Health Care-Obama's Crown Jewel

By John Stallings



There is a knock at the front door.

Peeking through the window a mother sees a man & woman both in uniform. They are agents of health-care reform.

“Excuse me ma’am” says the man, “Our records show that your eleven-year old daughter hasn’t been immunized for genital warts.

“And your four year old still needs the chicken-pox vaccine” says the woman.

“He won’t be allowed to start kindergarten unless he gets that shot, you know” says the man—smiling from ear to ear.

“So can we please come in?” asks
the woman. “We have the vaccines right here,” she says, lifting up the medical bag. “We can give your kids the shots right now.”

Is this a scene from the over-heated imagination of a conspiracy theorist? Or does it actually exist in the health-care reform bill approved recently by the Senate?

The actual language in the bill says;--“Authorizes a demonstration program to improve immunization coverage. Under this program, CDC will provide grants to states to improve immunization coverage of children, adolescents and adults through the of evidence-based interventions that are recommended by the Community Preventive Services task force such as reminders or recalls for patients or providers or home visits.”

Can we say, “Forced immunization?”

Should Obama Care pass, it will mean slavery to a system that won't look like anything we've ever seen. Freedoms are already being lost left right & center. In a nut-shell—No more private sector insurance.

Other than our spouse, family members, & maybe a few close friends, what other relationship do we have closer than with our family Doc? In the not too distant future, should the door on Obama Care be passed we’ll never see our doctor again, & in all probability we’ll never again see the same doc twice.

If a restaurant near your home started advertising free food & beverages, what do you suppose would happen? Right! There would immediately be constant lines at that restaurant stretching for blocks.

This would go on for a short time. What do you suppose would happen next? Right again. The restaurant would start rationing their food. They’d have to because of the overwhelming demand. People who weren’t even hungry would nonetheless stand in that line. Obviously now the restaurant would start turning people away. If they persisted in giving away food, they’d have to find outside financial support to help them pay for it.

I could go on with that analogy but I think you see my point.

Let's take a close look at what the Democrat Party has waiting in the wings should they be successful at ramming this socialized health care down our throats. Most of the physicians I've spoken to are opposed to UHC, for one reason because they don't want to become Government employees. They'd also like to keep the medical profession something they even recognize & want to continue to be rewarded both financially & intellectually.

From what I’m able to glean, the road to becoming a physician is one of the most demanding & expensive among all the professions. The cost of eight years of college, then three to six years in residency would leave them about $140,000 in debt. Of course what the medical student looks forward to is the appealing salary they’ll get someday to compensate for all the hard work & money spent. That perk or reality would disappear after the enactment of Universal Health Care.

What would immediately appear however would be a huge new tax burden hung around the necks of already jaded & tapped out American taxpayers. By the way--if Obama-care is signed into law, the tax consequence will begin April 15, 2010.

Doctors who now get frustrated working within the guidelines of Medicaid, Medicare & HMOs, would find ever increasing aggravations with the adoption of universal health care. The way doctors would be paid now; “single payer” would be set by the federal government & would be appreciatively lower than they currently receive. Everything in America that pertains to health care would be paid out of one huge pot, thus the name “single payer.”

Now the doctors would be answerable to a group of politicians & the freedom they had to practice medicine as an art/science, i.e. treat patients as individuals, would leave & have in its place federally mandated guidelines for certain procedures across the board. Now you have a group of highly trained doctors being forced to treat each patient the same even though they might feel certain patients would benefit from an alternative type of treatment. We’re talking about a “one size fits all” approach. But people are different & don’t respond the same to medicines & protocols.

Let’s go back to our restaurant illustration when all those people came looking for that free food, stifling the place. Likewise, under “free-health care” now people would be jamming every medical facility. Because there isn’t a fee, people who before would have thought twice about going to a doctor, now will visit the doctor with minor problems that really don’t require medical attention. So you have people being turned away & you also have longer waiting lists.

Personally I need no further proof of the aforementioned than the experience I’ve had as a minister. From time to time my particular denomination would seek to secure group insurance policies for its constituents but the coverage would generally be discontinued after a few months. Though a letter would be sent to the ministers not to start taking their families to doctors for things that weren’t serious, invariably they’d do it anyway; and this in a church group that believes strongly in divine healing. It’s just human nature.

In 2007, in Canada where they have “free health care” the average wait was 18.3 weeks for surgical treatment. In the U.S the wait is just a couple of weeks. Under universal health care, Doctors will lose the fulfillment of being able to help every sick or injured person & the order of the day would become summarily turning people away due to full schedules.

