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.

Barack Hussein Obama has selected Kathleen Sibelius to be his new Health and Human Services Secretary. She is the current Governor of Kansas and probably the most ardently pro-abortion Governor in the country. That is in keeping with the Obama administration policy of killing as many of the unborn as possible. Obama seems to fail to realize that the majority of those unborn that are killed are black. But that does not seem to concern him. He is more concerned with killing as many unborn as possible and letting the chips fall where they may.

Kathleen Sibelius can also be counted on to push for socialized medicine. Those that are pro-abortion are almost always pro-socialized medicine. They usually want cradle to grave medical care for those that manage to avoid the abortionist. They are also for killing off those that are elderly as soon as is possible. To the pro-abortion, pro-socialized medicine person, the ideal society would only have peopled up until about age 75 or 80. Then they would be allowed to die or undergo euthanasia.

Since almost all of those that are pro-abortion are corrupt. And, since almost all of those that are pro-socialized medicine are corrupt. We can assume with a high degree of accuracy that Kathleen Sibelius is corrupt. The other guiding light in this matter is the selection of the Cabinet by Obama himself, almost all of those he has selected have either been outright crooks or corrupt.

Bill Clinton is the most corrupt person ever to hold the office of President. Barack Hussein Obama is determined that he will have the most corrupt administration in American History. So far that honor would probably have to be held by the Harding administration or the Grant administration. Obama is going to win that honor within the first couple of months. Both of those Presidents took almost their entire administration to earn the honor of most corrupt.

Of course, with today’s Democrats it is almost impossible not to select a corrupt politician. Almost all of the Democrats that serve in the House and Senate are far more corrupt than the corrupt “Silver Knight” in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”. The Silver Knight at least had a streak of honesty still left in him. That resulted in the final scene where he acknowledges that he is corrupt and Jefferson Smith has been telling the truth all along. Today, none of the House or Senate Democrats would ever do such a thing. They would continue to insist that the righteous Jefferson Smith was the one who was corrupt. That is how we get House and Senate Democrats constantly complaining that Republicans are corrupt while they are far more corrupt. I am not giving the House and Senate Republicans a clean slate. There are a lot of them that are corrupt also. It is just that there are some House and Senate Republicans that are honest and above board. That is the difference. You can’t find one in the Democrat caucus and you find them all over the place in the Republican caucus. You find corrupt politicians in both parties.

What this country really needs is a complete sweep of the House and Senate in the next election. I know that will mean some honest Republicans might be defeated. But it is far better to lose one or two honest Republicans than retain hundreds of corrupt Democrats or Republicans. My guess is that at least half of the House Republicans would fit the definition of an honest politician. The percentage goes down in the Senate because there are so many squeamish liberal Republicans that are basically dishonest at heart. I would be very surprised if there are 25% of the Senate Republicans that fit the definition of honest. I do not believe that even one Democrat would fit the definition of honest.

We need politicians of the highest moral fiber. We have politicians of the lowest moral fiber. That is because of the way we do politics in America. We analyze everything and magnify every minor mistake into a major mistake. That is why honest people avoid the process. Dishonest people do not care about getting dirty. Honest people do care about getting dirty. That is why the best people do not get appointed to positions like Supreme Court Justices. We have to clean up politics to get good people to devote a portion of their time to the service of their country. That is the way Adams and Jefferson saw the legislative function of government. Career politicians were unheard of in the early days of the country.

On the way to work today, I was able to listen to Rush Limbaugh and I could not believe my ears. He was giving information that was contained in the Emergency Pork Spending Bill that has nothing to do with stimulus and everything to do with socialized medicine.

The bill creates a Health “Czar”. It is not called that in the bill, but that is effectively what it is. This Health Czar is supposed to put ALL medical records on a national database. After the records are on a national database, the Health Czar is to check to see that doctors are following prescribed procedures with patients. Unusual patients would be reviewed by a committee that would have the final say in the treatment for those unusual patients.

What this does is force everyone to follow one set of guidelines all across the country. It does not allow for individual treatment. It also sets financial criteria to determine if someone even gets treatment. The good part of this is that if you are visiting far from home, the doctors would have your records in an emergency. That is a rare situation. On the other hand, it causes a lot of people to not get treatment at all. The medical board would look at how long you have to live and determine if the treatment suggested is worth the effort. People would be expected to just accept the fact that they are going to die.

Tom Daschle set all this out in a book published about a year ago. He wants us to be more like the Europeans and accept death when we are faced with it. Americans fight against death up until the very last minute by trying every treatment under the sun. Europeans are prohibited from doing that by their socialized medical system. Tom Daschle wants us to do the same thing.

