Speaking Truth to Power

There were many town hall meetings across the land this past week. Some estimate that there were over 1,000. (I am sticking to that modest number because it is perhaps better to understate the size and velocity of the anti-Democratic Healthcare Plan movement). I know in Yakima there was a 2^nd gathering in the space of two weeks.

In Clark County, Washington, Congressman Brian Baird got name recognition a few weeks ago when he used the words “brown shirt tactics” and “lynch mobs” in describing town hall attendees. To his credit, he held another Town Hall meeting after those remarks. It created another unforgettable moment that hopefully brought clarity to the topic Baird spoke of.

The speaker in the green shirt, David Hedrick said afterword, "I was one questioner out of 38, that was called at random from an audience that started at 3,000 earlier in the evening. Not expecting to be called on, I quickly scratched what I wanted to say on a borrowed piece of paper and with a pen that I borrowed from someone else in the audience minutes before I spoke. So much for the planned talking points of the right wing conspiracy. "

Congressman Baird supports a bill in Congress that is being written by lawyers who were elected by no one. Was he elected to represent the wishes of Washington DC lawyers? At another Town Hall meeting, a Congressman tried to explain that he didn't write the bill even though he was supporting it. Someone from the crowd yelled back for him to go get the lawyers who are writing it then. "Apparently that is who we need to be talking to!"

Open Letter to Patty Murray

Dear Senator Murray:

As you know, there was a collection of people with signs in front of your office in Yakima recently. They showed up to make their feelings known about the Health Care bill you are considering. They knew you were not going to be there but they took time from their busy schedules to come anyway. Why weren’t you there?

If any American were to list the duties of our elected officials in Washington, somewhere at the top of the list would be the purpose of listening to your constituents so as to better represent them in Washington. THAT IS YOUR JOB. It may be unpleasant for you. It may be bothersome for you, but it is clearly something we are paying you to do. Every person who showed up set aside their busy schedules to be there. None were paid. You are paid for precisely that and you conveniently avoided the scene. If you would have shown, it appears to me that you would have been the youngest one there. Are you afraid of facing people decades older than you?

Part of the profound frustration of people today is your refusal to stand in their midst and listen to them. You have been a leader in slick website propaganda, and the phone “teleconference” meetings that sound just like the slick AARP teleconference meetings. But we have come to the point that we are extremely tired of being manipulated by this full court press to pass what you have been told to pass concerning our health care. It is clear that you represent the Washington DC lawyers’ interests and your purpose is to tell us what we get. Have you grown so “professional” that you have lost site of the fact that your job is to do just the opposite?

The fact that you are just too busy to come here on your recess and listen to your own constituents in front of your own office is the answer to that question. On your website you try to portray that you are “fighting” for health care reform. Your rejection of the opportunity to hear your own people’s profound frustration tells us clearly who you are fighting against.

There are no facts, there are no figures, there is no history that could ever lead us to believe that the public option insurance plan is workable. History is full of facts and non-partisan experts have many figures to show us that a federally created and run health insurance option is unworkable, unsustainable, costly, and ruinous. Please join us to reject such an ill-conceived notion.

Thank you.

Real Questions. We want Answers

One of the best criticisms of the whole Health Care debate involves the unbeleivably high pressure put on Congress to get the bill approved. With 20% of the economy all wrapped up in this issue, people are wondering why they are insisting on the frenetic pace to get to the bill approved. I am paraphrasing, but one man remarked, “It took President Obama 6 months to choose the White House dog. Why do we have to have this monumental plan done in 6 weeks?”

The Democrats have no one to blame but themselves. They introduced a horribly complex bill that would impact every person in the country in the most profound way and then tried to rush the approval process. Fortunately, the citizens of this country are not serfs but are educated human beings. Given just a little time, they can read the bill.

