If this passes, you, your parents, your friends and the same for me will likely die by Obama and the Democrats’ hand. This bill cannot and will not improve health care for people – above all the poor. It’s purpose is to end the control that you have over your own life. Call your Representative and Senators and up the ante with them. Whatever it takes to stop this incredible injustice must happen now.

We know that freedom provides for an abundant life. Government control, on the other hand, causes the opposite. This bill is definitely a program to control, control, control you to death. SCB

The Cold Heart of Obamacare

by Nat Hentoff

Nat Hentoff is a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights. He is a member of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Cato Institute, where he is a senior fellow.

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Much of the press coverage of the Democrats' health-care legislation, now fiercely embattled in Congress, focuses on the public option, the actual long-term costs and tax increases, and the amendment barring funding for abortions, but the cold heart of Obamacare is its overpowering of the doctor-patient relationship — eventually resulting in the premature ending of many Americans' lives for being too costly.

To call the dangers of this legislation "death panels" obscures the real-life consequences to Americans, not only the elderly, of a federal government-run health-care bureaucracy. In the Senate bill, for instance, Medicare doctors whose treatments of certain, mostly elderly, patients costs more than a set government figure each year, will be punished by losing part of their own incomes.

Not only Medicare doctors will be monitored for their cost effectiveness. In the House bill, as Cato Institute's health-care specialist Michael Tanner explains (New York Post, Nov. 8), "111 government agencies, boards, commissions and other bureaucracies — all overseen by a new health-care czar," the commissioner of Health Care Choices, will keep watch on what the president has called excessive, wasteful health-care expenditures.

Moreover, President Obama has made clear that eventually he desires a U.S. equivalent of the British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), a commission that decides which drugs and procedures for patients are within the national budget for health care. The current baseline expenditure for each Briton, according to Michael Tanner, is $44,305 per year.

In this country, bureaucrats keeping tabs on patients — without actually seeing them and their condition — will mean, as Tanner notes, that "every time a doctor decides on a treatment, he or she would have to ask: 'Does the government think I'm doing this too much? Will I be penalized if I order this test?'" (Disclosure: As a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, I have access to its continuing research.)

President Obama and his supporters in Congress insist that clinical studies prove how many needless and expensive tests and procedures are so often performed. But these are collective statistics. Individual patients are left out.

Harvard Medical School faculty members Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband bring the individual back into this crucial debate in "Sorting Fact From Fiction on Health Care" (Wall Street Journal, Aug. 31): "Data from clinical studies provide averages from populations and may not apply to individual patients.

"Clinical studies routinely exclude patients with more than one medical condition and often the elderly or people on multiple medications. Conclusions about what works and what doesn't work change much too quickly for policymakers to dictate clinical practice." Everyone, regardless of political party, should keep in mind:

"If doctors and hospitals are rewarded for complying with government-mandated treatment measures or penalized if they do not comply, clearly federal bureaucrats are directing health decisions."

If congressional Democrats succeed in passing their health-care "reform" measure to send to the White House for President Obama's signature, then they and he are determining your health decisions.

Also remember that these functionaries making decisions about your treatment and, in some cases, about the extent of your life span, have never met you. They do not know your name, have not spoken directly to your doctor and, of course, haven't the slightest idea of what your wishes are. Is this America?

Another doctor whose byline in the New York Post I try never to miss is Mark K. Siegel, a practicing internist and an associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center. In "Destroying the Doctor-Patient Bond" (New York Post, Aug. 3), he points to Section 123 of the House bill that "establishes a Health Benefits dvisory Committee, chaired by the surgeon general, which makes recommendations to the HHS secretary on what should be covered and what shouldn't.

"These rulings from on high," Dr. Siegel warns, "are problematic, since useful treatments or tests for one patient are not appropriate for another. Appeals are bound to be time consuming and largely ineffective. This is the government interfering directly with the practice of medicine."

Is this what presidential candidate Barack Obama meant by "Change we can believe in"? Even if you voted for him, is this the change you will believe in if your doctor is overruled by the government in his or her treatment decisions about you?

Remember those federal bureaucrats recently ruling on breast-cancer screening? Dr. James Thrall, chairman of the American College of Radiology and a Harvard Medical School professor, said the resulting furor of dissent by doctors showed (Wall Street Journal, Nov. 18) that rulings "based on costs and large group averages, not individuals" lead him to fear that "we are entering an era of deliberate decisions where we choose to trade people's lives for money."

Is there anything you want to say to your representatives in the House or Senate before the final vote is taken? If you don't act urgently now, you may become part of another collective statistic — American annual death rates.

I'm scared, and I do mean to scare you.

We do not elect the president and Congress to decide how short our lives will be. That decision is way above their pay grades.

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More by Nat Hentoff

Hentoff, Nat (2009, December 6). The Cold Heart of Obamacare. Retrieved December 7, 2009, from The Cato Institute Web site: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11024

The Lost People of America

I remember reading Ayn Rand and hearing lots of questions as to whether a person should find a Galt's Gulch or create one to live in. There were a series of questions of this type which are related to this line of inquiry: "Should one accept Social Security or should one go to a government school or accept money from the government in any way?" Later Rand was glad that Alan Greenspan, one of her proteges, had the opportunity to curb inflation and buy time by becoming the head of the Federal Reserve Bank.