For as long as I can remember the Democrats get elected by saying the Republicans are going to take away elderly people’s Social Security and Medicare. Now the Democrats are taking away actual medical services and everyone is supposed to like it. Republicans never once made an effort to take any Social Security or Medicare away from elderly people. Democrats propose to actually take health care from elderly people. But, it is the Republicans that hate the elderly and want them to die. The Democrats are telling them to accept death and go off and die.

If this passes and an elderly person votes for a Democrat that person should be certified as brain dead. They have been sold a bill of goods by the Democrats for 40+ years and have bought into it. Now, when the Democrats finally have all the power they want they stick it to the elderly people that voted for them. I cannot believe that Democrats could be so stupid. Elderly people vote in greater numbers than younger people. But, I guess if they die off faster that demographic does not mean as much.

This Emergency Pork Spending Bill is full of other Democrat ideas like socialized medicine. The bill should be defeated and a real bill crafted. This Emergency Pork Spending Bill is nothing more than a Trojan Horse to destroy America. Anyone voting for this Trojan Horse should be voted out of office as someone not fit to hold an elected office. I do not care which party the person voting for the bill holds, if he/she votes for the bill it means that he/she has a desire to destroy America by turning it into something she is not.

In looking at the people being named to the new administration you get the feeling that they either are deliberately picking the worst candidates possible or that they have no idea what they are doing. In either case, the thought is very disturbing. If they are deliberately picking the worst candidates, then we are in big trouble. We need the best and brightest in Washington to make sure we are safe. If they are picking the candidates because they have no idea what they are doing, we are in big trouble because that means the new administration is clueless. In either case, I do not have high hopes for this new administration based on who they are selecting.

For example, picking Mrs. Clinton for anything is asking for trouble. She wants to be President. She will undermine this President every chance she gets, though in a way that will be hard to detect. Her diplomacy will be entirely based on what is best for the Clinton’s as first priority. If it happens to benefit anyone else, then we are better off.

The choice for Attorney General was a particularly galling choice. He was intimately involved with the Clinton pardons. Those pardons were so graft ridden as to be embarrassing. Anyone involved with them should be behind bars, not rewarded with high government jobs and that includes the person making the pardons. The choice for Attorney General also is heavily involved in trying to get around the second amendment to the Constitution. Any Attorney General that does not believe in the Constitution and all its various parts should not even be nominated, let alone approved.

Janet Napolitano was picked to run Homeland Security. That shows the incompetency that is being allowed in this administration. Napolitano at best has been a poor Governor. She has run up huge deficits by ignoring the state Constitution. Her attempts to balance the budget completely ignored the way budgets are supposed to be balanced. Her method was to push the deficit into future years. That really solved the problem. It just made the problem worse. Napolitano has no idea what to do at the border. The Director of Homeland Security is primarily involved with securing our borders. Since she has no clue as what needs to be done, we can expect terrorists to pour across the border for the next four years. We can also expect more prosecutions of Border Control Agents because she believes the illegal immigrants have more integrity than the Border Control Agents. None of this speaks highly of our almost former Governor.

If this is the type of individual that Barack Obama picks for his administration, the country is in for four years of problems. Nothing will be solved. Current problems will be intensified and prolonged. Judge selections will be incompetent and stay on the bench way too long.

Congress is not going to be much better and probably worse than the administration. Ted Kennedy is already dusting off plans to socialize medicine. If he pulls that off, the country might never recover from this dark period in its history. We can only hope that Norm Coleman holds on in Minnesota and/or Saxby Chambliss wins in the runoff in Georgia. We need at least one and probably both of them to win to really hold off the Democrats in their worst moments. With all the fraud going on in Minnesota, it will be a miracle or some Democrat that cannot stomach any more fraud, to stop the theft of that seat. The Georgia seat is a safer bet, but Obama is spending a lot of money to steal that one too. Even with a 6-1 deficit in spending and about 10-1 deficit in paid workers, Saxby Chambliss is holding on to a narrow lead while the voting has started. He needs every Republican leaning voter to go to the polls to pull this one out of the fire.

The only hope of holding off the worst of the next four years hopes on two Senate races still undecided. If one or both become Republicans, we can stave off a total remake of America. If both fall to Democrats, then we will not recognize America in even two years. All that we in states outside of Minnesota and Georgia can do is wait, watch and hope for the best. I, for one, am praying that the best occurs.