Hypocrisy and Absurdity Reign in This Election Season

Today is Election Day, and nothing can be worse than the incessant impetus of the state-worshiping electorate swarming into their local voting precincts, whether they are public “government” schools, firehouses, and other state-approved municipalities, to cast their state-sanctioned, state-endorsed, and state-approved votes for their preferred candidates for public “government” office. This even entails their votes for or against state-approved measures on the ballot.

The Tea Parties’ call for constitutional government, tax-and-spending cuts, no cap and trade, fiscal accountability, and a repeal of the recently-passed, Obama-approved health care program, as stated in its recently-circled “Contract from America” document which has been pushed and lobbied by many of its backers, rings hollow in comparison to their steadfast backing of the establishment’s Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and controlling and their need to militarize the borders between the U.S. and Mexico. One must include their lack of condemnation of the former Bush administration’s profligate spending (although some of them like conservative The Dana Show host Dana Loesche have skewered W.’s domestic agenda). Last but not least, they have not even bothered to deplore the Department of Homeland Security‘s Transportation Security Administration checkpoints’ thoroughly invasive search and frisking procedures commonly known as “enhanced patdowns” along with its utter disregard and violation of passengers’ privacy and civil liberties via its screeners’ use of naked body scanners at nearly every airport across the country. (Ironically, the Bush and Obama administrations “informed” us that the scanners wouldn’t record our images, but the recently-leaked photos of the scanners prove otherwise. Even the U.S. Marshalls Service admitted it.) Given that the conservatives’ “revolutionary” movement has put Congressmen John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and nearly the entire GOP in the House and the Senate “on probation,” should we seriously take them at their word?

The “Contract from America” document is a de facto embarrassment and fraud on the American electorate, its semi-libertarian undertones notwithstanding. It’s nothing more than a descendant of Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract with America,” although a number of GOP’ers more or less liken the GOP’s “Pledge to America” document to it. No where in this newest proposal does it tacitly say anything about repealing nearly every federal agency, regulation, and a host of entitlement programs. There is no call to end the U.S. federal government’s disastrous energy and foreign policies (which go hand-in-hand in reality). For example, the manifesto calls for an “Pass an ‘All-of-the-Above’ Energy Policy,” which mandates the following:

Authorize the exploration of proven energy reserves to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources from unstable countries and reduce regulatory barriers to all other forms of energy creation, lowering prices and creating competition and jobs.

Even worse, there is no call to repeal the federal income tax, the capital gains tax, the estate tax, and repeal all the federal spending (which constitutional scholars on the laissez-faire/minarchist side would deride as “unconstitutional”). Only a mention of a “moratorium on all earmarks” unless a balanced budget appears, but why a moratorium? Why not outright abolition of the earmarks and the spending? In the interim, a gutting of the spending would be much preferable to that option, but obviously this is done specifically to pander to a base of conservatives who really don’t want cuts in or repeal of entitlement, pork, and defense spending out of fear that such moves would affect their piece of the welfare-warfare pie. After all, there’s nothing better than a conservative politician who is buying votes from blocs of welfare-worshiping, warfare-worshiping Tea Party activists and their voting base who are primarily interested in and defensive of propping up and maintaining their hegemonies of the Middle East.

One would think that the Tea Parties would field GOP candidates who are solid on pro-peace, pro-civil liberties platforms. With the possible exception of Ron Paul, the idea of said candidates is an oxymoron in terms. The vast majority of the Republican establishment is a warmongering outfit, and one can include all the Tea Parties on that column. Republican congressional candidates running on anti-war and national-security state platforms might have been worthy of consideration for the electorate (despite the likelihood of grumblings from the Tea Partiers), given that it might have energized scores of Americans who have been increasingly viewing the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as both fiscal albatrosses and embarrassing quagmires. But don’t count on that. The Tea Party is fundamentally opposed to that idea, and their conservative underlings would scream bloody murder at the prospect of an anti-war, anti-state Republican in their midst. Thank you Tea Partiers and Republicans. Your pro-war, anti-civil liberties records have emboldened President Obama to magnify his assaults on the peoples in Afghanistan, Iraq, the entire Middle East, and on our own shores as well and bolster international support for global hegemony. Obama’s barbaric policies, which were carried over from the Bush administration and made into his own, ought to incite anger from every American.