What follows is very long. You may not want to read it all. I don’t blame you. Our Congressmen and Senators have not read their own versions of the bill and they certainly do not want to read these 20 questions. President Obama hasn’t read the bill and doesn’t want to answer specific questions about it. These questions come from Robert Tracinski by way of Pamela Geller’s website, Atlas Shrugs. They both encourage us to go to our own Town Hall meetings and ask questions such as these.

1. The government has been "reforming" health-care for sixty years—tax breaks for employer-provided health-insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, encouraging HMOs and managed care, and government health-insurance at the state level in Massachusetts, Maine, Oregon. Government health-care has expanded until it is now more than 50% of all health-care spending. Yet after sixty years of government "reform," the problems with health-care are just getting worse. So why should we believe that even more government is the solution?

2. President Obama keeps telling us that he's not trying to get rid of private health insurance. But the bill being debated in Congress would require all new insurance policies to be offered through a government-run exchange, in which the rates that can be charged and the coverage that has to be provided will be dictated by the government's so-called "Health Choices Commissioner." Employer-provided health-insurance will fall under the same regulations in five years. How is this insurance going to be "private" if the government controls everything about it?

3. A video on YouTube shows Barack Obama back in 2003—only six years ago—saying that he is in favor of a "single payer" system. The "single payer" is government, so this means he was in favor of socialized medicine. And just a few weeks ago, Barney Frank—one of the Democratic leaders in the House—said that he considers the current bill a step toward "single payer." So when Obama and the Democrats tell us this bill won't lead to a government takeover of health-care, why should we believe them?

4. Medicare is broke. Social Security is broke. Federal tax receipts are falling, and Congress has already voted on trillions of dollars of stimulus and bailouts in the last year. The national credit card is maxed out. So how can you justify voting for a bill that will require even more money that we don't have?

5. The health-care bill that is being discussed includes huge taxes on businesses to force them to provide more health insurance for their employees, as well as a whole set of mandates telling health insurance companies who they have to cover and what they have to cover them for. This is an enormous increase of costs for businesses and insurers. Have you considered how they're going to pay for all of this, or whether they will even be able to pay for it? How many of these companies will go out of business or lay off more workers after the government forcibly increases their expenses?

6. One of the main demands of the health-care bill is that insurers are required to cover people with "pre-existing conditions." That's like getting insurance on your car after you crash it. It's just a way of getting someone to bail you out for something that has already happened. This isn't insurance, it's a handout. So doesn't that mean that the rest of us will have to pay more for our insurance to absorb the cost of those handouts?

7. The health-care bill will mandate what costs insurance companies have to cover. For example, they will have to pay for routine check-ups and physicals, or they will have to provide every woman with maternity coverage. But what if you don't want to pay for that extra coverage? Right now, if you're young and healthy and don't need frequent check-ups, you can save money with a high-deductible insurance that doesn't cover them. Or if you don't want children, or already have children, you can save money by dropping the maternity rider on your policy. By taking those choices away from us, won't this bill actually make our insurance more expensive, not less?

8. A lot of people have been upset about Congress passing bills that they haven't had time to read—and they haven't even finished writing the health-care bill yet. But what I want to know is, with a bill this big and complex, have you taken the time to read it and understand it? Can you really say that anyone has had the time to figure out how all the parts will work together and what all of the consequences will be? With a bill this big, is it even possible to figure out all of that and really know what you're voting for?

9. President Obama and the Democratic leadership are making us a lot of promises about what we will get and what we won't get from this health-care bill. But what is or isn't in this one particular bill is not the end of the story. For example, how many times has Medicare changed over the last forty years? As more and more of us become dependent on the government for our health-care coverage, won't we have to worry about what some future Congress or some future bureaucrat will decide to cover or not cover?

10. The defenders of the health-care bill claim that it's going to lead to all sorts of savings, not by actually cutting any services or denying care, but just by finding "inefficiencies" that will save money. Do you think this is remotely plausible? When has anybody ever said, "This project has to be lean and efficient—let's get the government do it"?

