A Letter to the President #3
August 20, 2009
Dear Mr. President,
Tuesday, August 11, you graced us with another Town Hall meeting. This seems to be the only thing you are good at. You have become quite adept at using these staged events to push the liberal agenda. Once again your entire speech was filled with one lie after another. You never answered any of the questions (if they could be called that) that were asked. Are you incapable of answering questions directly? Or are you too much of a coward?
You mentioned in your speech that people “are held hostage by health insurance.” People are not held hostage by insurance companies. Whether an insurance company pays for something or not, people still have access to high quality medical care. Hospitals will work with individuals who are unable to pay up front. Apparently you are under that assumption that people will only receive the treatment they need if their insurance agrees to pay the cost. But here’s a question: if the government insurance program refuses to pay for medical care, then by the same logic are you not held hostage by the government?
Once again you want us to believe that the stimulus bill is working. If so where is the evidence? The only jobs created are federal and state jobs. The only people benefiting from your stimulus are Union leaders. Unions have always killed capitalism. Government intervention destroys prosperous economies. Private business is what we need. Many businesses have closed their doors, or laid off employees to cover the rising costs that your Stimulus package put on them. Unemployment is close to 10%. And as you’ve said, only a third of the money was spent. If this is the result after only spending 1/3 of the allotted money, why spend the rest. Why don’t you and Congress give the rest of that $787 billion back to the people? The people have always been able to spend their hard earned money better and more efficiently than the government.
The Recovery Act is a failure. You love to mention Bush’s failed economic policies. Unemployment stayed fairly constant that last eight years, as the chart below indicates.
|
2000 |
2001 |
2002 |
2003 |
2004 |
2005 |
2006 |
2007 |
2008 |
2009 |
|
4% |
4.7% |
5.8% |
6% |
5.5% |
5.1% |
4.6% |
4.6% |
5.8% |
9.7% as of July |
Figures from www.infoplease.com & http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=usunemployment&met=unemployment_rate&tdim=true&q=current+U.S.+unemployment+rate
When are you going to quit blaming Bush for your problems?
True to your Marxist principles, you instigate class warfare. The wealthy Americans are not paying enough. In truth, the wealthiest Americans pay more in taxes than anyone else. You stated, “It doesn’t mean we can just sit back and do nothing while so many families are still struggling, because even before this recession hit we had an economy that was working pretty well for the wealthiest Americans, it was working pretty well for Wall Street bankers, it was working pretty well for big corporations, but it wasn’t working so well for everybody else. It was an economy of bubbles and busts.” Karl Marx would be so proud of you. The thing is, when the wealthy prosper, so do the poor. A free market economy always has “bubbles and busts”. The ups are usually long lived and the downturns are short. However, when government steps in to right wrongs that never existed those economic downturns last a long time. This is what you have been doing since January. Though you are only doing what our government has steadily done since F.D.R.
A free market society is the best society any nation can have. It gives all people the opportunity to succeed, but it does not guarantee results. The wealthiest Americans exist because they took the risk of seeking fortune, worked hard, and succeeded. They refused to settle for mediocrity. What you are pushing for is equal poverty. Your health plan will force everyone to pay all that they earn in order to support it. It will destroy business and destroy the economy. This has happened in every nation that has implemented such a plan. The results will be no different here.
Whereas many of the poor in this country remain so because they are dependent on the government for their livelihood. These people are on welfare, collect food stamps, and have Medicaid for health insurance. They have no incentive or desire to improve themselves and their lives.
You yourself are wealthy, Mr. President. You have more money than people can dream of. Many in your administration are wealthy. Are you, or they, willing to give up your wealth to someone who has less than $10,000? Are you willing to donate your money to a non profit charity that lives among the poor day after day trying to help them find work? Since you are unwilling to sacrifice your wealth for the sake of another, then do not force others to do it through a government mandate. You hypocrite.
You and your ilk always make it a crime for people or businesses to create profit from business transactions. You accuse the drug companies and insurance companies of making more money than they should. Who are you to decide how much they should make? Who are you to decide how much anyone should make? Those companies only stay alive because they make a profit and those profits are reinvested in the company. That is how business works. No one has the right to decide how much an individual or a business makes.
