Advice to Seniors: Beware of Obama Health Plan

This is a special Liberty Alert! Barack Obama will address the AMA today in order to peddle his monstrous new plan for healthcare rationing before the nation's doctors.

Time to STOP the Obama health plan which will ration care through its 300 million dollar cut to Medicare for Seniors and Medicaid for the poor.

Read all about it today at Columbia Conservative Examiner.

There you will find the facts from a variety of sources that indicate Obama's plan will not only raise taxes for most Americans but totally destroy our private healthcare system.

Cato Institute: Downside to 'Universal Healthcare'

On Thursday of this week Barack Obama gathered a team of various persons to delve into the subject of 'healthcare reform.' And the Cato Institute immediately published a study from Feb. 28 as a response.

An excerpt:

Universal health insurance does not necessarily mean universal access to health care. In practice, many countries promise universal coverage but ration care or have extremely long waiting lists for treatment. Those countries that have single-payer systems or systems heavily weighted toward government control are the most likely to face waiting lists, rationing, restrictions on the choice of physician, and other barriers to care.

Is this really what we want in America?

What Obama Won't Tell You About Health Care

Health care has become one of the central issues of the 2008 Presidential campaign, and Barack Obama has taken great pains to make you think he is on top of it.

The problem lies is what he has NOT told you.

Obama's plan calls for mandated universal health coverage for all. Notice I did not say 'all Americans.' There is a very good reason for that.

Obama's plan includes roughly 20 million illegal aliens.

Of the so-called 45 million Americans without health insurance, as Obama likes to say, what he won't tell you is that 20 million of those are not even American citizens.

The Obama plan is modeled after the disastrous practice in California of granting free health care to any illegal alien that shows up at the door of a hospital. Such a practice has driven the state closer and closer to the brink of economic collapse.

In addition, Obama's plan calls for no systematic effort to recruit millions of new doctors or the construction of hundreds of new healthcare facilities that will be needed to handle the masses of new patients who will overwhelm the present system under a universal coverage program.

This can only mean one thing--health care rationing!

And our nation's Senior Adults and the Baby Boomers who are set to begin retiring will be the victims of such rationing.

Decisions will be made to withhold care from Seniors in lieu of providing care to illegal aliens who may be younger and healthier.

Is this the kind of America we want?

Second Amendment News Roundup for 3/10/08

Focusing on guns and politics, here is today's Second Amendment News Roundup:

It is totally outside the realm of sanity that U.S. politicians would base their proposals for universal healthcare on the experience of Great Britain, Canada, or Cuba, among others. Nicki has yet another very good reason to totally reject outright these proposals:
http://libertyzone.blogspot.com/2008/03/health-care-nightmare.html

A ruling by a California Court of Appeals has millions of parents in a state of frenzy. The Court ruled that there is no Constitutional right to homeschool...and this in a state that is already chomping at the bits to end homeschooling and have such parents thrown into the slammer. The Volokh Conspiracy has the story:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_03_02-2008_03_08.shtml#1204845642

A bit off-topic but very helpful nonetheless, Roberta has an excellent primer on the coming deadline to switch to digital TV....along with the political ramifications:
http://twowheeledmadwoman.blogspot.com/2008/03/geek-mode-enabled.html

JR blogs about his day at the gun show in North Texas:
http://akeyboardanda45.blogspot.com/2008/03/day-at-gun-show.html

Armed and Safe has an important reminder about Illinois Gun Owners Lobby Day on March 11 (this Tuesday):
http://armedandsafe.blogspot.com/2008/03/igold-08-reminder.html

Blogstitution provides commentary on the latest barbaric attack on an Israeli seminary:
http://www.blogstitution.com/2008/03/06/the-wall-of-hate/

Robb Allen has come up with his own gun free zone sign:
http://blog.robballen.com/archive/2008/03/09/Heres-your-sign.aspx

Sebastian says that Clayton Cramer has essentially torn apart D.C.'s reply to the Heller case before the U.S. Supreme Court:
http://www.snowflakesinhell.com/2008/03/09/tearing-apart-dcs-reply/

David Codrea reports the sickening news that Dennis Hastert's congressional seat in Illinois has fallen to an anti-gun Democrat in a special election following Hastert's retirement from politics:
http://waronguns.blogspot.com/2008/03/illinois-gets-another-anti-gun-democrat.html

Traction Control has an interesting post on the Barrett rifle and accessories:
http://tractioncontrol.well-regulatedmilitia.org/?p=995

John Lott says that the U.K. Telegraph wonders why the mainstream media is ignoring this year's 'global freezing':
http://johnrlott.blogspot.com/2008/03/global-freezing-uk-telegraph-wonders.html

Mike McCarville suggests that John McCain is in dire need of coaching on speaking style:
http://wwwtmrcom.blogspot.com/2008/03/gadfly-on-john-mccains-speaking-style.html

Hillarycare II: A 'Mark of the Beast'?

