Thursday, September 10, 2009

Obama's Problem: We don't trust him, or government

Obama made a speech last night. It was the same speech he's been making for months, full of promises, empty of specifics, laced with personal attacks on people who don't agree with him, and sprinkled throughout with lies.

But in the end, he failed to address the fundamental problem the American people have with his still non-existant "health care plan". Simply put, we do not trust Obama, we do not trust the Democrats, and mostly we do not trust government to do what they say, or accomplish the goals they specify.

Obama said this speech would include compromises with the Republicans. I saw two -- first, he "compromised" about how many americans are uninsured, because he stopped lying about it for one speech. Last month, Obama said 47 million americans were uninsured. Last night, it as 30 million. As one commentator put it, and I paraphrase, "at that rate if we do nothing we'll solve the problem by November".

The second was that he mentioned legal reform. Unfortunately, there is no legal reform in any of the bills being considered, so unless they are going to go re-write the whole thing, his promises otherwise are empty.

On most other points, he fell flat. He called his opponents liars, but then objected when someone called him a lie. He said we were lying about rationing end-of-life care, then acknowledged medical boards which would determine what care was "cost-effective". He said we were lying about illegals being covered, when there is no language in any bill that checks for legal status before giving away health insurance or health care (this is what prompted that "that's a lie" outburst -- it was a lie, but our country doesn't have a system where back-benchers yell during speeches. Better if he had yelled "That's not true", it would have conveyed the same point and not had the "lie" word, which is unacceptable when used by Republicans but fine when Obama says it in his speech).

Obama said we needed to stop the scare tactics, and then said people would die if we didn't pass his health care plan. He said he was trying to be bi-partisan, when he has not invited Republican leaders to the White House since april, and Nancy Pelosi refused to let any Republican amendments come to the floor for a vote.

Here is just one of Obama's outrageous lies, where he claims a man died because his insurance cut off his chemo treatment:

One man from Illinois lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because his insurer found that he hadn't reported gallstones that he didn't even know about. They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it.

Here, in contrast, is the sworn testimony of the man (Otto Radditz) sister, at a hearing in August:

After two appeals by the Illinois Attorney General’s Office, Fortis Insurance Company finally overturned their original decision to rescind my brother’s coverage and he was reinstated without lapse. This is after weeks of constant phone calls between myself and the Attorney General’s Office and we were literally scrambling hour by hour to get this accomplished so that my brother wouldn’t lose his 3- to 4-week window of opportunity that he had prepared for and lose his opportunity to have the procedure.

There was no delay, he got the treatment, it just did not work. (Also, it wasn't Chemotherapy, it was a stem cell transplant, one of those non-embryonic ones that are already being used to save lives but are given the boot by the Obama administration so they push untested embryonic research).

But worst of all, he tried ot sell government interference in our health care as some sort of moral imperative, something we owed to our people. He tried to justify it by basically saying the American Ideals of self-reliance were outdated:

Our ability to stand in other people's shoes. A recognition that we are all in this together; that when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand. A belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgement that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise.

Note how he deftly twists the human imperative to care for one another, into the opposite -- a greedy desire to force others to pay taxes to care for others, using government, so that we the people don't have to be bothered by it.

That is the liberal mantra -- why help someone myself, when I can get the government to take my neighbor's money ot do it, while I get credit for being "compassionate" and my neighbor can be ridiculed for being "cold-hearted"?

Note also the communist belief expressed in the phrase "hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play" -- that is simply a translation of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs".

It was never Government's job to "reward" people with personal security from hardship simply because they were "hard-working" or "responsible" (Forget the more obvious fact that millions of the people who are already given free medical care, or will be by this government takeover of health care are neither hard-working nor "responsible"). The hard work is what rewards you, with money, and the responsibility rewards you when you spend the money on important things like your health care.

At it's core, government-forced health insurance is proposed because people are supposedly IRRESPONSIBLE. We are too stupid to buy insurance, so the government will make us do it for our own good.

The idea that government knows best is NOT an American idea.

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