The following is circulating around the Net. Its analysis is simplistic but somehow does make me scared of ObamaCare, not to mention the even more government-centric proposals. What do you think?To President Obama and all 535 voting members of the Legislature.
A. The U.S. Postal Service was established in 1775. You have had 236 years to get it right and it is broke.
B. Social Security was established in 1935. You have had 76 years to get it right and it is broke.
C. Fannie Mae was established in 1938. You have had 73 years to get it right and it is broke.
D. War on Poverty started in 1964. You have had 47 years to get it right; $1 trillion of our money is confiscated each year and transferred to "the poor" and they only want more.
E. Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965. You have had 46 years to get it right and they are broke.
F. Freddie Mac was established in 1970. You have had 41 years to get it right and it is broke.
G. The Department of Energy was created in 1977 to lessen our dependence on foreign oil. It has ballooned to 16,000 employees with a budget of $24 billion a year and we import more oil than ever before. You had 34 years to get it right and it is an abysmal failure.
You have FAILED in every "government service" you have shoved down our throats while overspending our tax dollars. AND YOU WANT AMERICANS TO BELIEVE YOU CAN BE TRUSTED WITH A GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM ??
Obamacare is a deal between the private insurance industry, the pharm lobby and the hospitals to require that we all purchase products from them.
ReplyDeleteThere is some level of government oversight into each industry as a result, but I don't see why one of the tag cloud labels for this is 'single payer' -- this is anything but single payer.
I could see this argument applying to a single payer system, and would suggest that the reason this argument looks strong in that context is that we have, since Johnson, not been paying attention to the inexorable march of the Norquists to weak government.
Nixon thrashed the economy badly by escalating in Vietnam and refusing to pay for the adventure. No one paid much attention, but the precedent was set - wars are a great way to lose a lot of money and no one makes you pay for them any more.
In the short term, the stock market takes a hit as a result, but in the long term, the net result is the degradation of the social safety net.
The Norquists of the world understand exactly what they want to do; they want to hobble a government that was once able to build sewage lines, dams, interstate highways and the other infrastructure in order to convince us to turn over control of these things to business.
There are a lot of things I'd rather buy from the government than from a business. Healthcare, education, water, roads and power are all amongst those things.
Basically, anything where I don't want a corporate 'person' to claim fifth amendment rights to not show me an audit trail.
I am outraged that I don't have that choice if I'm required to buy insurance. But if that choice had been available, the plans would have been far cheaper from the government than from business - they were terrified, and they persuaded Obama to take single payer off the table long before the final debate.
As the chart atop that post (and the 2400 page document yet unread by most of Congress that voted for it) describing ObamaCare indicates, while government isn't DELIVERING the health care, it is superimposing a MASSIVE, labyrinthine bureaucracy of rules and regulations that the private sector must comply with. That scares me. Less mammoth government mandates have paralyzed businesses, contributing for example, to their not hiring.
ReplyDeleteAnd while there are no perfect analogies--indeed, analogy is the weakest form of argument--noting the failures or gross cost-ineffectiveness of such central government programs and initiatives does legitimately give me, at least, reason to fear that ObamaCare could kill us.
Why a tag "Single payer?" Because, as I wrote in the post, it's related to the even more government-centric approaches such as single-payer. I believe this post would be of some interest to advocates for single-payer, and/or they're people I'd like to read it. Those are, I believe, core purposes of tags.
Individual and Employee-Sponsored health insurances have existed for many decades too -and they are broke! For that matter Capitalism has existed since industrial revolution, many centuries ago, and as we see with another stock market plunge, it's utterely broke!
ReplyDeleteNow let's not throw baby with the bathwater, Tea-Partiers should engage in constructive solution not in pure demagoguery that can easily be turned around against their market fundamentalism.