Growing up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains gave me a unique perspective on the world, for good or ill. Most of it, I will be quick to say, has been for good.

The values of mountain and Piedmont folk in the Carolinas, Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia are solid as a rock and time-honored. Faith, family, honor, respect, courtesy, tradition are all words that describe this area of the country.

Part of the religious faith of evangelical Christianity, which runs deep in this neck of the woods, has to do with the 'the end of time,' or as theologians would put it, 'the parousia.'

Many Christians believe that at or near the end of time the forces of evil will take over the world in the name of peace, goodwill, and prosperity. Fooled into believing the rhetoric of these purveyors of hate and evil, the masses will help them usher in a new world order.

Part of that new world order will be a system of identification. 'The mark of the beast,' as it is called in the Book of Revelation in the Bible, will be the identifying emblem of this new system of government.

This mark involves the infamous number '666' that each person will be required to wear on their person, engraved into their skin, in order to make purchases such as food, clothing, beverages, and other goods. Those who refuse to accept the mark will be simply out of luck when it comes to acquiring life's necessities.

Today as we were treated to further information about Hillary Clinton's proposal for universal healthcare, we learned that she envisions a time in America when it will be necessary to show proof of health insurance before one can get a job.

Thus, if you are out of a job and have no health insurance, you are barred from being hired for a new job.

And, without a job you can't buy food, beverages, clothing, or the other necessities of life.

Do I believe that Hillary Clinton is the anti-Christ and that her healthcare plan is the 'mark of the beast?' No. Contrary to many of my brothers and sisters in the evangelical Christian world, I believe that the book of Revelation was written primarily to first century Christians in code to warn them about coming dangers within the Roman Empire, particularly with regard to Nero's impending scourge.

In no way does this mean, however, that there are no parallels between Hillarycare II and the book of Revelation's frightening scenario of a dominant world government where people must tow the party line in order to live.

For years many of us have been sounding the alarm concerning the dangerous 'slippery slope' of the expansion of government control over various sectors of our lives. The creeping crawl of government power is very jealous and protective of its territory. It only relinquishes power as citizens successfully fight it. And if citizens do not fight it, it continues gradually infecting and infesting every single area of human life, until one day George Orwell's nightmare in '1984' is a reality.

Thomas Jefferson recognized the danger during the era of our nation's founding, and stated that the natural state of affairs is for government to seize power and that eventually, and periodically, citizens must go to battle to preserve liberty.

And it is at this precise point that the book of Revelation in the Bible may not be so narrowly limited to circumstances in the first century.

If one looks at Revelation through a symbolic lens instead of a literal one, we can easily see that perhaps the story of the anti-Christ and the mark of the beast refers to circumstances that repeat themselves in the course of human history.

Thus, perhaps Hillarycare II is a type of mark of the beast, if indeed she intends to prevent citizens from getting a job unless they have health insurance. Further, perhaps the mammoth government bureaucracy required to regulate and enforce such measures is a type of anti-Christ.

In no way is this possibility intended to impugn the character of Hillary Clinton personally. Here we are speaking purely of concepts, ideas, and institutions rather than individuals. Reading the book of Revelation with a symbolic lens yields an interesting array of possibilities if the anti-Christ, the mark of the beast, and other such terms are viewed as metaphors for totalitarianism.

Oppressive and omnipotent governments certainly embody every single manifestation of evil known to the human race. Consult your history on the reigns of terror of the Communist Party in the USSR, particularly under Stalin, the Third Reich in Germany, the Communist government of Fidel Castro in Cuba, and the scourge of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia after the Viet Nam War.

Certainly the Founding Fathers of the United States of America minced no words in describing the danger and rottenness of a government that meddled too much in the lives of the citizens.

