David

Karki

Read David's bio and previous columns here

July 22, 2009

A Tyrannical Power Grab Masquerading as ‘Health Care’

Congress is presently debating a health care bill that has nothing at all to do with your health. It is the de facto abolition of private insurance and private medical practice, and a massive tax increase to boot to pay for it all. It's also a complete shredding of the Constitution and an invasion of everyone's personal liberties in that it will make illegal individual transactions between insurer and insuree, and doctor and patient.

From Page 16 of the House bill (H.R. 3200, a 1,018 page beast):

(1) LIMITATION ON NEW ENROLLMENT.—

6 (A) IN GENERAL.—Except as provided in

7 this paragraph, the individual health insurance

8 issuer offering such coverage does not enroll

9 any individual in such coverage if the effective

10 date of coverage is on or after the first day of

11 Y1.

This is the direct phasing out of private insurance. No new policies for new enrollees will be allowed past January 1 of whatever year Congress decides Y1 will be. In other words, any attempt by an individual or employer to purchase private insurance after the bill goes into effect will be committing a criminal act. Two parties engaging in a mutually beneficial transaction to which both freely consent will now be a crime.

Furthermore, Pages 148 and 151 establish totalitarian government control of the content of private insurance policies and forces employers to provide policies. Failure to comply with either will result in punitive excise taxes, to the tune of $100 per employee per day for those who don't provide the type of policies dictated by government (page 148), and the equivalent of 8 percent of all wages paid by the employer for those who attempt to evade Washington's thuggish control by simply stopping the provision of health benefits at all (and instead, say, raising employee wages so their workers can buy on their own with after-tax dollars).

At $100 per non-compliant employee for every day of non-compliance, and 8 percent of all wages paid . . . why not just roll tanks on the offices of every company and insurer in America while you're at it? The fact that this doesn't use actual weaponry to forcibly march everyone into the government program makes it no less violent and tyrannical.

This monster of a bill goes on and on and on, destroying all limits on government's power and seizing control of all that it can. Except for, of course, the exceptions Congress gives itself, government employees and labor unions. You weren't actually expecting them to live by the draconian laws they foist upon the rest of us, were you? 

President Obama is lying through his teeth when he claims you'll be able to keep your insurance and doctor, because everything else in the bill creates incentives that will ensure that it doesn't happen. The only way it holds is if you don’t change anything in the policy, the provider doesn’t change anything either, and that somehow the provider manages to stay in business and provide the same service for the same cost despite a sudden loss of most clients to the government program (and thus most of their revenue from premiums) with no prospects of new customers (save for new dependent children born to current policy holders). 

Obama's lie is a rhetorical con job designed to answer a concern with a technically correct formal positive that deliberately hides the massive negative. It is a bamboozling of which Machiavelli would be proud. And it shows that rather than simply being insanely mad, Obama/Pelosi/Reid and company know exactly what they are doing.

They are staging an illegitimate, unconstitutional, immoral power grab via the outlawing of private sector insurance and medicine. It will turn doctors into slaves, forcing them to provide services at below-market prices or even for free. It will turn insurers and employers/individuals into outlaws for simply selling and buying.

Most of all, it will turn government into the extinguisher of liberty and the controller of us all. There won't be one bit of our behavior that we won't first have to seek government's permission before engaging in, as they'd be paying for the health-related consequences. And if you think this won't lead directly to rationing of care and even the power to decide who lives and dies based on who government thinks is “worth the cost of saving,” you have a rude awakening ahead of you.

Between this and the equally atrocious “cap and tax” bill, which effectively outlaws all domestic energy production and puts all our personal lifestyle choices, from light bulbs to showerheads, under government's dictatorial control, it's pretty clear to see what's going on for anyone who isn't a hardcore red Kool-Aid chugging leftist.

Our power-obsessed Congress and president have all but declared war on the people and their Creator-endowed freedoms, and without question have long-since left behind any pretense of paying any attention to the Constitution, which doesn't allow for any of this, in spite of the fact that they disingenuously swore an oath to uphold it. That they would even consider such monstrosities, much less try to hastily ram them down our throats before we can find out what's in them – precisely because they know that government power, once entrenched, never retreats or goes away, makes them deserving of removal from office.

Therefore, all of us who value freedom and liberty – which I'm afraid is a minority these days, an even smaller one than the third of the colonists who backed the patriot cause against Britain – must fight with all we have using words and demonstrations and the like, in the hopes that this despotism can be stopped before it's too late. This may seem radical, but when government has so broken its compact with the governed and lost its legitimacy, the people are free and in fact have a duty to respond in like fashion.

For if we don't, America will be gone with scarcely a whimper to announce its death.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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