"The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened." ~(1948) Norman Thomas, Six-time Socialist Cadidate for US Presidency
Over the Thanksgiving holiday our Senators will be home. The 11/21 vote was to move the matter to debate once they return from the holiday.
I urge each and everyone of you to visit their Senator’s office with the message they seem to not have heard. Vote for this Healthcare bill, and you better prepare for retirement.
To that end:
MAKE SURE TO DROP OFF A “HAPPY RETIREMENT” GREETING CARD!
This is our last chance to be heard! If you can’t get to their office just drop one in the mail! Find the addresses here: http://www.senate.gov/ . A list of Democrat Senators up for re-election in 2010 is here: http://www.fireandreamitchell.com/2009/11/21/a-list-of-democrat-senators-up-for-re-election-in-2010/
TIP 1: If there is already someone geared up to run against them, be sure to mention that candidate by name in a note, so they know that YOU KNOW who their competition is! Even better make sure they know you will be working on the competition’s campaign if you are so inclined!
TIP 2: Think about presenting them with a big beautiful Mylar Balloon for a little extra pizazz!!
TIP 3: Spend some quality crafty time with family and like-minded friends to deliver custom-crafted cards and doo-dads.
TIP 4: No time to go to the card shop? Here’s a free retirement card template you can print and send! http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/TC103754971033.aspx?CategoryID=CT101433941033 ht
TIP 5: Get a group together, meet up at a specific day/time and throw a party! Cards, balloons, cake, noise makers! Sing “For He’s a FOLLY Good Fellow,” give them a Barney the Dinosaur watch as a departing gift!
TIP 6: Film the delivery and/or party. Take pictures during your visit or scan your card! Post them here! (We do love your creativity, folks, but PLEASE stay on topic or your image will be deleted)
TIP 7: If your Senator is not there to see you, at least request the office manager. I believe this will provide more impact.
Again, please be sure to invite EVERYONE YOU KNOW!
This is too important not to post. It corroborates EVERYTHING I thought was true about this bill and all the provisions I have investigated thus far. Folks, if this thing passes it will be hell to be an American citizen. In addition to all the new taxes she speaks of for insurance premiums and necessary medical devices, your State will also have to get revenue from somewhere to cover the imposed hike in Medicaid mandates. By the way, the money fairy is a myth, so don’t believe those Detroiters that stand in line waiting form Obama money.
Q. Is the United States, in your opinion, becoming a socialist country?
A. Not quite. The U.S. has been pretty center-left since the days of FDR, and definitely in terms of entitlement spending (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, SSI, Welfare, Section 8, Food Stamps, Lord know what else). Since nearly half of the country doesn’t even pay any taxes to fund it we’ve got the whole nanny state thing covered.
What has kept us center left, ironically, is capitalism itself. It’s cyclical in nature, so we’re assured boom and bust periods every few years. You may notice that during the bust periods, businesses and people have no problem running to the government to be succored and taken care of. That’s usually when we end up with some massive new entitlement, and once we have them, they’re politically untouchable despite the calamitous economic consequences of maintaining them.
What has kept us from drifting further left, fortunately, is the independence of our states. So while one can move to California and conceivably live off the dole for a lifetime, they wouldn’t be able to pull off the same feat in say, Texas, where the culture is different, government is small and there are virtually no taxes, services, or handouts.
Americans also love innovation, choice, and speed, so likely wouldn’t tolerate a government responsible for running all of our industries, and deciding the output and delivery of our goods and services. Most of us panic when we don’t have enough options available on our iPhones for Pete’s sake, so I doubt we’d ever want to rely on Uncle Sam for our clothes, TVs, remotes, video games, cars, laptops, etc. It would be way too inconvenient. Women may be divided on an issue such as abortion, for example, but they’ll unite if you mess with their department stores. Inhibit their ability to customize their kitchens and there may be be rioting in the streets.