Many jobs in the U.S would be eliminated by the removal of the current insurance companies. In short, in this writer’s view, “free” universal health care would be a bad deal for all America.

Another downside to “free” health care would be that the government would make decisions for the patient & make rules that the patient must follow. For instance, under this plan, a man could be told to report for a prostate examination at 7: am on Monday morning or risk losing further care. A woman could be told when to report to have a mammogram & if she failed to show, her medical care could be affected.

My wife & I are with an HMO & though we’re happy with the plan, we’re pressured to have more & more tests & take medications we don’t want to take, & won’t. This would be but a small sample of what the face of “free” health care would look like. I realize it sounds harsh to say anything the government runs isn't done very well but I would invited the reader to drive around to the public housing areas or "projects" in their town & look them over. These are government run. Is that the way we want our health care to look?

There are stories coming out of the UK, who’ve long been on free health care, that smokers are told to quit smoking or surgery will be refused. I’m not a smoker but if a government can make rules against smokers, they can conceivably refuse health care to individuals who don’t eat at least five or six veggies a day or get from 20-40 minutes of aerobic exercise at least three times a week.

“Die in Britain, survive in the U.S” was the cover article of the February 2005 issue of The Spectator, a British magazine in which James Bartholomew details the downside of Britain’s free health care system;

“Among women with breast cancer for example, there’s a 46% chance of dying in Britain vs. a 25% chance in the U.S. Britain has one of the worst survival rates in the advanced world, while Americas has the best.”

He continues, “If you’re a man diagnosed with prostate cancer, you have a 57% chance of it killing you in Britain. In the United States the chance drops to 19%.” Again, reports Bartholomew, “Britain is at the bottom of the class & America is at the top.”

Explains Bartholomew, “This is why those who are rich enough often to go to America, leaving behind even private health care. The reason for that is in America you’re more likely to be treated & further, you’re more likely to get better treatment.”

In America, if you’ve had a heart attack, you are given beta-blockers compared to fewer than one-third in Britain. Similarly, American patients are more likely than British patients to have a heart condition diagnosed with an angiogram, more likely to have an artery widened with angioplasty & more likely to get back on their feet by way of a by-pass.

“In the main, Britain’s universal health care system has evolved into a ramshackle structure where even having a test, beyond an x-ray tends to be a rare extravagant event,” writes Bartholomew. “In Britain 36% of patients have to wait more than four months for non-emergency surgery. In the U.S 5% do. In Britain, 40% of cancer patients do not see a cancer specialist.”

Bartholomew tells about a woman named Peggy, an American radiologist who went to Britain to meet her English boyfriend’s family. While she was there, her boyfriend’s father found blood in his urine & went to a local National Health Service hospital in which no CT scans or cystoscopy tests were done. The patient had asthma & lay in his hospital bed with breathing difficulties but still didn’t see a specialist. He was told it would take six weeks. Short of six weeks he was discharged from the hospital. Back home before his appointment with a consultant he died of an asthma attack.

Bartholomew reports that Peggy was “surprised at how ‘accepting’ her boyfriend’s family was.” “What we saw was an unexpected passivity, a lethal submissiveness to systemic incompetence & tragedy, a reaction that seemed poles apart from how things happen in the U.S.” She didn’t say too much because she didn’t want to come across as a pushy, arrogant American but she was thinking that “in America we’d go nuts if we were told we’d have to wait six weeks to see a specialist. Expectations are so much higher.”

As far as the elderly, [and some have suggested that age would start at around fifty] they can just forget it if UHC becomes law. Obama himself has said that-" those old people will have to be given pain pills instead of expensive medical procedures."-Check this out on YouTube.

As a footnote on Canada, the average wait for a simple MRI is three months. In Manitoba the median wait for neurosurgery is 15.2 months. For chemotherapy in Saskatchewan patients can expect to be in line for 10 weeks. At last report 10,000 cancer patients who waited an average of two months for radiation treatment have filed a class action lawsuit against Quebec’s hospitals.

Anyone who has a heart will immediately think as I did; what about all those who can’t afford health care? Let’s take a look at the numbers we’re given.

We hear & read a good bit about the 47 million Americans who don’t have health insurance & anecdotal evidence usually accompanies the figure, dramatizing the tragedy. It’s implied if not bluntly stated that this denotes a scandalous shortcoming of our society, our government & our capitalist way of life. The message is – “these Americans are your friends & neighbors & they don’t have health care.”

