In yesterday's Star, Thomas E. McClanahan--the paper's resident Conservative--outlined more of his reasons for being against the Health Care Reform Act passed earlier this year.
Naturally, he utterly ignored the fact that US District Court Judge Henry Hudson's ruling against the reform was highly biased and should have been dismissed since Judge Hudson is a part owner of a company, apparently, that worked openly and against this same reform. Recusing, anyone?
But no, Mr. McClanahan didn't address that issue.
We'll go on from there.
Next, he says
"At issue is the personal mandate, the part of the law that says everyone must buy health insurance or pay a penalty."
Okay, so if this is an issue, then how can government tell us to buy car insurance, then? How is this a problem?
No one gets the connection? One is allowable but the other isn't? How wouldyou explain that?
But here's what he says is the crux of his issue with the health care reform:
During the health care debate, it was common to hear people piously assert that health care should be a right, perhaps unaware of the full implications. The ongoing strikes and riots in Europe, however, represent the long-term risks of the progressive vision, in which government-delivered social benefits are portrayed as personal rights.
No wonder they’re rioting in Europe. They believe their personal rights are being violated by budget cuts brought on by the sovereign debt crisis.
Well, okay, right, the people are rioting---actually it's the university students because their costs have been rumored that they are to, I believe, double. That's not a health care problem, for one.
Secondly, not all of Europe is rioting, for sure.
Third, Europe is decidedly, absolutely not rioting on or about health care in any way. The societies over there wisely decided, decades ago, that health care is, indeed, a "right" and that it shouldn't be tied, endlessly, as we have, to profit and profits, ad infinitum. That our system has is true lunacy. It's indecent. It's obscene.
The fact is, the claims Mr. McClanahan makes in his column yesterday are the same, old and very tired claims that are virtually always made about progessive policies, politics and laws, be it Social Security or Medicare or whatever. It's always "the end of the world" with these people. In this case, Mr. McClanahan claims that "The problem is that elevating benefits to the level of rights confers an unlimited grant of power to the government. In the legislative process..."
Right. If this passes, the sky is definitely going to fall. You know we'll all turn Communist, don't you?
He goes on: "From government’s point of view, positive rights are marching orders. Heaven and earth must be moved to deliver the promises. The state grows rapidly and ultimately it outruns the capacity of the tax base to pay for it all, endangering the financial security of everyone."
The fact is, Mr. McClanahan, if the "public option" had also been included in this health care reform, all it would do is give the insurance agencies some competition, in a direct effort to help keep insurance costs down. More than anything, that's what's killing our health care system--the costs, the high, high costs.
So there's the rebuttal to the column and that's all well and good.
But the fact is, our health care system is utterly, completely, totally broken. More than 50 million of us here in the US have no health care coverage.
It's clear Mr. McClanahan and lots of Conservatives and Republicans are against what he derides as "Obamacare" but which is really the Health Care Reform Act of 2010 and it's for the people of the US, of America.
Fine, they're all against it.
What would you, Mr. McClanahan, and all your kind who are so against this, do FOR the American people, to help fix our health care system?
No one on the other side has offered any solutions yet.
And of it--the system, our costs and our individual and collective health--just keep getting worse, in the meantime.
Link:
http://www.kansascity.com/2010/12/18/2529544/obamacare-and-the-risk-of-positive.html
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