The “Pledge to America” manifesto is worse than the above-mentioned one. It gives lip service to slashing spending and paring down the deficit, but it barely elaborates on some specifics. The Republicans’ conservative base and the Tea Party are heavily putting an enormous amount of stock in the GOP to retake the House (which is very likely after today) and possibly conquer the Senate to carry their agendas, but they are foolish to do such a thing. The GOP is asking the Tea Party and their conservative supporters to have faith in their fiscal restraint, but what do they have to show for it after Bush’s rampant spending during his years in the Oval Office? After being wiped out politically in 2008, their credibility and respectability have been virtually obliterated beyond repair. Even their support for the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, and other pervasive government programs have never wavered. What will it take for the Tea Party candidates to wake up and realize that, despite one of their concerns is cuts in entitlement spending (despite the fact that 63 percent of the movement is opposed to that), Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are also government programs? Even the Pentagon and the Military Industrial Complex are programs too.

And what of the Democrats? The Democrats have come off as absurd hypocrites on the home and war fronts without question. President Obama has broken more than a handful of promises to the American people, promises that he made to his constituency and his base who backed him to deliver his promise of “change” to the U.S. His promises, such as making his administration transparent to an already-skeptical, already-cynical American public, ending the Bush-propped, Bush-backed War in Iraq (which he’s failed to do twice in a row), digging the economy out of the Bush-imposed recession, and ending Washington’s culture of interest interests and lobbyism, were never intended to be delivered. After all, he has already backpedaled on his intentions to end the military’s old “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy (twice in a row, point of fact), and his appeal to a federal appeals court that overturned that Clinton-era executive order has already enraged his gay progressive Democratic base. Oh, and his expensive stimulus and Cash-for-Clunker programs and bailouts of GM and Chrysler have really bloated the deficit even further, which have become fodder for the right-wing talking heads on Fox News.

Obama has already embroiled the nation further in the Iraqi and Afghani conflicts than Bush ever had. After all, we are talking about the same current president who has proceeded with Bush’s war policies by amplifying his genocidal killings in the Muslim nations and blatantly declared war on our civil liberties and the Constitution. Unlike Obama, Bush did not so much possess a morsel of authority to engage in assassinations of Americans in the name of the War on Terror without a shred of due process. His pledge to pull the plug on Guantanamo Bay — that is, releasing all Americans imprisoned as “enemy combatants” who would be tried by a an American criminal court in New York (given that they are constitutionally accorded with the right to due process and a right to a speedy trial) in lieu of a U.S. military tribunal without the presence of a jury of their peers and the right to a defense by an attorney on their behalf — was rescinded due to conservative outcries because expressions of sympathy and empathy for “terrorists” would be tantamount to appeasing and treason. Such a move would give the loopy fringe right wing plenty of ammunition, thereby denouncing Obama as a supporter of terrorism. Obama’s backpedaling on reversing Bush’s foreign policy would enable the Republicans to brand the President sympathetic to the terrorists’ cause. Can you imagine how that would play out for Obama’s re-election chances? Those labeled slapped on him and the Democratic Party would make the Democrats’ chances for re-election to the House and the Senate more problematic than it is now.

Americans who are convinced that the country is moving towards the wrong direction should realize that the GOP’s power grab of the House and possibly the Senate won’t do anything to unroot the manifestation, cause, and flow of statism in this country and abroad. The state’s tentacles have reached every facet of American and international lives as we know it. Republicans who claim that this election is about a “referendum against Obama” are deluding themselves because it’s truly a referendum to exact more control of American lives and wiping away more of our freedoms than ever Republican-style. The Democrats are at least honest about not being in favor of laissez faire and individual liberty; after all, they have never believed in the individual, just only in the collective. But the Republicans’ incessant claims of championing those values are not worth the campaign literature on which they are printed. Every statist action from exacting conquest of other nations (including the Muslim world) to engineering government-mandated pensions and medical care for retired and poor people must be scrapped. The much-worse welfare-warefare state that has inundated the United Kingdom and Europe will soon metastasize to our soil. The welfare-warfare statism in our homeland is untenable and unmanageable.