She always advocated living in the world and achieving values in the world. And she always advocated living and advocating the values required of a moral man in full possession of his own life force for the purpose of maintaining his life for his own happiness. But, there was a line one must never cross: One must never advocate for the programs that the government offers nor in any way become captured by them or the government to the point where he advocates, actively or passively, the collective at the expense of the individual. That was the sealing of one's fate, the collapse of one's moral fire. At that point one loses himself and his right to exist as an individual human life. He becomes a vegetable in spirit - living, but not alive.

In the case of Alan Greenspan, we see that he did cross that line.

One of the shocking and disheartening results of this past horrendous year is to realize that many of those close to you or that you have known have crossed that line. They have submerged themselves into the great collective, the home of non-existence of the individual. The grand irony is that they expect you to take them, an individual, seriously and listen to them as if their individual opinion should count when they have given up that ground. If we are all to be folded into the collective, the reason for that is to erase individuality. If you notice, at bottom, that is the sum total of the thing that all of the people who advocate this socialization want to get rid of.

image by ukyo_freak

These traits and effects come with the territory of individual and individualism.

Happiness: There is no collective happiness. Happiness as a concept will have to go out of existence. This is too bad because for some of you, it will pass from the cultural conversation before you discovered what it was and that it was actually a wondrous possibility.
Pursuing one's dreams: There are no collective dreams/ambitions. Those are individual.
Merit: Bad. After all, everyone in the collective must have self-esteem as a right and it is not something one earns.
Motivation: There is no collective motivation. There is only the sum of individuals' motivations. The collective has to get rid of motivation and replace it with fear - the fear of not looking good which amounts to always looking like one is part of, at least in some way, the group.
Prosperity: There is no collective prosperity. You may be prosperous and your neighbor may not be prosperous. It depends on what you do and how you do it. The collective is always trying to stamp that out and redistribute the wealth so that those difference don't invite envy and hatred.
Differences: Differences always imply individuals and in the collective, those are bad. In the collective there is always pressure to belong and not stand out. One cannot excel or achieve lest someone else may want to do that and therefore threaten the cohesion of the collective.
Love: Love is always individual. Not important in the collective. Love gets replaced with duty. "Of course we love our country. We must."
Attraction: Attraction is always individual. Again, not important unless it is attraction to an abstract idea like the State or the greater good or feminism or diversity or anything group oriented.
Values: Values are the possession and the motivation of the individual. No good. Only the group's so-called values are the ones you can espouse - whether you give a damn about them or not.
Trade: This form of peaceful activity is something that comes when individuals are ends in themselves. That's no longer true under collectivism. Everyone is a means for the collective's ends. Peace has no meaning under collectivism which depends on the dynamics of drama and turmoil to generate sufficient fear to drive people wherever the leaders want them to be.
Capitalism: This is what freedom for the individual is insofar as a political/economic system is concerned. It is based on individual rights. This definitely is out, replaced by socialism, which operates by pro-collective, anti-individual rules which means by regulations, taxes, permissions of a zillion kinds and is the diametric opposite of freedom.

All of those kinds of things are what must be forever denigrated and diminished, sometimes even stamped out by force, if a society of people as a collective is to be maintained. In the collective there is a constant drumbeat against these values and attributes which arise only in the evil-by-nature individuals. Hmmmm, sounds like the biblical "original sin" idea.

A few days ago I highlighted one drum banger: US Representative John Lewis. Entitlement is the watchword of the collectivist. If you buy that, then you have submerged yourself into the collective - or as Neal Boortz calls it, "the great unwashed."

I see John Lewis as a profoundly evil man. He calls for every individual to become a dependent. "He is entitled to healthcare," he says. "It is his by right." Of course, now it is healthcare, but in principle, he is saying that every man is entitled to all that others produce. He is trying to drive the future slaves into the pen under the guise of it being morally justified for him to eat the flesh of his neighbor.

This is always the way. No one looks at the other side of the hand - the side that has to provide the benefits that the government and politicians plan to disburse or the diminished lives of those trapped by the dependency. The other side is the dark and ugly slave side of the hand.

Somebody has to go "pick that cotton and tote that bale" and guess what? It is going to be YOU. And it is not going to be you because of what YOU want. It is going to be YOU because of what THEY want. You might get a few scraps from the table, but that is just to keep you unable to rise up and speak. Whatever you would say has to look dumb and really beside the point. They keep a close eye on how much of what they disburse it takes to maintain this oppression.

History has taught us everything we need to know about how this works. The great result of the The Great Society was entrapment of those who became dependent on it. Generally, it literally ruined their lives. Once sucked in, they were stuck in the goo and their lives became about manipulating the goo. "You mean I can get more money if I don't have a husband? Jettison his ass. You mean I can get more money if I have more children? Let me get some more of them then."

This is the basic principle of socialism: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Having viable needs becomes the name of the game.