11. One of the ways that has been proposed for government-provided health insurance to save money is by substituting Medicare reimbursement rates for market rates when paying doctors and hospitals. But many private hospitals and medical practices have said that if they have to accept these lower rates, they can't cover their expenses, and they will go out of business. So doesn't this bill guarantee an immediate shortage of doctors and medical services?

12. Medicare cuts costs by paying lower rates to doctors and hospitals, who then shift these costs to those of us with private health insurance, who get charged higher rates. But if the government takes over and starts dictating Medicare reimbursement rates for everyone, who will the costs get shifted to then?

13. When the government starting portraying people in the financial industry as villains and started limiting their pay and subjecting them to more regulations, banks reported a "brain drain" as smart and well-educated people left the industry or went overseas looking for better pay and less stress. But the term "brain drain" was originally coined in the 1960s when doctors and medical researchers left Britain to escape socialized medicine. Aren't you afraid we might see the same kind of brain drain from the medical profession here in America?

14. Do you know the meaning and significance of the term "quality adjusted life year"? (For this question, you will need the answer, which you can supply if your congressman is forced to admit that he doesn't know it—preferable after some stammering and a long, awkward pause. "Quality adjusted life year" is a term used under socialized medicine to determine whether elderly patients are allowed to get expensive drugs or treatments, depending on some bureaucrat's calculation of how many good years they have left. You should ask your congressman: Can you assure us that the same thing won't happen here?)

15. One of the proposals for how the government is going to save money is that it's going to have a panel of medical experts who will dictate from Washington, DC, what the proper medical practices are that should be paid for, and what practices are supposedly "wasteful" and "unnecessary." Won't this mean interfering with decisions that would normally be made by me and my doctor? And won't this discourage innovation by requiring any new idea to get approved by a board of establishment "experts" before a doctor can even try it out?

16. Government-run health-care is not some new, untested idea. In Britain, it has led to a "postcode lottery," where the medical procedures you are allow to get depend on where you live. In Canada, it has led to a shortage of doctors and waiting lists for major surgeries. In America, Medicare ended up costing far, far morethan anyone expected. Massachusetts and Maine spent enormous amounts of money to extend government coverage to very few people. The Oregon Health Plan may not cover your cancer treatment—but it will cover assisted suicide. Given all of this experience, what makes you think that somehow this will be the exception that will avoid all of the problems that government health-care has always led to?

17. Why does "reform" always mean more government? Are you aware of proposals that have been put forward for free-market reforms of health care? Congress has already approved Health Savings Accounts, where individuals buy their own high-deductible health insurance and save money tax-free, which they can use for their out-of-pocket health-care expenses. This gives people more control over their spending on routine medical treatments while keeping them covered for a serious illness, and it allows them to keep their health insurance if they change jobs. But this program has been limited in size. Are you open to ideas like this, for free-market reform of health-care?

18. A lot of doctors say that medical malpractice insurance is what is really driving up health-care costs. Doctors have to charge more to cover their expenses, and they also have to practice "defensive medicine," ordering unnecessary extra tests just to make sure they can defend themselves in court if something goes wrong. So why isn't tort reform—for example, limiting excessive jury awards in malpractice lawsuits—being considered as part of health-care reform?

19. What part of your decision on this bill, if any, is affected by a consideration for liberty, individual rights, and the Constitution? Would you consider opposing this bill for no other reason than because it gives more power to government at the expense of the freedom and property rights of private businesses and individuals? Would you consider opposing it simply because it grants powers to the government that are not authorized anywhere in the Constitution?

20. Thomas Jefferson said, "A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government." Notice what is not on his list: government-provided housing, or government-provided food, or government-provided health care. And Jefferson's views on the role of government were widely shared by America's Founding Fathers. So my question is: Please explain where you disagree with the vision of our Founding Fathers, and why.

If every Congressman and Senator took the time to answer these questions, their intelligence, love for the people they are supposed to serve, and integrity would become absolutely clear to all of us.

Groucho Marx once said "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?