But Census data shows that 9.5 million of the uninsured listed themselves as “Not a citizen”: they aren’t Americans. The number of uninsured now drops to 37.1 million, about 12% of the population. The Census data also shows that there are 8.3 million uninsured that make between $50,000 & $74,000 per year & 8.7 million who make more than $75,000 per year. That’s roughly 17 million people who ought to be able to “afford” health insurance. Should we count those who can afford health insurance among the uninsured?

So 37.1 minus 8.7 minus 8.3 now leaves us with roughly 20 million people without health insurance which is approximately 7 % of the population, a far cry from the 16% we’ve been told by the socialized medicine lobby & the compliant media who are obviously too lazy to examine the facts.

The Kaiser Family Foundation which is frequently a source for the mainstream media says that Americans who don’t qualify for existing government programs & who make $50,000 a year total actually no more than 5% of our population. Also the number of uninsured American “floats” & 45% will be uninsured for only approximately four months.

This information begs the question; if all this be so, & universal health care has been an abysmal flop around the world, why would intelligent & conscientious politicians want to try it in the U.S? I won’t presume to have that answer in its entirety, but a couple of answers come to mind. Many politicians feel with a more centralized, omnipotent government things work better. It also militates toward a grand design of getting the people more & more under government control. The proponents of universal health care feel that it has yet to be done by the right people; i.e. –them.

When Mr. Obama talks about change, you can be sure what he's always had in mind was some incarnation of universal health care. This, if it happens will be a quantum leap for America toward the abyss of socialism. Mr. Obama seems genial enough but we knew from the get-go--he’s far, far Left.

It’s a well known fact among serious observers that a major reason communism shriveled up & died in Russia is that people quit working. The reason they quit working is hard work only pays off in a free-enterprise system. But as you probably know, in the last few years, they've moved back toward the free-market system. As a matter of fact more millionaires are now being produced in places like Russia, China & India than in America. This sounds hard to believe but motor-car companies like Rolls Royce, Bentley etc. report that the lions share of their sales are coming from what we used to think of as third world nations.

There’s an ocean of material on the Internet about the pros & cons of so-called free universal health care so you need not take my word for anything. But consider this;

In Canada, while thousands of baby-boomers & the elderly wait for knee & hip replacement surgery, a dog can get a joint replacement operation at a veterinary hospital done in a matter of weeks.

But the real danger of adopting a system like the one in Canada & Britain is not just long waits for medical treatment. Americans would pay much higher taxes & lose important liberties while turning over personal, life-and-death decisions to government bureaucrats.

This article doesn’t presume to bore down particularly deep into the universal health care question because I'm obviously not an expert on the subject, but hopefully it will give some food for thought.

The ultimate question is; does it make sense to destroy, [though imperfect,] the best medical care the world has ever seen because 5 out of 100 don’t have adequate access to it?

THE MIRACLE OF CHRISTMAS EVE-2009

On Christmas Eve of 2009, “Tracy Hermanstorfer went into cardiac arrest & stopped breathing during labor” said Dr. Stephanie, a maternal fetal medicine specialist’s at Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs Colorado.

“She had no signs of life. No heartbeat, no blood pressure, she wasn’t breathing,” said Dr. Martin. “The baby was… it was basically limp, with a very slow heart rate.”

She said she couldn’t explain the mother’s cardiac arrest or recovery.

“We did a thorough evaluation & can’t find what explains what happened,” she said.

While one team worked on saving Mrs. Hermanstorfer, another team of medics set to work on the child.

Moments later Mike Hermanstorfer was stunned when he saw his son show signs show signs of life & learned his wife has inexplicably started breathing again.

“My legs went out from underneath me,” he said. “I had everything in the world taken from me, & in an hour & a half I had everything given me.”

Mr. Hermanstorfer credits “The hand of God.”

This was a miracle given to us in 2009. I wonder, would this have happened if Obama Care was a legal bill?

When this mother was found with no pulse, heartbeat or any other sign of life, would a doctor have been quickly summoned & asked to establish the time of death? Would the “death-panels” have been consorted to decide if this woman & her baby would be denied life? Would a C section immediately be performed to save the child? I think we all know the answer to that question.

If you're getting anywhere close to mid-life & you feel UHC really doesn't involve you, & so you defer being pro-active in this effort because you can't see yourself needing things like cat-scans, MRIs, knee, hip or any joint replacements etc.- may God bless you & may you be correct in your assessment.

But if you see the dangers of all this, & you believe with the final passage of this unjust health care bill many of the freedoms will disappear that young men & women have fought & died to protect, & you just haven’t taken the time to write & call your representatives letting them know in no uncertain terms where you stand, I trust & pray you’ll reconsider & let your voice be heard.

If you & I work together & pray, God has promised to hear from heaven & heal our land.


Blessings,


John