Q. What do you think was the turning point with The President’s poll numbers?
A. I might be reaching here, but I’d have to say “Gates-gate”. That event will live on in infamy as the day when Obama spoiled the vision of himself as a transformative, post racial, unifying President. Keep in mind many white moderates and independents made the good faith assumption that he would be the cure for what ills this country racially, and he’d be what we needed to assuage white guilt. Not so fast.
In rushing to judgment against the Cambridge police, without having the facts of the matter at hand, and siding with Gates while inserting race into the narrative, he exposed himself as just another huckster…the “angry elitist black man” who sees racism even where it isn’t, and opts to pretentiously ram his sermonizing on the subject down our throats.
He got off easy with the Reverend Wright situation, as well as the “Guns and Religion” comment. He even managed to escape scot-free after calling his own grandmother a “typical white person”. But now that he IS the United States, there are no more free passes for remarks like that, and I don’t think he’ll ever be able to regain the trust of those independents again. When discussing the event with a disappointed white liberal friend of mine, he uttered the words that sum up how much Obama tarnished his image: “I never thought I’d see a U.S. President ever pull the race card.” Ouch.
Q. What has gone wrong for the Democrats in the health care debate?
A. There’s an old saying in the legal profession: When you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. When you have the law on your side, pound the law. When you have neither, pound the table.
Give you one guess what our friends on the Left have been pounding?
Here are some of their biggest blunders:
They’ve tried to demonize concerned Americans practicing their right to protest as Nazis, racists, KKK members, astroturfers, corporate stooges, and terrorists. Considering that many of the people at those town halls look like they have 4 pm bedtimes and probably spent WWII fighting fascism, the left’s claims are a little hard to believe. That they represent the majority of this country (the 75% who aren’t liberals) will prove fatal to the Democrat party.
Obama has been exposed numerous times for not knowing what’s in either of the bills he has floating around Congress. That doesn’t do much for his credibility when he’s out there guaranteeing everyone everything.
There are numerous Youtube videos of the President floating around where he describes his wish for single payer, and outlines his plans to gradually sneak insert it into our system. That he is all of a sudden against it when the entire left wing of his party is pushing for it, is suspicious and lends credence to the public option being a Trojan horse.
Congress (and the President) have exempted themselves from this supposedly “wonderful” plan.
Spamgate. Not so much the incident itself but the White House’s attempts at covering it up.
Obama has been caught telling some whoppers. Claiming an AARP endorsement? Doctors are reimbursed $50,000 for amputations? They push tonsillectomies on people for fees? Guaranteeing we’ll keep our plans? No rationing? All are foolish declarations.
The CBO has blown apart all of Obama’s assertions about “bending the cost curve” and bringing costs down. Some say even their estimates are still too low. Yet he won’t let go of savings as a talking point.
Obama cut a deal with Big Pharma on the side, one of the same “special interests” he purports to be fighting on our behalf.
He used the Post office as the standard for Government run health care.
The left wing Democrats (Pelosi and co.) have written all of the legislation and are responsible for some of the more bizarre proposals within the overhaul, placing the moderates and conservatives in their party, many hailing from red states, in a tenuous position. That this Administration failed to realize the effect of such a strategy is either indicative of their supreme incompetence or their willingness to send the lambs to slaughter in order to accomplish their goal. It may very well be both. The lambs, however, are not so keen on being unemployed, certainly not in this economy, and are hitting the brakes right at the edge of the cliff before they fall into the vast pit known as the American center. Left wingers don’t usually make it out of there alive, disappearing into the depths of nefarious political history alongside Jimmy Carter, George McGovern, Mondale, John Kerry, and soon, Dodd/Reid/Frank/Pelosi. But you know who it’s REALLY waiting for, though…
I can go on, but I think I’ve made a pretty good case.
Americans DO want reform, of course, but only the kind that aids the 5% of us who fall through the cracks when it comes to coverage and offers us protection during periods of unemployment, at a lower overall cost. That’s it. Until our President gets that a government takeover is out of the question he can look forward to more declining poll numbers.
Not that it matters anymore. The revised deficit numbers released this past weekend should be the final nail in Obamacare’s coffin, or at least what places it on life support. Call them a death panel. We’re now (officially) looking at a trillion dollar deficit each year through the next DECADE, folks.