It was never intended to work. It cannot work. It is against the laws of nature, specifically man's nature. And so, there has never been a more evil system devised to enslave men than socialism. And right now if you are a liberal, you are a backer and a believer in the principle that generates this horror.

This is the drumbeat that is being sounded by President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Jesse Jackson (notice how he uses race, another collective, to drive men into the pen), Al Sharpton and many, many more.

But the sharpest pain of this whole great division of mankind which is going on right now is when you see the people you love urging you and all those around you to go on into the pen. You see them submerging themselves into the great unwashed, losing their identify and their value except as another body that can work for the collective. "It's what you deserve," the lost people of America say. How can something be any sadder than that?

How have we come to this horrendous state of affairs in the lives of men? Why is it that the descendants of slaves are now advocating slavery? What is going on? Why is slavery suddenly, in 2009, looking to some like a good thing?

Slavery is the good? I never thought I would see the day. Talk about a disconnect. This is the greatest disconnect of human history. How can it happen that a country of free men, the richest country to have ever existed and able to provide a higher standard of living for all its people including its poor, suddenly throws itself back in time and into an abyss where there is no freedom? How is it possible that suddenly freedom looks like slavery and slavery looks like freedom? What is the cause of this greatest of all flip-flops?

Until this question gets answered, a Glenn Beck on every street corner will not be able to save us. It's as though we are zombies unable to respond and must go on into the pen. Why? How did we become so frozen, so deadened? How is it possible that the siren's call into the slave pen actually holds some allure?

This question shall be taken up in a future post.

image by Cotter158

Speaking into the Listening? Hell No!

When China's concern is the stability of the dollar so they get their money back, Obama has no idea what their concerns are. They had to ask. Here.

To get questioned about our domestic issues on the world stage is an embarrassment which Obama and the Democrats have caused. Rather like your neighbor asking you in public if you can afford something you are about to buy.

Obama then talks about how no nation should dominate another, delivering his view of a fantasy world. The thing he leaves out is that free trade does not operate on the principle of force and domination. If a company, a corporation or a country is dominant in the field, it is because they earned that position. Obama seems completely unaware that voluntary interactions and agreements can occur among men and that they are the basis for civilization. For him there is only force and that's why he is compelled to tell people they shouldn't do that.

Given his point of view I'm expecting the bows to get lower and lower until he finally just prostrates himself flat on the floor before any man who will give him an audience.





The man offends my sensibilities.

To John Lewis - for the 2nd day in a row.

To The Honorable Representative from Georgia, John Lewis:

NO. Above all, vote NO, on the health care bill.
Will John Lewis vote for MANDATES and thus, slavery? We will see.
Freedom is the answer. Force and slavery is not the answer.
I will not vote for anyone who votes for this bill. That is my final answer.


Sunday, 11-8-09: Last evening I saw a clip of John Lewis, my representative, before the House of Representatives.

I know John Lewis. When his book Walking with the Wind was published, I went to Barnes & Noble in Buckhead to buy his book and he could sign it. I have it in my library. That evening I was so moved being in his presence that I had to turn away lest I dissolve in tears. In the context of what he did for civil rights, he was great.

But the context has changed and he is no longer great. Never - never - have a I seen a representative who is so out of touch with the requirements of human life that he is a demand that people be made dependent upon the government. Further, he has the temerity to call it the right thing to do. He has acted counter to what he says his life is about - freedom - and instead came down four-square to enslave all of us forever.

No man can possess an economic right - the right to health care - without also creating a slave to provide it. Any man who, at the point of a gun, will force a man to become something less than human in order to do good is an evil man.

Forcing a man to support his neighbor takes the entire action out of the realm of the potential good. A man forced is unable to be good or bad. John Lewis denies that men should possess choice. He cannot trust that men will do what they see as the good. Further he thinks that what he thinks is the good is The Good, as if he has some claim on that knowledge and that it exists in some context which does not depend upon individual people and their lives. Thus he places himself and will now find himself in the same realm as all tyrants. If he had not pulled his gun on us, we could consider what he thinks is good and we might even come to think so ourselves. But not now. John Lewis has sunk as low as a man can sink and whatever good he may have done, he has now transformed himself into a menace to a civil and humane society.

Since these people cast their lot with the wrong side of what a human being is, I bet my life that the people who advocate this are on the wrong side of history. The consequences of this, should it become law, are vast. Slavery does not work. Never did. Never will. The costs are devastating.

Our biggest problem is to see the transformation of the human spirit that follows from enslavement. We have plenty of evidence in this country of those effects. Slavery instills a self-hatred, sprung from powerlessness, that takes generations to erase and then only if it is understood as to how it can be erased. At root it is a transformation in one's relation to power regarding the self. John Lewis has never understood any of this. Thus he seeks to spread the poison of his own spirit over the entire society - hoping that if we are all that way, it will become reality and because it will be the water we swim in, invisible.