All the odious signs of the Republicans are there. Once they are in power (and after tonight, they will be), they will proceed with the War on Drugs and be more aggressive with their xenophobic, nationalistic, and jingoistic anti-immigration zealotry. All the campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, the Tea Parties and their Republican operatives will conquer and rule the American people like their Democratic counterparts in a statist conservative Republican manner.

Hypocrisy and absurdity surely reign in this election season. Especially on Election Day today.

What’s Sauce for the Goose Is Sauce for the Gander

Proponents of Obama’s pro-subsidized insurance industry medical-care “reform” a.k.a. ObamaCare are absolutely (and entirely) correct to object to the death threats and acts of physical violence directed at some congressmen that followed the recent ObamaCare vote in the House. It is paramount to stress that all decent and civil people must condemn and reject the actions of those who partook in them. Regardless of their reasons, what transpired was and still is immoral in every step of the way. It’s immoral because it violates the essence and spirit of the Non Aggression Principle (NAP) and should not be tolerated across the board. Not only that, it sullies the cause of human liberty, which entails the diminishing of State power over the lives of freethinking individuals.

Having said that, the supporters of the so-called overhaul come off as nothing more than hypocrites because of their support for State violence against nonviolent individuals who just want to be left to their own devices. These individuals should be renouncing violence, yet they embrace it by supporting the plan. Considering the fact that the Obama administration has ordered the IRS to hire 16,00 new employees to be armed and loaded and carry out the medical-care mandate, violators, who happen to be uninsured Americans and who refuse to comply with the federal mandates and regulations by enrolling and paying for the newly state-mandated insurance, will be levied fines of nearly $700, which is nothing more than an assault on his or her liberty. Those fines can include, but not limited to, a confiscation of the violator’s property, further sanctions such as arrest and incarceration, etc. All those things coupled with resistance to arrest and incarceration can, and will eventually, include the mighty wrath of the vile and pernicious State. And that simply can occur because an innocent and peaceful individual rightfully abstained from complying with a government mandate.

The point is that, if universal health care were such a noble endeavor and a goal truly worth of praise (and it would most certainly be), it would have been enacted freely and voluntarily in the absence of the State. This would be best achieved exclusively via voluntary exchange and social cooperation, not via brute force. After all, as the legendary George Washington once pointed out, “Government is not eloquence. It is not reason. It is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master.” While they could have implemented otherwise, the proponents of ObamaCare decided that coercion must be employed (by using threats of violence) to get their way. That attitude is predicated on the notion that the ends must always justify the means. If they oppose violence by speaking out against the death threats and other threats of violence aimed at them, talk about the pot calling the kettle black. They are hardly setting a good example.

Advocates of liberty across the board must reject such calls of violence. They need not to sink to their level.

Reality or Alarmism?

Democratic operatives and mainstream media shills and apologists for the Obama administration’s just-passed and enacted medical-care overhaul are now accusing the rank-and-file Republicans and their cronies who oppose the much-touted yet highly-unpopular “reform” and warn people of dire medical and economic consequences of being alarmists. The standard argument now being offered goes like this: “You and your ilk made the same claims about Medicare when it was passed in 1965.”

That is quite a hilarious contention, come to think of it. When Medicare was passed and enacted into law, opponents of the program at the time predicted that it result in the state’s greater control of the medical system than ever.

Here’s a couple of fair questions to people: does anyone now believe that Medicare was such a good idea to create? And while we’re at it, does anyone now think that was a horrible prediction at all?

Medicare, as it stands, has an unfunded liability — that is, empty promises — of $37 trillion over the next 75 years, the insolvency of the program notwithstanding. To give the devil his due, Obama at least admits that Medicare is a major reason for the federal deficit, which creates the massive national debt. To rectify the problem (namely the out-of-control budget), coverage for a handful of services are being denied. Doctors are now routinely being prompted to stop accepting new Medicare patients, thanks to the insane bureaucratic burden imposed upon them.