You try to use the fact that UPS and FedEx are doing just fine while competing against the Post Office as a reason for government run health care. “It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems,” you said. Maybe this is why the government should not run anything. The Post Office loses money every year. What will make government health care any different? FedEx and UPS came around because of the increasing inefficiency of the post office. They have proven that the government cannot run a business. Insurance, whether health or other, is a business.
You mentioned, “Medicare and Medicaid are on an unsustainable path. Medicare is slated to go into the red in about eight to 10 years.” If Medicare and Medicaid will be bankrupt in 10 years, then why are you expanding these unsustainable programs to cover everyone? Medicare and Medicaid are both government insurance programs done on a smaller scale. If they are bankrupt after 40 years, what makes you think you can just expand them on a national scale and have different results? Trying to use these two programs as a reason to have nationalized health care is a flawed argument.
Another aspect of our current health system that you claim is a problem is the fact that specialists are paid more than general practitioners. There is a reason for that. General practitioners see a wide variety of patients every day. They see more patients than the specialists. Because they see more people per day they can charge less per patient without suffering a huge deduction in pay.
Specialists only concentrate on one area of the medical field. They go through more years of school than your general practitioners. They only see patients that pertain to there area of expertise. A Cardiologist only sees patients with major heart problems. Oncologists see only cancer patients. And so on. That is their specialty. You wouldn’t send someone with a sore throat to these people. You also wouldn’t want a general practitioner treating you if you had cancer or a heart attack. Again, who are you to decide how much a doctor can or cannot make? Doctors are businessmen. Their practices are businesses. Setting restrictions on how much a physician earns compels them to treat less people and not care if their patient get well or not.
You contradicted yourself later when you mentioned that you managed to get “something right like Medicare.” How could the government have gotten Medicare right when it is bankrupt? You said yourself that it is headed on the road to bankruptcy. But you insist that the government got it right. If you believe this, then you have admitted that you think the right course for America is to spend it in to oblivion while taking complete control of private industry.
You addressed on person’s concerns by stating that Medicare benefits will not be cut to pay for this public option. One problem: about a month before you passed a proposal of how to pay for government run health care. One this proposal were cuts in Medicare and the supposed savings from these cuts would help pay for this health care reform of yours. Which is it?
Another portion of your speech states:
“Under the reform we’re proposing, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.
You will not be waiting in any lines. This is not about putting the government in charge of your health insurance. I don’t believe anyone should be in charge of your health insurance decisions but you and your doctor. I don’t think government bureaucrats should be meddling, but I also don’t think insurance company bureaucrats should be meddling. That’s the health care system I believe in.”
Mr. President, why do you continue to lie to us? Page 16 of the House Bill begins a list of requirements that must be met in order for individuals to be allowed to keep their current insurance plan. If none of those measures are met, they lose their insurance, forcing them on the government option. How is that allowing people to keep their current health insurance? There is a similar list for employer based insurance.
This bill has provisions for establishing advisory boards for everything: preventative care, use of medical practices, care received, prescriptions and so. With all of these health advisory boards, not only is there going to be a new bureaucracy formed, meaning increase government control, but what is to keep these boards from determining who your doctor is, what medical care you will be allowed to receive, or how much care you will receive? These boards will be headed by government bureaucrats. Who controls them? Another bureaucrat?
Either you do not have a clue of what is in this bill, or you do and do not care. I believe it is a combination of both. You know full well that this supposed reform imposes new taxes, cuts Medicare benefits, rations care, dictates the kind of medicine people can have and extends government control over every aspect of people’s lives. You know this and you do not care if it results in economic disaster, Americans being denied health care, or kills the ingenuity and initiative that drove us to develop better treatments for diseases.
Mr. President, your entire speech at this meeting is the equivalent of what comes out of a horse’s ass. You couldn’t even answer the pitiful questions that were asked. Instead, you continued to sell us a bushel of lemons. You claim to care about average American. You are a liar. You don’t care about the people. You just use them to get your government programs passed. You use the status quo, “the people,” to get what you want and if these measures fail you can stay afloat by claiming that you were only trying to help. Or, that your measures kept things from being worse.
Sincerely,
Lady Liberty