By his actions, he is a mighty force to entrap and keep stuck all people who learn to depend on someone else for what they need rather than learn that they can create value, offer it in the world and make it on their own - really they can. And, consequently he makes all our plights worse by his existence. He loves being the victim, playing to the victim and creating ever more victims. This is who John Lewis is, the source of the spirit of John Lewis that enrolls his victims. I'm not impressed.

Freedom is one thing - freedom. One cannot make up for slavery except to free the man enslaved. All attempts to enslave the free for the purpose of reparations for the cost of slavery are beyond possibility. No material good can cause the transformation that must occur in a man's mind. In fact, to distract from this task only causes the effects of slavery to last longer. No transformation can occur until the nature of the free human being is grasped.

And, this is possible. It is possible to experience what freedom in one's spirit is and to know that it exists. But it is not possible until one understands himself as his own and only valid motive power. So long as his behavior is bottom-line caused by his reaction to someone or some thing outside himself, whether it happened yesterday or thirty years ago, rather than he seeking or keeping his own values, he is an enslaved, spiritually impoverished man.

There is a great misunderstanding athwart the country. It's generally believed that nurturing is good while standards and calling to account are bad and should be upended. Consequently we keep everyone a baby so that they can be nurtured within the popular paradigm. What we have not understood is that nurturing applied at the wrong time kills and destroys just as much as lack of nurturing when needed kills and destroys during those times. And this error about how life works has completely infected politics. John Lewis along with many others are flat wrong in their understanding of this principle. We suffer accordingly.

Down with all those who advocate babyhood and slavery - Lewis, Pelosi, Reid, Obama, Michelle and millions of others. They portend a dark, sad world indeed.

Up with freedom - all of those who see what people need, create it, produce it and offer it in free trade. There's the future. There's the incredible lightness of being. There's where the love is. This is the light that America is known for - not John Lewis's horrendous, demoralized, slave-bedecked worldview.

Insane Pelosi and Her Democrats

(Is Pelosi insane? Now that the die is cast, we shall see. I'm sticking with my assessment. Let the good times roll, i.e., enjoy Pelosi battling the hydra-head, and let the evidence roll in! 11/8/09 SCB)

MANDATES: THE INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY

PELOSI: Buy a $15,000 Policy or Go to Jail

JCT Confirms Failure to Comply with Democrats’ Mandate Can Lead to 5 Years in Jail

Friday, November 06, 2009

Today, Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp (R-MI) released a letter from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill (H.R. 3962, as amended) could land people in jail. The JCT letter makes clear that Americans who do not maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” and who choose not to pay the bill’s new individual mandate tax (generally 2.5% of income), are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.

In response to the JCT letter, Camp said: “This is the ultimate example of the Democrats’ command-and-control style of governing – buy what we tell you or go to jail. It is outrageous and it should be stopped immediately.”

Key excerpts from the JCT letter appear below:

“H.R. 3962 provides that an individual (or a husband and wife in the case of a joint return) who does not, at any time during the taxable year, maintain acceptable health insurance coverage for himself or herself and each of his or her qualifying children is subject to an additional tax.” [page 1]

- - - - - - - - - -

“If the government determines that the taxpayer’s unpaid tax liability results from willful behavior, the following penalties could apply…” [page 2]

- - - - - - - - - -

“Criminal penalties

Prosecution is authorized under the Code for a variety of offenses. Depending on the level of the noncompliance, the following penalties could apply to an individual:

• Section 7203 – misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.

• Section 7201 – felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.” [page 3]

When confronted with this same issue during its consideration of a similar individual mandate tax, the Senate Finance Committee worked on a bipartisan basis to include language in its bill that shielded Americans from civil and criminal penalties. The Pelosi bill, however, contains no similar language protecting American citizens from civil and criminal tax penalties that could include a $250,000 fine and five years in jail.

“The Senate Finance Committee had the good sense to eliminate the extreme penalty of incarceration. Speaker Pelosi’s decision to leave in the jail time provision is a threat to every family who cannot afford the $15,000 premium her plan creates. Fortunately, Republicans have an alternative that will lower health insurance costs without raising taxes or cutting Medicare,” said Camp.

According to the Congressional Budget Office the lowest cost family non-group plan under the Speaker’s bill would cost $15,000 in 2016.

###

What this means, in principle, is that every day when you awaken, to live that day you will have to walk to your US Government Post Office and give them $3 (or some such amount). After you have paid your fee, you can live, but you have to make sure that you earn enough that day to pay $3 the next morning - morning after morning, seven mornings a week, 365 mornings a year for every year of your life. Never will you breathe as a free man again. I've said that the liberals are the new slave masters - owners of the plantation upon which you and I live as slaves.

Liberals are the 21st century's newest fascists. Although it is completely un-PC to make this claim, no matter how sweet Barack Obama is, once government is transformed into a instrument of oppression, it's only a matter of time until a growing corruption will produce our own murderous dictator for a President. Fighting this bill is worth every cell in your body - if you want to wake up tomorrow and call them your own. Should this bill pass into law, it will mark the beginning of the growing public knowledge that the only enemy the American people have is their own government. SCB

WRITE YOUR CONGRESSMAN NOW!
NO DELAY! AGAIN!