Hillarycare II and Its Problems

Hillary Clinton rolled out her healthcare plan on Monday, which to a great degree is 'Hillarycare revisited' from 1993. She has amended her plan that was doomed to failure 14 years ago, but the supposed 'new and improved' updated version still carries highly problematic features.

The most glaring and obvious problem with Hillary's proposal is that it places the bulk of the burden for healthcare on the backs of U.S. employers. Small businesses and entrepreneurs will suffer the most, many of whom will be unable to withstand such a financial burden.

These will be forced out of business.

Under Hillarycare II, American employers will be required by federal law to provide health insurance to their employees or pay into a fund that helps provide coverage for the uninsured.

The immediate consequence of such a provision is obvious--employers will eliminate jobs.

For example, say I own and operate a small business that relies on 10 employees with minimal skills, working at slightly above minimum wage. If I am suddenly forced to provide healthcare coverage for these employees, immediately I am placed in a terribly unnecessary catch-22. I can keep all the workers, provide the coverage, and go out of business, or I can eliminate eight jobs and keep two so that I can afford to provide them with health coverage.

My business does not make enough money to survive under Hillary's proposal without eliminating jobs.

The only other alternative is to go out of business, meaning that none of the original 10 employees will have jobs.

The American service industry relies on the unskilled, minimum wage worker to keep costs down. Many of these workers are not provided with health insurance coverage. If these employers must now provide such coverage, not only will their personnel costs skyrocket, but they will either pass these costs along to the consumer, resulting in skyrocketing inflation, or they will begin massive layoffs.

It is not the responsibility of the American employer to provide healthcare coverage to its employees. Corporations began this practice during the post-WWII boom years when companies lured quality, dedicated, and loyal employees to its rosters by giving them an incentive package to close the deal.

This way the employees were happy, and the employers had long-term, valuable employees for life.

As American society has become more mobile and as both employers and employees have seemed to devalue the mutual loyalty of the status quo, employers in many cases have no longer felt it necessary to provide health insurance.

By the same token, employees have increasingly felt no loyalty to the company at all, and will skip from job to job and company to company, depending on who makes the best offer at the time.

But the bottom line is that nowhere is it written in stone that U.S. companies have any obligation whatsoever to provide health insurance for their employees. And if they are forced by federal law to do so, look for massive layoffs as jobs are eliminated in an attempt to contain spiraling costs.

The way to address this problem is to make it attractive for employers, even small business owners, to provide health coverage. One way to do that is to allow small business and single-employee/owner entrepreneurships to buy into group insurance plans, thus vastly reducing the costs of providing the coverage.

A second problem inherent in Hillarycare II is that there is absolutely no mention of the fact that individual citizens should be encouraged to take some personal responsibility for their own healthcare. Those of us with a libertarian bent have long advocated for personal medical spending accounts to which workers and individual citizens can contribute.

These accounts can be opened through one's employer, and a predetermined amount, decided on by the employee, is deducted from one's paycheck each pay period to go into the account.

The value of these individualized healthcare spending accounts is that it teaches sound principles of economics and personal responsibility. Hillary's concept of health insurance takes the matter totally outside the realm of personal human responsibility and places it squarely in the realm of the federal government and employers.

If ever there were a concept that teaches by example that the world owes a person a living, and insurance to boot, then this is it. Why not just go ahead and say that U.S. employers owe their workers a new car every four years? And if for some reason the employer can't do it, then the government will.

These kinds of ideas originate in the land where candy canes grow on trees and where where the rocks yield rich Hersey's chocolate.

Finally, Hillary's proposal mandates that those citizens who cannot afford health insurance be covered by the federal government. This would essentially be an expansion of the current Medicaid program.

Several questions must be asked of the candidate lest such a thing be allowed to go unchallenged. First, what are the criteria to be used to determine whether or not one is able to afford health insurance? Who sets such criteria? What kind of bureaucracy will need to be put into place to manage such a massive expansion of government power?

Another vital question revolves around choice and empowerment. If and when these who cannot afford health insurance are placed on the rolls of a government insurance program, do they get to choose their own physician? Can they change physicians if they are not happy?

These issues must be addressed before a significant portion of the population, if not the majority of the population, will support such a mammoth plan such as Hillarycare II. As we have noted many times, we are open to methods of making provision for those who lack health insurance, but so far we have not seen a plan we could support.

So far, the plans put forth by the likes of Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and even Mitt Romney run a high risk of making the dog deathly sick in an attempt to heal part of its tail.