All in all, the government medical program has stimulated supply and demand of services, thus propping up prices for everyone across the board by subsidizing medical care for the retirees. Costlier medical care results in costlier medical insurance. Medical insurance companies are soon priced out of the market, thus becoming wiped out of existence after the price of insurance skyrockets. That certainly adds to the number of people who are uninsured. (Although this is not the only factor of inflation, it remains a relatively large one.)

With prices rising higher and the number of uninsured growing larger (all because of the government product known as Medicare), there is no question that all this has energized the government’s attempt to increase its power over the medical system.

Now, in the present day, the predictions made about Medicare have come true, not to mention legitimate. It has opened the door for more state intervention in our medical-care choices — meaning us.

The question that needs to be asked is this: is what we’ve warned about ObamaCare making us alarmists or talking about reality?

The Moral and Economic Bankruptcy and Ignorance of Real Time Host Bill Maher

Statist liberal and Barack Obama shill Bill Maher, host of his populist HBO talk show Real Time with Bill Maher, fired a rant that contained a series of smears and ad hominems at the Republicans who are up in arms over the passage and enactment of ObamaCare.

Here’s a YouTube clip* of Maher making his speech on the March 26, 2010 episode of his show:

John Dingell: ObamaCare Was Put Together "To Control The People"

Congressman John Dingell of my home state of Michigan discussed the vile health care law that was passed by Congress and signed into law by Obama, specifically in a recent interview with conservative talk show host Paul W. Smith on WJR 760AM in Detroit. Apparently, he let slip the real goal of ObamaCare and its provisions:

Here’s an excerpt of his scathing yet honest answers regarding the hidden agenda of the new law:

The harsh fact of the matter is when you’re going to pass legislation that will cover 300 [million] American people in different ways it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.

How nice of him, Obama, and the statist Democrats in power! In their eyes, we’re all just a bunch of Pinocchios with strings attached to our arms and legs like hand-made puppets.

How quaint.

The True Prescription for Medical-Care Reform Is A Freed Market

The recently-passed medical-care bill a.k.a. ObamaCare, which Barack Obama signed into law on Tuesday and which will be challenged in the form of lawsuits in federal court by many state attorney generals on the grounds that it is unconstitutional, has opened a Pandora’s Box in the political, legal, constitutional, moral, and anti-liberty scheme of things.

It’s political, because the bill, which was supposed to be brought to the Senate for reconciliation before Obama signed it, ended up being bypassed to Obama’s desk for his signature, without the “fixes” (which are actually amendments) being applied to the document. After all, the Voice of America news site reported on March 22 just before the bill reached the Oval Office: “[T]he Senate must still sign-off on a series of changes approved by the House.” (After Obama signed the bill into law, the Senate had just passed the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010.)

The law’s conservative critics argue that it’s both unconstitutional and illegal, because there’s nothing in the Constitution that says that the U.S. federal government must coerce uninsured individuals into purchasing health-care insurance. I’m not much of a fan of the current document as established by our Founding Fathers, but the conservatives’ argument is entirely flimsy. While it may be true that any constitutional scholar or historian worth his or her salt will say that this medical-care “reform” does not fall within the constitutional purview of the federal government, the Constitution is pretty cryptic in this area. So what if it is unconstitutional? Conservatives are wrongheaded to make this point. They should be arguing that the bill is wrong and unethical, because it initiates force against those who choose not to pay for other people’s medical care, whether they are insured or not, and subsidizes those who would otherwise not need the insurance for a variety of reasons. Congressional Democrats, such as John Conyers of Michigan, say that the “general welfare” clause (found in the Preamble and Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution) grants the federal government the power to establish dominion of the U.S. medical-care system. But what were the conservatives expecting? That Obama would just not sign the bill into law? Democrats have historically been hostile to human liberty across the board. Republicans are the same. Face it; if George W. Bush had proposed a similar law and lobbied hard to pass it, would the GOP and its cronies have argued against it then? Of course not! They would be all for it, because they would have been getting the credit for it, and they would financially and politically benefit from it like former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney did when he imposed RomneyCare in his state.