The Insanity of Government Health Care

For all those that think that public health care, i.e., Government Health Care, is good, this man, Representative Rogers of Michigan, is very clear as to what the issues are and what’s more important, the insanity of the plan and the callous, arrogant, disgusting attitude of the government toward the people of the United States.

I suppose there are some sweet little old ladies out there advocating government health care who we think are soooo innocent that they would never be so evil and anti-human as to advocate a system of institutionalized evil - which is what government health care is. It’s time to call them, all of them, no matter what form they come in, to account. They are not your friend, not my friend, not humanity’s friend.

There should be no Government Health Care. None. Freedom which provides innovation in every aspect of that field is the answer if we want health care. The last anyone should want is the dead, corrupt, entangled, unaccountable, violently costly, political hand of government. I can't think of anything worse than that. No man should have to live with that institution directing his life. It is simply anti-human and sucks the life out of HIS life.

Apparently during this time in our history, a large number of people want the "mommy" state. Whatever that means, one thing is for sure. The state will not fulfill on that requirement. It has none of the characteristics of a mommy unless your view of a mommy is a "Mommy Dearest."

There is a place for government, but a proper government is nothing like the government we have today. For one thing - and for a teaser - it must not be able to arbitrarily levy taxes. There has to be another, voluntary way for the state to raise money. It must, as all of us must, be created to depend on enrollment and registration, not force of arms to obtain money from the people who it is designed to protect.

Great minds ought to be creating how, and the system required for a voluntary payment to government to work. Then it should be tried in small, and then increasingly larger, jurisdictions until it gets perfected as a working method for the government to raise money. We are never going to be politically free until we get rid of the arbitrary force of Caesar. I'm not persuaded by the Bible's command to "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's." I might be persuaded just to keep myself from having to go to prison, but I definitely am not persuaded as a design principle for a moral, principled and just government.

Why Are We Moving Toward Socialized Medicine?

By Yaron Brook

Government intervention in medicine is wrecking American health care. Nearly half of all spending on health care in America is already government spending. Yet President Obama's "reforms" will only expand that intervention.

Prior to the government's entrance into medicine, health care was regarded as a product to be traded voluntarily on a free market--no different from food, clothing, or any other important good or service. Medical providers competed to provide the best quality services at the lowest possible prices. Virtually all Americans could afford basic health care, while those few who could not were able to rely on abundant private charity.

Had this freedom been allowed to endure, Americans' rising productivity would have afforded them better and better health care, just as, today, we buy better and more varied food and clothing than people did a century ago. There would be no crisis of affordability, as there isn't for food or clothing.

But by the time Medicare and Medicaid were enacted in 1965, this view of health care as an economic product--for which each individual must assume responsibility--had given way to a view of health care as a "right," an unearned "entitlement," to be provided at others' expense.

This entitlement mentality fueled the rise of our current third-party-payer system, a blend of government programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, together with government-controlled employer-based health insurance (itself spawned by perverse tax incentives during the wage and price controls of World War II).

The resulting system aimed to relieve the individual of the "burden" of paying for his own health care by coercively imposing its costs on his neighbors. Today, for every dollar's worth of hospital care a patient consumes, that patient pays only about 3 cents out of pocket; the rest is paid by third-party coverage. And for the health care system as a whole, patients pay only about 14 percent.

Shifting the responsibility for health care costs away from the individuals who accrue them led to an explosion in spending. In a system in which someone else is footing the bill, consumers, encouraged to regard health care as a "right," demand medical services without having to consider their real price. When, through the 1970s and 1980s, this artificially inflated consumer demand sent expenditures soaring out of control, the government cracked down by enacting further coercive measures: price controls on medical services, cuts to medical benefits, and a crushing burden of regulations on every aspect of the health care system.

As each new intervention further distorted the health care market, driving up costs and lowering quality, belligerent voices demanded still further interventions to preserve the "right" to health care: from regulations mandating various forms of insurance coverage to Bush’s massive prescription drug bill.

The solution to this ongoing crisis is to recognize that the very idea of a "right" to health care is a perversion. There can be no such thing as a "right" to products or services created by the effort of others, and this most definitely includes medical products and services. Rights, as the Founders conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but to freedoms of action.

You are free to see a doctor and pay him for his services--no one may forcibly prevent you from doing so. But you do not have a "right" to force the doctor to treat you without charge or to force others to pay for your treatment. The rights of some cannot require the coercion and sacrifice of others.

Real and lasting solutions to our health care problems require a rejection of the entitlement mentality in favor of a proper conception of rights. This would provide the moral basis for breaking the regulatory chains stifling the medical industry; for lifting the tax and regulatory incentives fueling our dysfunctional, employer-based insurance system; for inaugurating a gradual phase-out of all government health care programs, especially Medicare and Medicaid; and for restoring a true free market in medical care.

Such sweeping reforms would unleash the power of capitalism in the medical industry. They would provide the freedom for entrepreneurs motivated by profit to compete with each other to offer the best quality medical services at the lowest prices, driving innovation and bringing affordable medical care, once again, into the reach of all Americans.