I hope the Bammer gets plenty of rest on his vacation.
Q. What do you think of the Democrats using reconciliation to push Obamacare through?
A. They should probably start updating their resumes.
Q. What can Republicans do to get a larger share of the black vote?
A. Stop assuming that it isn’t theirs for the taking right out of the gate. Mike Huckabee, who managed to pull 45% of the black vote in Arkansas, said all he needed to do was ask for it.
Case in point: I was invited to speak at a conference on party identification and voting at a University earlier this year to a group of minority underclassmen. My liberal counterpart made the mistake of doing the thinking for them, and assumed there was nothing to discuss beyond the same usual talking points. I had other plans, and made mincemeat out of her (in a polite way, of course).
Once I was done, I was approached by about 7 or 8 of the students, and each one told me they’d either be registering Republican, voting Republican, or were leaning Republican and wanted to talk to me some more and ask questions. A few others wanted me to recommend the reading materials that shaped my own ideas.
8 students out of 30 or so, at a liberal institution, in New York, with a black Democrat President in office. That’s 25%. I didn’t need any cheap slogans, PR people, teleprompters, or a multimillion dollar campaign to sway them either.
Here’s a secret: Black people, and by extension all minorities, want the same thing everyone else wants- freedom of opportunity, safety, an education, better lives for their children, etc…. Don’t treat us like aliens that need to be studied and dissected. We’re not a group incapable of independent thought. We are reasonable human beings! Sure we’ve got our liberals, but we also have many moderates and conservatives who simply vote Democrat because it’s all they know. The same probably goes for Latinos and every other group out there. Go after everybody without using condescending tactics, let them examine your ideas and principles, and you’ll get results.
Q. The Republicans still haven’t been able to distinguish themselves or make any gains amidst all of the turmoil. They’re the party of “No”. Shouldn’t they be out there making alternative proposals to the people in order to be taken seriously?
A. When has a minority party ever been able to take the lead on agenda setting? Nothing Republicans propose will ever make it out of Committee in this Congress. I’m actually happy they’re sitting the sideline, because it’s galvanizing Americans, regardless of party, to take up the fight. Partisan politics are good for sport, but this is real life, and those labels mean nothing here.
Sorry, but the Dems own the stimulus, they own the porkulus, they own the quadrupling of the Bush deficits, they own the doubling of the national debt, they own the auto bailouts, they own the unemployment rate, they own any pending tax increases, they own cap and trade, and they will own Obamacare.
Why should Republicans get involved? I’d stay as far away as possible. When your opponents are busy burning down their house, it’s better to save some water for your own.
Their main focus now should be developing candidates, leaders, and a message to help navigate us through the rough years ahead and better defend the interests of their constituents.
Better to be the party of “no” then the party of “can’t”.
Q. Was Cash for Clunkers a good idea?
A. Not for car dealers, who’ve yet to be paid. Certainly not for the government’s reputation for managing programs. Or poor Americans who typically can only afford clunkers. Or even for consumer spending, which declined in July.
So I’d say no.
Auto union workers might probably disagree, but they also thought auto bailouts were a good idea, so who cares?
I have been sitting quietly on the sidelines watching all of this national debate on healthcare. It is time for me to bring some clarity to the table by explaining many of the problems from the perspective of a doctor.
First off, the government has involved very few of us physicians in the healthcare debate. While the American Medical Association has come out in favor of the plan, it is vital to remember that the AMA only represents 17% of the American physician workforce.
I have taken care of Medicaid patients for 35 years while representing the only pediatric ophthalmology group left in Atlanta, Georgia that accepts Medicaid. For example, in the past 6 months I have cared for three young children on Medicaid who had corneal ulcers. This is a potentially blinding situation because if the cornea perforates from the infection, almost surely blindness will occur. In all three cases the antibiotic needed for the eradication of the infection was not on the approved Medicaid list.
Obama and Democrat Congressional leaders uncorked the bottle and the peoples’ Genie is out.