Finally, it’s immoral and anti-liberty, because it is an assault on individual liberty while both protecting and expanding the parasitic medical welfare state (including the entitlement programs of Medicaid [which is universal medical care for the uninsured poor and needy] and Medicare [which is universal care for mostly wealthy retirees and the elderly collecting Social Security). (Medicare recipients will not be pleased to learn that this new law, which begins to take effect in its entirety by 2018, will undercut, undermine, or eliminate their coverage or see a significant rise in their premiums.) Individuals, who are already not allowed and had never been allowed to make that many decisions on their medical-care options, will find that their insurance premium costs will rise, the quality of health care to plummet, and the pool of available doctors shrinking at a much substantially higher rate than ever. The new law, which for months had been widely touted as a “reform” of the system, will not allow wiggle room for doctors to make medical decisions on their patients’ health and patients to make medical choices on their health and what insurance plans work best for them. ObamaCare does not and will not address the state’s intervention in the medical-care market, research, and the system in its entirety. It does not even allow patients to shop for insurance plans from insurers across state lines.

The medical care system certainly requires reforms — true radical reforms. ObamaCare, on the other hand, is just too expensive, and powerful medical and insurance interests are prospering and will prosper even more at the expense of all of us. The status quo will merely profit from it, which hardly leaves any legitimate reason for any sane and rational individual to admire it. With that in mind, we have no sound reason to tolerate it.

The idea that a highly-bureaucratized, highly-socialized state-propped medical-care model such as ObamaCare costing only $940 billion is nothing more than a piece of fiction. Medicare, which was launched in 1966, actually cost $3 billion. Congress projected the costs of the program at about $12 billion by 1990 (an alleged conservative estimate). By the time that year came, the actual cost was $107 billion (if inflation is included in the costs). In 2003, the CATO Institute issued a report indicating that the program was going to be price-tagged at a projected $244 billion. Moreover, the Medicare system is rife with massive fraud and abuse. Fewer than 5 percent of the medical claims filed with the agency are audited. Cost overruns, rising deficits, lower payments to physicians and hospitals coupled with payment delays, medical services and procedures rationed by doctors, hospitals, and the state coupled with treatment delays, payroll taxes paid by employers and levied on employees, and HMO-style “assembly line” medicine have plagued Medicare for the longest time.

Thanks to the imposition of the Medicare Drug Prescription Benefit Act of 2003 (a Bush-era edict that was price-tagged at $400 billion) and a month after then-President Bush issued that decree, Medicare Plan D’s price-tag went up to $534 billion. According to the 2009 Annual Report of the Boards of Trustees of the Federal Hospital Insurance and Federal Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Funds, the projected costs from 2009 to 2018 are $727.3 billion. But the economic reality is that the costs for that program are going to be higher — much higher — than deemed. Even James Bovard, a policy analyst for the Future of Freedom Foundation and author of The Bush Betrayal, noted in 2005 that the Medicare trustees would cost up to $7 trillion over the next 75 years (assuming the federal government and all of its various programs, including Medicare and its prescription drug program, still exist).

Obama, his progressive supporters who are behind the new model, and his medical and insurance cronies are misguided to believe that the new doomed medical-care system will be accepted by the American people, including their opponents and critics. But they are gravely mistaken. Critics of the law, for months before Congress passed it, have pointed out the obvious problems that the new system will create. Even more than 60 percent of the American people, according to many online polls, were overwhelmingly opposed (and still are) to the bill. This “reform” is nothing more of a repackaging of the current system, with the exception that it coerces more coverage and more people into the system.

Focus on the fact that the majority of the attention of nearly all the “reformers” centered on the health-insurance industry. The common denominator in the entire medical-care “debate” had been, still is, and will continue to be that health-insurance firms have been under-regulated. For months, what became a discussion on “health-insurance reform” soon morphed into “health insurance regulation.” Of course, health insurers have been massively and obscenely over-regulated, but the “reformers” don’t want to ruin the fun of their crusade against the companies because of that fact. The bulk of the “over-regulation” is imposed by the biggest insurance players such as Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Blue Care Network, and Aetna against the smallest insurers. More insurance firms will go under ObamaCare, which was the plan all along. The claim that Obama & Co. touted (saying that patients will get to keep their current insurance plans) is just bogus. Expect to see more insurance firms going under because of the massive mandates.