Yaron Brook is the executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights in Washington, D.C. ARC is a division of the Ayn Rand Institute and promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand--author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

Freedom: Our Protector

Something unfamiliar has descended on this nation. As Americans, it is a feeling we have never known. It is a fear of men.

Never has there been such an assault on people - as human beings - as we are experiencing now. The assault is coming from all sides at once. Every day there is a new assault.

The personification of this massive assault is President Obama. Behind him are all the men who seek new powers over us, who seek to force or profit from the force of our every action. Government men are leading the way. Businessmen and dependents of all kinds who want to use or have what they are handing out are standing in line to work with them. Whether by outright directive as in the forcing of banks to take government money; government orders and intrusions into their very hiring, firing and pay; stripping people of their lawful contracts, i.e., assets, and the risks and benefits associated with those contracts; or by telling you, directly or indirectly through taxation, what you can take into your body, be it nicotine or nourishment - everywhere, we live under the threat of moral directive and compulsion.

President Obama is working overtime to undermine every working relationship we have. He tells us that our doctors prescribe unneeded surgeries (I'm sure there are A FEW unscrupulous ones that do.) and prescribe the more expensive pills (Red or blue, I can't remember which.). He tells us to fear the cops when they come to our aid. He tells us that he knows or his young appointee knows how to run a car company. He does not stand up for people seeking freedom in foreign lands but instead plays buddy-buddy with the world's bloody-handed dictators. He forsakes our allies for the world's criminals. He wants to stunt our industry with pernicious and penalizing taxes on energy. He knows what people, especially cops, are thinking (and it's not good) even if they are not.

He seeks to turn black against white, customer against businessman, patient against doctor, investor against Wall Street, worker against management, citizen against cop, and government against the people.

There is one battle he will not allow - us against the government. But that one is coming whether he likes it or not.

And now he wants to be our doctor, our surgeon, and our nurse? On those days when we may be sick or hurting, we are going to be told to wait in line for weeks or months to get the attention and care we need and want, to perhaps save our lives. You will no longer be a patient. You will be a ward. As we see in Canada, a dog has better health care. The same will be true here unless Obama nationalizes animal care too.

If you want to see what your health care will be like under Obamacare, remember how he told you to save gas? That's right, blow up your tires. This past week when asked if an old woman with arrhythmia who has a good spirit should get a pacemaker, he suggested a painkiller. Jeez.

And if this weren't bad enough, he appoints czars with wild ideas such as "population needs to be controlled" if the earth is to live, and animals have rights and can sue humans. I didn't know they could speak, let alone read and write. Is it no wonder we are scared out of our wits?

Add to this his ingenuously telling us that when the government takes over health care, we will save money and the country will be running right once more, that no one will lose the health care they now have and that we will be as free as we have always been to conduct our lives. This we are to believe in the face of the fact that the government has run its health care programs into the ground and that all government health care plans the world over suffer from shortages and must ration their treatments and their time. Is it no wonder doctors and surgeons run from these Animal Farms?

Further he has gone abroad and apologized wholesale for America. Never has he said a good thing about us. When he mouths what America has stood for, it is obvious he lies insofar as his believing that it ever was a good thing. He wants positive rights, he says, knowing full well that he must enslave someone to provide them.

Obama doesn't know what it is to be an equal. Either he's on top or he's making sure he's lower than the king. Meet a man as an equal? Who ever heard of that? This is Obama's problem.

Government's hand is a dead hand - no vitality there - only laws, rules and regulations. You dutifully follow them, or else. Used correctly they support human life. Used as Obama wants to use them, they deaden and destroy it.

So far he has not be able to get us to march in lockstep, but he has his plans for that too: the Obama corps in the form of AmeriCorps. Already set up and being further formulated in the background, he wants to give students money to go to college. For that they will pay with X years of their lives in his corps. He says he wants this as well funded as America's military. Does anyone doubt that this will be an indoctrination machine? By all means, increase the deadness!

We are starting to get in spades that Freedom is Our Protector, and Obama is an enemy of freedom. By our minds and our choices, we sort the good from the bad - the good doctors from the bad doctors, the good teachers from the bad teachers, the good bankers from the bad bankers, the good businesses from the bad businesses, the good friends from the bad "friends" - you name it. Obama says that's bad. He wants to limit choices - outlaw them. Nowhere is this more obvious nor fundamentally destructive than in Government Health Care.

As an American, I have the right to my life, my liberty and my pursuit of happiness. I pursue my happiness by taking the property I own, starting with my own life - body and mind - and developing it and building it to provide for what I need. Seeking values is the essence of being alive. Political freedom is my only requirement.

Other Americans are not my enemies as Obama paints them - neither the doctors, the bankers, the car makers, the cops, the news organizations, the factory owners, the investors, the rich or the poor. All are available to talk to and work with if I need them and they provide what I need. They are the people I seek to meet and learn about so I may be able to satisfy my needs. Obama, on the other hand has turned the poor and the rich and the fat into parasites, the doctors and the bankers into predators and industry into plunderers. All are scapegoats. We are supposed to hate them. They are bad. Obama is no friend of America.

