Sunday, December 27, 2009

The Audacity of Dopes

A few days ago a friend sent me an e-mail with an attachment proclaiming that Obama was forcing Health Care reform on us and that we should all sign some form letter protesting his decision to force this down our throats. I read the e-mail’s full contents and came away thinking that this individual must have been off the planet during the previous President’s administration.

I, first of all, am indignant that this individual would dare to presume that Bush ‘Jr.’ had nothing to do with the present state of affairs – financial, economically, and politically – that the United States finds itself in right now. I mean, he started two wars and left them for someone else to resolve – coupled with that is the mounting debt of those two wars… 2.7 trillion and rising! He gave the rich a ten year tax cut that is going to cost us 2.4 trillion by the time it expires in 2010. He oversaw the worse collapse in our economy since the Great Depression of 1939 and you have the audacity to send me an e-mail saying that the present President is forcing something horrible on you! This President that has done more in eight months than Bush did it eight years hogwash!

How anyone can make the effort to demean the reduction of the cost of Health Care in America is beyond me. Considering that we are the most advanced industrial State on the ‘PLANET’, we sure have a hard way of showing it with a life-expectancy that is behind countries like Costa Rica and Cuba – Third-World countries! You want to bitch to me that the President is forcing you to have a better life than most countries that you turn your nose up to for their level of poverty! Are you just plain ignorant, or what? What is even more astounding is that these countries that have better life-expectancies actually have some form of government subsidized health care for all of their people – go figure! Even Mexico is better than the United States considering that it is a Third World country with a life-expectancy of 76.1 years!

These protestors are concerned that abortions will be funded by this Health Care reform bill. The effort to fight this bill for reasons unfounded anywhere in the document is ludicrous, but there they are fighting to rescind a law that has had precedence for over thirty years. The practice of abstinence 'was favored' over sexual education, over teaching our kids to deal with peer pressure, and over being responsible for providing our kids with the means to prevent pregnancies when we know that they are sexually active.

What will even the most rudimentary form of Health Care reform do… it will reduce cost through fraud detection, force competition between companies within the insurance industry, and reduce the needless request to order more test to confirm a diagnosis that can be done with less spending. Hospitals that have realized these basic principles are currently doing better with less in every aspect of medicine. Patients are recovering faster, mortality rates are down, and overall performance of these hospitals has improved tremendously.

The biggest problem with getting a better life-expectancy for Americans is providing the ignorant with sound reputable information that shows that if you implement a legislative law that is not influenced by the industry you are trying to regulate, you will be able to deliver as promised. Consider that the anti-trust exemption that has been granted the Insurance industry is actually hindering any chance to regulate the cost of Health Care – removing this exemption will force insurance companies to compete. Right now, each insurance company has an appointed area in which it operates and no other insurance company can venture into that area – hence, no competition and prices remained fixed at higher than normal levels with regard to the insured; bet you didn't know that?

As Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) explained at the hearing, the health insurance industry — unlike any other private industry in the country — is allowed to engage in price fixing, bid rigging and market allocation, all of which would violate the law if any other sort of company did it.

If you think that fighting Health Care reform is the sensible thing to do, then you deserve exactly what you will receive if we don’t pass a strong Health Care Bill. All anyone can ask is that you take a serious look at what you are fighting against and the people that are supporting you in this effort. Ignorance of the facts is not an excuse!

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