He’s not happy, this Genie. In normal times, he sits there quietly inside the bottle. Sometimes watching. Mostly not. He finds politics boring, if not disgusting.
He sat and watched in silence as the TARP bill passed. Told the sky was falling, he looked up and saw it wasn’t. But he shrugged, trusting the bipartisan nature of the effort. Then, as TARP rolled out, he stood up. The bailouts plowed a furrow across his forehead; his eyebrows lowered; his gaze intensified. But he stayed inside the bottle.
Along came the Stimulus Bill. Or, in the language of the big spenders, The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The Genie smelled the bacon through the glass bottle. He heard the squeals coming next from the Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009. Another stampede of pigs.
Inside the bottle, the Genie’s leaned forward, pressing his hands and nose flat against the glass. As he watched banks and car companies yield to government control, his jaw slid up. His lips pressed tight. His breathing shortened. But he stayed inside the bottle.
In his peripheral vision he saw a dancing troupe dressed like Cossacks enter the side door of the White House and disappear within. The Czars had come. The Genie watched, and wondered.
The debate over a public option in health care has exposed a core public policy issue that until now has been seen only at the local level: what services should be provided directly by the government and its employees versus simply having the government ensure access to those services in the open market. Enlightened conservatives like the late Jack Kemp, who respected the power of free markets but wanted to make sure that low- and moderate- income citizens were empowered to benefit from them, have argued passionately that government has a moral obligation to ensure access to these services but a near-equal obligation to stay out of the service business itself. Kemp—and Al Gore, incidentally—once said government works best when it steers rather than rows, otherwise it tends to become bloated and—when competing with private firms—gluttonous. Indeed, in the few opportunities I had to discuss Kemp’s populist ideas with him, he was quick to cite the painful experiences of local service firms and non-profits in their competition against federally subsidized, book-cooking and rule-bending local governments.
Our various levels of government provide many essential services, from the city planning and law enforcement to safety inspection and professional licensing. These particular types of services are direct expressions of the government’s police power, and so are rightfully and for the most part confined to public providers. A second service category is more discretionary, which means they could be provided by the private market but, for both good and bad reasons, the government has intervened as the monopoly provider. These usually include mass transit, water and sewer services, etc. Rarely—as in almost never—has a government allowed private firms to continue to compete for customers once it has established itself as a provider, and truly never on a level playing field.
For example, private jitney services are forbidden in most US cities, especially in densely-traveled bus corridors (i.e., where the customers are). And as President Obama prepares to push billions of new dollars into intercity high-speed passenger rail, Amtrak is already claiming with legislative justification that it has a monopoly to operate the trains in almost every corridor in which the services are being planned, despite the existence of dozens of US and global companies eager to do so. Solid waste collectors are routinely blocked from offering their services in service areas attended to by a public operator. And then there’s K-12 education, where any family using anything other than government schools must pay twice (once through their property taxes and again through tuition), while the poor are economically prohibited from choosing at all. In fact, many public union teacher contracts allow the sale of surplus school property to almost anyone, such as liquor store operators and shopping mall developers, but not to private school foundations that might build a competing facility. Reduce…
Other barriers are less obvious but equally effective. They amount to cheating, and they have a huge and readily calculable cost to taxpayers. Here’s how they work:
1. Cooked Cost Accounting: For a time in the 1990’s, numerous city governments invited private companies to bid against their public in-house operations to provide services ranging from wastewater treatment to city vehicle maintenance. Unfortunately, the cities usually limited the contracts to 3-5 years, too short to allow private firms to recover the cost of the equipment they’d have to buy or to earn back their other start-up costs. Moreover, when comparing their own service costs to the private option, the government usually left out much of its general overhead and long-term liabilities, such as pensions and equipment replacement, arguing that they would have to carry those costs whether the service was contracted out or not. The private competitors, on the other hand, had no choice but to include these costs in their bid. So they often lost. Once the private competition was wiped out or otherwise deterred, the public operator breathed a big sigh of relief and usually returned to its normal cost escalation or lower service level.