Another problem is that the Congressional Budget Office says that the new law will reduce the deficit in ten years. Anyone with a modicum of comprehension of economics knows that the CBO’s report is nonsense. Lawmakers have been relaying dubious information to the agency with cooked figures on the issue. Conservative columnist Thomas Sowell, in his latest op-ed titled “An Off-Budget Office?,” debunked this lunacy by noting with respect to the San Francisco Chronicle’s article on the matter entitled “Costly Bill Seen as Saving Money“:

It’s not hard to understand at all. It is a lie.

What makes this particular lie pass muster with many people, who might otherwise use their common sense, is that the Congressional Budget Office vouched for the consistency of the budget numbers that say you can add millions of people to a government-run system and yet save money.

The Congressional Budget Office does honest work. But it can only use the numbers that Congress supplies– and Congress does dishonest work. It is not the CBO’s job to give their opinion as to whether any of the marvelous things that Congress says it will do in the future are either likely or possible.

Sowell even further notes:

[N]one of this money is in the official federal budget that the Congressional Budget Office sees. There are many other financial liabilities of the government that are ‘off-budget,’ which means that they do not show up in the official numbers.

Even research analysts find the CBO’s findings apocryphal. As Marc Goldwein, the policy director of the the Washington budget watchdog group Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, points out:

CBO is the most trusted analysis out there, but everything they say, you should take with a humongous grain of salt.

Is health insurance the most lucrative and most profitable commodity in the industry? Not quite. Such insurance on average generates a profit margin that amounts to about 3-4 cents on the dollar. These firms do welcome a guaranteed clientele, even if it’s foisted upon the public, because it ensures their profitability. Although Obama & Co. will appear as an populist opponent to the industry, he’s actually its best ally. Why? Because Big Insurance will accept the onerous new regulations to decimate its much smaller competitors, leaving insurance consumers with fewer insurance options to purchase. Considering they are not incentivized to innovate and compete thanks to their politically-connected, politically-protected mandates, young healthy people will find that the individual mandates are compulsory and that they must purchase highly expensive products and services from these protected government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), thanks to the state. It’s intriguing that the progressive critics of the insurance enterprises, who routinely bash their practices and support Obama’s “reform,” neglect to mention that the new model coerces everyone to transact with these entities.

The only objection that these GSEs have with the plan is that the penalties for not complying with or refusing to comply with the individual and employer mandates are not high enough. Most young people will likely choose to pay the penalties out of their pockets rather than purchase the insurance because of the cheap savings for them. Hence, a problem arises out of that mess: if and when the uninsured become sick and then apply for coverage, they can’t and won’t be denied because the new law prohibits it. Expect to see future changes (in the form of stricter penalties) in the federal law to avert more gaming of the system in the not-too-distant future. Thus, this is another victory for the already-protected insurance establishment.

Finally, the critics of the old government-created public-private hybrid of the medical-care system have been spewing ad nauseum for months that the system was the result of the free market, and that it has failed the American people. But that is a baldfaced lie. A free market medical-care system hasn’t existed, nor has it ever existed over the last 100 years. The “reformers” continue to miss this paramount point every single time: what exists now, and will continue to exist, is the current system has been the result of an uncompetitive medical and insurance cartel system that has been codified by the state and thrives and exists entirely and purely, thanks to state privilege. This privilege has come into existence because of its extension of state governments through state-approved and state-sanctioned monopolistic licensing. Congress, if it wanted to, could end this nightmare by repealing the prohibition on interstate insurance sales and the horrendous tax favoritism for employer-provided medical insurance coverage. But don’t let those points enter the mind of the vile, greedy, and pernicious Democrats, who stand to financially profit from the system at the expense of the poor (whom the ruling party claims to care about).

And to make matters worse, before the bill passed in both chambers of the House and were signed into law, many physicians across the country threatened to bolt from the system and give up their practices. Many of them have exited from the profession because of the low reimbursements and payments from Medicare and to avoid legal malpractice liability. Expect to see a much larger mass exodus from the system in the months and years to come.