He's no friend of people anywhere. Although his outstretched hand may hold candy, his hidden hand holds a club.

Freedom is MY friend and protector.

The Killer Wedge

At the Moment of Vulnerability

Right now, this Obama Administration is working overtime to pass Government Health Care. What it seeks to do is become the health provider for the nation. What this means is:

YOU CANNOT FIRE YOUR DOCTOR.

You cannot choose your doctor, except for superficial characteristics; you can go nowhere except to government clinics and health facilities. This is the end of you as an independent human being - and right at the moment when you need to have safeguarded your independence the most - when you are the most vulnerable. This is what Government Health Care means.

Only one other time has this country engaged in this kind of activity. That was the institution of slavery. A slave could not fire his employer. He could not go elsewhere to find a place to work.

Above all else, this is the principle that MUST NOT get refastened onto the American people.

And it is not just you the citizen that is the slave. So long as a human being wants to practice in any aspect of the medical industry, (doctors, nurses, hospitals, pharmacists, drug developers and producers, alternate forms of health care provision, emergency crews) he must work for the government or leave the country. Otherwise, he must leave this industry. Ultimately these are his only choices under Government Health Care. Runarounds and a black market will be against the law.

This is as evil as anyone can get when it comes to social life for human beings. This is a moral issue and nothing more.

Notice how many people are talking about the best way to create the program and how much it will cost as if the basic premise of slavery is quite all right. No one is talking about the basic issue. Even those who should know better than anyone what slavery is - and I am talking about the American black in particular - are looking at the "candy" in the hand of the politician rather than the club behind his back.

These men offering this "candy" are Barack Obama and all of his Administration, Nancy Pelosi, Teddy Kennedy, and a host of other politicians - liberal and conservative. It also includes corporations and their lobbyists who are trying to get in early on the game to provide the products that the government will need in its programs. They all need to be fought. The very idea of human bondage must be fought root and branch.

Obama has a Science Czar, John Holdren, who is on record with some very draconian methods of population control, wanting to reduce it to below replacement levels and advocating sterilizing men as the means. He has a Regulatory Czar, Cass Sunstein, who believes in "Nudging" people into the right behavior via taxation.

I'm telling you, this is no different than the Progressives of the past. Their mission has always been to "improve" society by force. In the early 1900's, eugenics was their call as the means to this end. (The wildest of that advocacy was Nazi Germany.) Now it is what is called "nudging" - a program of taxation that discourages particular behaviors and fosters others. They think they can use FORCE, the law with taxes, fines and prison in the background, with a smile on their face and righteousness in their heart.

They are wrong. To force a "choice" is to obviate man's possession of volition - the capacity to choose. This negates his humanity at the root. No longer is he able to pursue values, reap the consequences and correct or continue his course of action. Good and bad no longer apply to one forced. Since he had to do it, all he can provide are excuses. He's powerless. Force misapplied by anyone, but above all the institution of government is a primary cause of social deterioration. It negates the mind and the pursuit of values. It kills human life.

I offer Government Education as a prime example. Compelling students to learn is not the same thing as showing that learning is a value to be pursued. Force and enrollment, the presentation of a possibility and its value so one can choose it or not, are opposites. Anyone who wants learning via enrollment, as opposed to indoctrination, has to provide it himself.

As an architect, I know what force is. Before Handicap Access became the law of the land and when I was in architecture school, books on handicap access were everywhere. If one had a client who wanted handicap access, one learned how to best provide it. There were many possibilities and there was much competition regarding solutions to various problems.

Once Handicap Access became law, the building code reduced all of this to a single section with rules and layouts. The investigation and search for better means not only for access but for handicap mobility largely ended.

When handicap access was just beginning, I had a doctor client who had need for it in his office. This was a remodel project and there was a bathroom present. The question arose as to whether a handicapped person could use the bathroom. I rented a wheelchair and investigated the matter for myself. I then took the results of my study and my solution to the building department and they were quite happy to approve it given that I actually knew how it was going to work.

Today that is impossible. Now with the rigid codification of everything regarding Handicap Access, it is way too costly to go after a better solution. Who wants get a variance with all that entails and/or go before a board to fight for something that may not be approved even if it works. Better to just do what the code says and be done with it. As a consequence, we see the repetition of the same plans over and over.

Further, rather than business who want to appeal to the handicapped offering the benefits of their facilities as an attraction for customers that they want and appreciate, all business and public buildings must provide the access whether they will ever need it. This results in a huge expense where not needed and deprives the business who welcome the handicapped to show that they welcome them. All of this is how society becomes gutted of its differentiation, values, and even beauty and charm. So much for the government and its influence.

Needless to say all of the innovation regarding handicap access has dried up. It doesn't exist. There is no longer any excitement around the subject.

And this is exactly where Government Health Care is headed but with a far worse aspect. You will be the government's slave unable to exercise your own mind and your own free will, the two fundamental aspects of remaining fully human. And this relative to the most personal aspect of yourself - your body.