2. Debt and Capital Subsidies: Government debt is subsidized by federal taxpayers; that is, the interest on the government’s debt is generally tax-free, while interest on a private provider’s debt is taxed at combined rates of up to 50 percent. This means that, by comparison, taxpayers pays up to half of the debt service cost of public option vis-a-vis private companies. The result is that public operators can borrow at 3 or 4 percent while private service and infrastructure companies—and health insurers—must raise their capital in private debt and equity markets at normal, much-higher rates. Even worse, the equity component of a private operator’s financing is taxed twice: once at the corporate level (corporate income tax) and then again at the individual shareholder level. Government providers almost never include the enormous taxpayer cost of these subsidies in a public-versus-private comparison.
3. Implicit Service and Revenue Guarantees: There are two main types of public service operating agencies: internal enterprise fund units, such as the Chicago Department of Aviation, and independent public authorities, such as the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Bonds issued by or on behalf of internal enterprise funds may or may not have the explicit backing of the participating government; that is, the government has varying hurdles (sometimes none) it must clear to backstop one of its financially underperforming business units. This contrasts somewhat with bonds issued by independent (but still government-owned) public authorities, which are usually prohibited by their covenants from being backstopped by general government revenue. But what governments can almost always do fir their captive operators is to direct customers, and therefore revenue, to its business units. It does so by adding additional communities to its client base (e.g., incorporating smaller suburban jurisdictions into its service area, thus improving its economies of scale) or by driving private providers out of the market, either through regulation or temporary or customer-class marginal cost pricing. It can also use its monopolist oligopolist pricing power to simply raise rates to cover bloated costs.
4. Artificial Scale: The government is almost always the largest provider of public-use services in its region. A private company hoping to provide potable water or other infrastructure alternatives therefore finds itself competing against not just the “natural monopoly” aspects of infrastructure, with miles of existing pipe and connections already in the ground, but against the enormous economies of scale that benefit the government in the first place. It’s the same advantage that a handful of private companies like Wal-Mart and Verizon enjoy because of the relative size of their customer base. It manifests itself in enormous, competition-killing way, including input pricing (e.g., Wal-Mart’s power to squeeze its suppliers) and installed service structure, such as Verizon’s numerous cell towers in its Bell-legacy regions. The US health insurance market has a large number of private providers, but state-by-state regulation has kept many of them confined to their regional customer base. A Fannie Med public option, by contrast, would operate nationally and, as Medicare does in many cases, would surely use its scale to force its will on hospitals, doctors and drugmakers while other insurers pick up the real tab.
5. The Fannie Mae Lesson: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were supposed to be stand-alone, corporate-like purchasers of home mortgages (this should be sounding familiar already). The authorizing legislation that created them and the language of their founding charters refer many times to their full operating and financial independence from the government and, by exclusion and more, the absence of taxpayer liability for any possible corporate mishaps. In its subsequent competition with other firms offering the same mortgage bundling services, the feds were never supposed to be able to step in. But that’s exactly what happened in late 2008, to the tune of hundred billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars. You can be absolutely certain that the new managers of any public option—and most of its prospective customers—will remember that comforting golden parachute. And while the Congressional Budget Office can tell you how costly it is to taxpayers, Lehman Brothers can tell you how it is not to have had it.
No doubt President Obama will make promises that the House and House-Senate conference committee’s won’t keep when it comes to the financial independence and honest accounting of the public health insurance option. But even if they don’t explicitly empower a new public entity to cheat as it competes with private insurers, and even if they do offer the usual platitudes about ensuring a level playing field, there are at least five big reasons and many billions of dollars of experience to convince you not to believe a word of it.
The 2009 legislative session is sure to be a battlefront for competing interests looking to shape the future of our health care system. The growing concern by the general public and politicians about the increasing costs of health care and of the disparities in its delivery have conspired to make this one of the top priorities for Congress and the incoming administration. Evidence for this is clearly present in the prominent role the issues of health care quality and accessibility played in the 2008 presidential campaigns. The political reality is that those espousing a role for increasing government regulation have, for the first time, entrenched themselves solidly in a position to effect the changes they uphold. The room for effective opposition to this agenda is limited, placing the integrity of the Americas health care system more at the mercy of this politically and professionally unidimentional group than ever before.