The only good news coming out of this mess is that most Americans (if not, many) are seeing for the first time the fraudulent “reform” this law really is. It only secures and protects the government-created cartels, punishes the well-off, and merely postures as a friend of the uninsured who are largely impoverished.

At the end of the day, the true prescription for medical-care reform is a freed market. Two illusions need to be shattered. First, the idea that this is a matter between the status quo and this “reform” is preposterous. The “reform” IS the status quo in drag. Second, for generations, the state has bedded the medical profession and the insurance industry to ram down our throats the evil system we have today. A freed market is the only way out of this mess.

Medical Statism a.k.a. ObamaCare Passes in the House

ObamaCare, which is officially known as Patient Protection and Affordability Act of 2010 (H.R. 3950), has just passed in the House. The vote tally comes at 219-212.

It’s now expected that Herr Obama will sign it on his desk this upcoming Tuesday. But how can he sign a bill into law if the Senate hasn’t applied the “fixes” that the Democrats made to the House-passed version of the bill hours ago? Because those “fixes” aren’t REAL fixes. Those are just last-minute amendments to the bill AFTER it was passed, and they are heading to the Senate. The bill has already cleared the halls of Congress. According to the Voice of America news website, “[T]he Senate must still sign-off on a series of changes approved by the House.”

Obviously, so many backroom dealings had occurred on the House floor. The key provisions of the legislation that the medical lobbyists and Big Insurance (like Blue Cross Blue Shield) are backing include:

1. Coercing individuals to buy insurance or be faced with a penalty of 2.5 percent of income. That penalty would come to an annual amount of $695 if individuals refuse to accept that coverage.
2. Coercing employers to offer insurance to their workers or face a penalty of $2,000 per worker. Specifically, employers will be coerced to cover 65% of family premiums or fork over a penalty based on payroll. Small businesses with less than $500,000 on payroll will be exempt and payrolls up to $750,000 will have a reduced contribution.
3. Banning private insurance firms (that don’t have the political clout like Big Insurance does) that want new business from denying coverage to policyholders having preexisting medical conditions.
4. Coercing above-mentioned firms to accept new government regulations and mandates.
5. Coercing parents to keep their children on their medical plans until they reach the age of 26.

The most laughable aspect of this “debate” on the House floor is that Democratic Congresscritter Bart Stupak from my home state of Michigan, who was originally against the bill because of a provision in the bill that would allow taxpayer financing of abortions, flip flopped on it because of a meaningless deal that Obama cut with him by saying that he would issue an executive order to prohibit the funding. Stupak wasn’t against the bill because it would solidify the state’s entrenchment in the medical care system; he was against it because of his pro-life views. If that provision had not been written in the bill in the first place, does anyone really think he would have voted against it? Not in a New York minute!

(Interestingly and hilariously enough, the congressman was branded a “baby killer” by a Republican colleague in the House, although he has an idea of who said it.)

Once the bill is signed into law and goes into effect, one can be certain that millions of Americans will not obey the law. This is what happens when the state furthers itself into the medical care system much more than it has in decades. Any chance of restoring a true free market medical care system went up in smoke the second the bill passed.

It’s time for all Liberty activists to start practicing civil disobedience and educate the masses in a clear, concise, and innovative way. No more the state! More freedom than ever!

Health Care Socio-Fascism

Americans who support President Obama’s “health care reform” plan involving the creation of a new public “government” insurance plan that would require private companies except for small businesses to provide it ought to be a red flag. As problematic as the corporatized health care system is (and it is, due to decades of never-ending government intervention), it could be in worse shape. However, if Obama, his hero-worshipping limousine leftists, and their collectivistic cronies have their way (and it looks as though it is heading in that direction), the deliberately-misnamed “single payer” health care for which the Democrats ache will come a cropper their way.

My latest and newest op-ed, aptly titled “Health Care Socio-Fascism,” is available here at AssociatedContent.com. (It will soon be available at the Libertarian Enterprise and is currently being reviewed at the Nolan Chart site.)

[Cross-posted at The Freeman Chronicles and the Peace, Freedom, and Prosperity Movement website.]