system as the rest of the American people. Democrats will see to that. They would never settle for second class medicine, like they are going to force down our throats.

Recently, the Democrat Congress passed legislation to expand the SCHIP program. The program is supposed to provide health care to low income children. The program was expanded to include children up to 30 years of age and incomes up to, I believe around $80,000. Now, I am not sure about your children, but mine were full grown long before they ever hit 30. Mine were mentally adults by the time they hit 21 at the latest. Having “children” covered until 30 is nothing more than an attempt to get them to accept government health care.

We have a President who wants socialized health care. We have Democrats in Congress who have large majorities who want socialized health care. The only obstacle that stands in their way is the 41 or 42 votes in the Senate. They can filibuster any attempt by the Democrats to impose socialized health care. They cannot stop it if it ever comes to a vote, so the only hope is that all Republicans hold true to Republican ideals and stop the Democrats. If even two Republicans vote with the Democrats, all is lost. The country would never be the same again and we would never really have the country that was envisioned by our Founding Fathers. There are many that would say we do not have that country right now.

Republicans in the House and Senate need to decide right now that they are going to stand for fiscal responsibility. If they do that, they can win the Congress back in 2010 and the Presidency in 2012. If they decide to go along with the Democrats because the Democrats hold all the cards, they will be in even worse shape in 2010 and might not even be around in 2012.

The Democrats know that nothing they are proposing will get the economy going. They also know that sooner or later the economy will rebound. Their hope is that they can get Republicans to vote with them on these ideas that will help nobody except for Democrat contributors. If they get Republicans to defect and sign on, they will have effectively emasculated the Republicans for the next four years. If the Democrat non-stimulus package gets passed with only Democrat votes, then when it fails it will be entirely on the Democrats. They do not want that to happen. They also know it will happen. That is why Obama is going to Capitol Hill today to visit with the Republicans. He needs some of them to defect to give the Democrats the cover they need.

Of the $825 billion on the table right now, there has to be something that would be worthwhile just by accident. But, the vast majority is all pork. Nancy Pelosi was asked about the $100+ million to fund contraception. She replied that it would help the governments get by with less. All the other projects funded in this bloated Democrat payoff bill are just the same. They pay off one Democrat group or another and do not make any real impact on the economy. It is only called a stimulus bill because a stimulus bill is less likely to be looked at critically. If it was called what it really is, there is no way it could pass at all. The American public needs to understand that the stimulus bill proposed by the Democrats is not a stimulus bill; it is a payoff to constituents that provided the money and votes to Democrat Congressional candidates and to the Democrat Presidential candidate. It is not really intended to stimulate anything.