Health Care Reform Is About Control, Not Health

In another example of common sense, the government does not need to tell us to wash our hands, as Obama did when the Swine Flu first appeared. The government does not need to tell us what foods to eat, or what cars to drive, or what temperature to set our homes. But, the Libs just gotta.

This piece from PajamasMedia makes excellent examples:


Health Care Reform Is About Control, Not Health
By AWR Hawkins, August 17, 2009

Liberals have always been fixated on controlling people. In America, they accomplish this through taxation, regulation, and unrelenting appeals to our leftist-dominated court system. And when these avenues prove unsuccessful, liberals don’t give up, they simply look for a covert means to reach their original goal.

ObamaCare is just such a covert means. This is why Rush Limbaugh has spent weeks telling listeners that the president’s plan isn’t about health care, but about “government control of life [and] death” and everything in between.

As usual, Limbaugh is right. And even a cursory glance at the 1,018 page House health care bill (http://tinyurl.com/phs6da) demonstrates an end-around by the liberals which will allow them to control heretofore private aspects of our lives. For instance, ObamaCare will allow liberals to control diets over which they’ve failed to gain control through their anti-trans fat campaigns. ABC News confirms that ObamaCare will require obese citizens “to undergo diet counseling,” with the understanding that “those who fail to lose sufficient weight could face further ‘reeducation.’”

I find it ironic that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi describes opponents of ObamaCare as Nazis “carrying swastikas” (http://tinyurl.com/pwnorx) to congressional town hall meetings, while she and the majority of congressional Democrats are the ones who plan to send non-conformists to “reeducation” camps. Such liberal vitriol only proves Limbaugh’s point that as far as health care goes, any and every discoverable “health risk” will be used to further the government’s control over our lives.

Yet beyond “health risks,” an even easier way for liberals to control our lives through ObamaCare is by denying us the treatments we need once government officials, rather than doctors, are making our health care decisions. This is why the American Spectator’s R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. recently wrote:

"If you have any sense that you may be getting sick in the years ahead, I suggest you get sick immediately. If you will be in need of surgery or any other medical procedure, do it now! If not immediately, be certain that you hand yourself over to the health care professionals before October 15 of this year."

Tyrrell stresses October 15 because that’s “the date on which President Barack Obama hopes to sign his health care bill,” and that means that’s also the date on which the government will take ultimate decision-making power out of the hands of doctors and place it in the hands of D.C. bureaucrats.

If any of this seems too far a stretch, just consider the story of an American soldier who spent 14 months in Iraq, where he “withstood more than 12 IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices)” and suffered significant injury to “both of his feet and legs.” He has been home from Iraq for three years, and although doctors have known for those same three years that his ACL is torn as a result of the IEDs, they have not been allowed to operate on him because the government “hasn’t finished rating him” yet. In other words, because this American hero is on government health care through the VA system, both he and his doctors have been waiting years for a bureaucrat to clear him for surgery.

Although this soldier should “have had surgery two-and-a-half years [ago], …[bureaucrats] will not [allow] surgery until [the ACL’s] totally torn apart.” Instead, they just keep “giving him a cortisone shot or they put leg braces on him.” As this scenario plays out, his family looks on in unbelief, presuming he’ll be in a wheelchair “within another year.”

The soldier’s harrowing health care experience should be hauntingly familiar to anyone who heard Obama’s statement about “end of life” treatment on July 22, 2009, when he said senior citizens will be evaluated before being allowed to undergo surgery once ObamaCare is in place. Pending the outcome of the evaluation, where bureaucrats will decided whether grandma or grandpa is worth saving, the citizen may be told they’re “better off not having the surgery but taking [a] painkiller [instead].”

One thing we can all count on is this: once officials in the Obama administration gain control over our nation’s health care system they’ll exercise it as broadly as they can. Bureaucrats with no medical training will search out health risks based on cost to the government and will then hand down decisions on everything from proper dietary intake to knee operations to end of life treatment. And it doesn’t look like there will be any way to avoid this mess if it becomes law. There will be no way to retain private health insurance and therefore control of our own lives. For Obama and his comrades have structured ObamaCare in such a way that it will bankrupt most private insurers and greatly restrict those that are solvent.

It looks like R. Emmett Tyrell, Jr. was right when he said, “If you will be in need of surgery or any other medical procedure, do it now,” before ObamaCare is implemented. And I would add that if you enjoy buttery foods, fattened beef, or a good smoke now and then, you might want to avail yourself of those things as well. Because ObamaCare, if passed, will give faceless bureaucrats the ability to deny you many things you love in life based on how those things impact “the greater good.”