People who oppose this particular plan for reforming our system share the concerns over health care delivery in this country. They stand resolutely united in the quest to provide better health care in a more efficient and affordable way. However, this group believes that greater government intervention in such a complex and intricate segment of our society will only serve to increase the costs of delivering care and diminish its quality. They hold a view that promotes a stronger role for personal responsibility and accountability in both the delivery and acquisition of health care. They are innately concerned about the future of the American health care workforce and the effects that greater administrative demands and diminished reimbursements will have on the people that deliver this care.
Unfortunately, there is an ocean of misinformation and miscategorization working against this movement. The misrepresentation of the shortcomings of our present health care system is being afforded greater validity by the American public, and attempts at correcting these errors are quickly fading.
Amazingly, the advocates of this alternative viewpoint, the keepers of the more accurate assessment regarding the state of the delivery of our health care, have been egregiously quiet. They will discuss their disappointment over the changes being imparted upon them and their trade in professional conventions and physicians cafeterias throughout the country. But, either because of despair or simply as a result of a lack of time, these overworked professionals are not voicing their concerns to the public in an effective way. During their meetings, you may hear them warn of the untoward effects government-mandated health care is sure to have on patients and the dissatisfaction with which our citizenry will respond to them. You may even hear these pillars of the health care delivery system discuss their intentions to abandon their careers, or at the very least find a cushion that will allow them to rely less on health care for their livelihood. However, as these individuals dispel from their forums to continue their relentless efforts at caring for others and stem the course of human disease, the microphone is left open for those who have the time such as lawyers, public health experts, economists, academicians and certain legislators, to propagate their brand of misinformation regarding health care in the United States, the overwhelming majority of this group not ever having earned the privilege of laying a stethoscope on a patient.
This book is written in an attempt to reverse the trend of sociopolitical silence on the part of the medical community and as a megaphone for those whose views about health care reform are otherwise not being delivered.
HEALTH CARE REFORM: THE TRUTH
Biography of Julio Gonzalez, M.D.
Dr. Julio Gonzalez is a board certified orthopaedic surgeon in private practice in Venice, Florida. Born and raised in Florida he received his undergraduate degree from the University of Miami with a major in biology and a minor in chemistry. He pursued his medical studies at the University of Miami School of Medicine and graduated in 1990. Between 1990 and 1995, he served naval reserves, first as an intern in internal medicine at Portsmouth Naval Hospital and then for four years with the fleet where he was stationed in Jacksonville, Florida and served on two overseas deployments.
Upon completing his naval service in 1995, Dr. Gonzalez then pursued internship training in general surgery before completing his training in Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of Florida/Shands Hospital Urban Campus in Jacksonville Florida. He then participated in a knee reconstructive and sports medicine fellowship in Orlando, Florida. He practiced in Orlando, Florida for four years before relocating to Venice where he has been in solo practice ever since.
Dr. Gonzalez has been active in organized medicine, serving as Florida Orthopaedic Society Delegate to the Florida Medical Associations House of Delegates and Florida Councilor to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons He is an Active Fellow in the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons and a member of the Board of Directors of the Florida Orthopaedic Society. Dr. Gonzalez sits on the Board of Censors for the Sarasota County Medical Society and serves as Chief of Staff Elect and Surgery Section Chief Elect at Venice Regional Medical Center. He is a member of the American Medical Association.
His literary accomplishments include co-authoring the Dictionary of Orthopaedic Terminology (2007) and founding the Journal of Orthopaedic History set to launch in early 2009.
He lives in Venice with his wife, Dr. Gina Arabitg, and their two children.
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A. Not quite. The U.S. has been pretty center-left since the days of FDR, and definitely in terms of entitlement spending (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, SSI, Welfare, Section 8, Food Stamps, Lord know what else). Since nearly half of the country doesn’t even pay any taxes to fund it we’ve got the whole nanny state thing covered.