One further note. Already, we are seeing the inhumanity in which the government will indulge itself to effect its programs. Here is an article entitled, Tough Love for Fat People. Because our society is unwilling to allow people to experience the consequences of their actions, most Washington voices think there is no choice but to coerce their behavior. The new scapegoats are going to be fat people - and, of course, smokers. Where are the articles on drug users, alcohol drinkers, and all the other things that people use to excess? What about those who binge on sugar? Or those who eat only protein? Or those who exercise to the point of hurting their bodies? You name it. Is this the direction you want society to head?

If not, you had better get on your high horse and soapbox. Government Health Care is the killer wedge on this matter.

Doesn't sound like a group of people I want to live around. See my previous post.

Euthanasia by Default

A Government Health Care system means that everyone is paid for, seen and treated by the government. In such a system, there may be many different doctors, clinics and hospitals, but at bottom there is only one customer - the government. Ultimately it is the government's tune to which all dance.

Since health care is supposedly free, people will not choose whether they want to go to the doctor based on any number of reasons, one of which is cost. They will take advantage of the benefits since they are there to be used. With no apparent cost to them over which they have control, why not?

But nothing man must do to maintain his life is without cost. It is an enormous fantasy to think otherwise. Because in a nation the size of the United States there is infinite demand for these benefits, the government will soon see that the expenses far outrun their tax revenues. They will have no choice but to raise taxes and/or cut benefits.

Raising taxes has its limits. Taxes on the populace cut into their standard of living. As taxes rise and the standard of living lowers, people carp and complain. The health care people take the brunt of this because they are the leading edge of Government Health Care. But they will have their excuses. After all, they are not ultimately responsible. (With Government Health Care the health care people will suffer a huge loss of good will and trust from people. Who can trust someone who is ultimately powerless in the matter and is not hired by your own judgment?)

The Government will then be attacked. The rising cost of living will prevent the Government from calling for more taxes. They will try to hide them in everything, but to hold down taxes, they will cut benefits. There will always be those who say that all the waiting, forestalling, shoddy methods and reduced benefits are worth it. They will be wrong. It doesn't have to be this way.

As the benefits are downsized, it must come out of someone's hide. There must be priorities. Of course it only makes sense to favor the productive taxpayers over the unproductive tax users. And the latter are the handicapped, the mentally incapacitated, the elderly, to name a few obvious categories of people. They will be left to die. Not in so many words, of course. Maybe they will be given some palliatives, but nothing that can really make a difference and cost the system money it doesn't have. Call this euthanasia. This is what it is - by default.

Actually euthanasia means a gentle and easy death. But some of the suffering will not be eased. "I'm so sorry. That's just the way it is," they say, and besides, that costs money too.

The real crime is that it doesn't have to be this way. Just recently drug stores wanted to bring in nurses and medical practitioners of various kinds to look at people who needed some medical advice. Given their knowledge they could help those they could and if not, recommend to them someone with more advanced knowledge. This idea, a product of economic freedom, was fought tooth and nail by the doctors. They don't want the competition.

Of course the doctors went to the law makers. "Outlaw such a solution," they said. The problem is that the law makers should not have the right to limit competition and new ideas. Their job is to catch criminals who violate authentic rights, not the false "economic rights." This is where the current mess of the health system goes off the track. Instead of freeing people to come up with new ideas on how to deliver health care, they kill it. As a result they indirectly kill people.

I got an email letter this morning from John Lewis, my Congressional Representative. He says, "I believe health care is a right." He presents no argument. He just believes it. In the wacko ethics of our culture, he sounds like a good man. But he is not.

Nothing can be a right that has to be produced by some other men. What is Mr. Lewis going to do? Take their labor and their property and give it to you? In days past, the plantation owners did the same thing except they were honest. They had slaves for their purposes. Now we have "The Great Pretenders" who enslave others for your purposes, they say. John Lewis is one of "The Great Pretenders."

Slavery is the darkest, most evil kind of advocacy and John Lewis is advocating it. A is A no matter how you dress it.

What is the antidote to the great problem of health care? Freedom. Freedom to think, to come up with new ideas for treatment and care, and freedom to deliver goods and services to people - those willing to trade something for them.

Freedom! Let it ring! From the Stone Mountain of Georgia to the foothills of Santa Barbara.

Some say, "We have to do something about this health care mess." That's true. But let's get to the cause of the problem and not rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. We are in this mess because the industry is tied in a knot. Government regulation and control is ubiquitous. Free it. Let our people go.

The other reason we have this mess is because people like John Lewis are telling people that health care is a right. He has to poke out his own eyes to not see the slavery in this.

People want to solve these problems. Being bound hand and foot they only have narrow avenues for action. Slave masters are hounding them.

Government is not the answer. It is the problem. Some of you will lose your loved ones because euthanasia will be its result. Death is final.

Nothing was more graphic than a piece I saw on TV. In Canada the medical industry is government run. A human has to wait at least a month for an MRI no matter what his ailment. It could be serious and need quick attention or not. In Canada, on the other hand, veterinary medicine is practiced in a free market. An animal can get an MRI the next day.

Wake up!