OC: A Disingenuous President

Jonathan Strong

The debate on health care has been diverted from the substance of the proposed bill to two syllables uttered by an, until yesterday, unknown Congressman from South Carolina. But in all fairness, Joe Wilson had a point. Obama supports amnesty for illegal immigrants, so if amnesty occurs, those illegals will undoubtedly be eligible for his health care plan in the future. President Obama has said, “We have talked this issue to death, year after year, decade after decade, and the time for talk is winding down, the time for bickering has passed.” And despite the talk, no one really knows how exactly Obama plans to pay for a massive takeover of the health care industry while the media continues to ignore when and why Obama changed his views for support of a single payer system.

To believe that the government can save money through Obama’s reform of Medicare is naive at best and, more realistically, dangerous thinking. Consider Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it is reasonable to think that a health care regulator would be just as easily corruptible, mismanaged, and indebted as those disastrous Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSE). Even the Obama media cheerleader the LA Times isn’t buying Obama’s money savings promises. If John Stewart starts asking hard questions, all hope for Obama may be lost.

But it is worth discovering what the President’s true views on health care are and when they changed (assuming they have). In the past Obama has signaled his clear support for a single payer, universal system that other countries like Canada and Britain maintain. Not only that, Obama laid out his plan to move from the current, mostly free market model to a single payer system through the incremental growth of government not so long ago on TV. The plan he is now proposing is entirely geared towards moving the country towards socialist (universal) health care. Thus, it is entirely reasonable to believe that Obama does believe in eliminating private companies from the arena of health care.

It is difficult to recall any President speaking so disdainfully of the free market. While the president may have used the words “competition”, he continually spoke of profits as if they were something to be sneered at rather than celebrated. The President made his opposition to free markets clear when he said, “The only thing this plan would eliminate is the hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud, as well as unwarranted subsidies in Medicare that go to insurance companies - subsidies that do everything to pad their profits and nothing to improve your care.” If anyone is guilty of waste, fraud, and unwanted subsidies, it is the government itself. Profits are the fruits of success, they are something to be proud of and not denigrated. The government bailouts do lead to the logical conclusion that the government rewards failure, but that’s another issue altogether.

If there’s one thing we can be guaranteed that government will not do is eliminate waste and fraud. Consider that between $70 and $120 billion (that’s with a “b”) per year is stolen through fraudulent Medicaid and Medicare transactions now! Can we even entertain the notion that a government program will somehow be more efficient or well administered as a private corporation could do? This is where the profit motive is essential, and something that the government lacks completely. The government can only encourage competition by removing itself from a market, not injecting itself. Once the government forces itself into a market to regulate or takeover, competition is hamstrung or eliminated.

The “transcendent” President has been anything but on health care. He has complained that Republicans have nothing to offer but opposition. This is an absolute falsehood. In fact, it is President Obama that has not met with Republican leaders since April on the issue. Instead, the President has attempted to ram through an entirely partisan, bloated, and wasteful bill. A bill that will further benefit unions and government workers just as the bailouts and automotive takeovers did.

If Obama was so concerned about “insuring the uninsured” he could use the unspent stimulus money to cover every uninsured American. So why isn’t he? Well, the Democrats are likely holding on to it so that it can be spent in bulk for vulnerable Democratic seats in the run up to the 2010 Congressional elections. And Obama calls his critics cynical?

Obama can deny death panels all he wants, but the fact remains that they exist in Britain and elsewhere. Britain even has the Orwellian institution “NICE”, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. This bureaucracy decides which people are worth spending health care dollars on to save their lives and which people aren’t worth it.

It’s incredible how the left can say “keep your laws off my body” when it comes to abortion, and yet they’re willing to play God with government health care by forcing laws on people’s decisions and bodies through the coercive hand of government.

Obama frequently complained that his opponents are using scare tactics to oppose any kind of reform, this from the President who then said, “more will die as a result” if his plan is not passed. If any scare mongering is taking place, the President is guilty of it. Moreover, it is also patently untrue that more government involvement will lead to less death. Forget that we’re all going to die eventually; the fact is that Americans have significantly higher survival rates for many diseases than countries like Britain and Canada who have single payer systems. How exactly Obamacare will save lives was a detail that wasn’t explained.

Investor’s Business Daily has reported, “breast cancer in America has a 25% mortality rate, in Britain it's almost double at 46%. Prostate cancer is fatal to 19% of American men who get it. In Britain it kills 57% of those it strikes.” This reality flies in the face of Obama’s scare tactics.

Beyond the untruths, Obama demonstrated an incredible lack of class by invoking Ted Kennedy’s death as some kind of sick (pardon the pun) motivation for reforming the entire system of health care. The Democrats have used death for political advantage in the past as when Paul Wellstone tragically died. Kennedy may have had a soft spot for the “disadvantaged” but his life was also a record of self gratification, narcissism, running roughshod over the lives of others, debauchery, the arrogant belief that he was above the law, and material excess.

There are numerous ways to reform health care without a government takeover or even government expansion. Many Republicans and private individuals like Newt Gingrich have proposed innovative solutions to make health care affordable, accessible, and efficient. The President was disingenuous in his Congressional address to the American people. He has been secretive of his true beliefs on whether he supports a single payer system, and if he no longer does, he should explain what made him change his mind.

The American people deserve far better than the current bill floating around the halls of Congress. America already has the best system in the world, it now must focus on making that system more efficient and more affordable.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Jonathan D. Strong graduated from the MichiganStateUniversityCollege of Law. He is a member of the Florida bar and currently resides in a suburb of Toronto, Ontario. E-mail: strongconservative@gmail.com.