The DFL/Democrats’ Health Care Myths
Every day for the last two+ weeks, one special interest group or another has had an LTE in the St. Cloud Times, each repeating the same myths. This morning’s LTE was submitted by Marybeth Juetten, the President of the Central Minnesota Trades and Labor Assembly. The first myth was in the third paragraph:
The best way to fix the current health care crisis is to provide quality, affordable health care for all. A public insurance plan will do just that. A public insurance option would be available for everyone alongside private health insurance plans.
Where do I start? When did government-run health care provide “quality, affordable health care” for anyone? Has Ms. Juetten seen the VA hospitals lately? Medicare is available to all seniors but I’ll bet that Medicare wouldn’t be seniors’ first choice if they had different options.
Secondly, the public option would soon be the only option because the government doesn’t need to make a profit. Before people say that that’s reason enough to choose the public option, it’s important that people understand that there’s a catch. While the government doesn’t need to make a profit, government can’t afford to provide health care without raising taxes.
Here’s another DFL/Democrat myth:
Keep your private insurance you have if you like it, or choose a public plan that guarantees coverage without a private insurer middleman.
That isn’t exactly true:
“When I say ‘If you have your plan and you like it,… or you have a doctor and you like your doctor, that you don’t have to change plans,’” the president said after we asked him about this, “what I’m saying is the government is not going to make you change plans under health reform.”
The House and Senate plan on writing what minimum coverage policies must have. Think of it as the biggest unfunded/underfunded mandate in U.S. history. Considering that the Obama administration’s and the Democrats’ House and Senate leadership control freak tendencies, and considering all of the state and federal mandates already in place, shouldn’t everyone think that they’ll put even more mandates into this legislation?
Minnesota alone has more than 60 mandates that insurers must include. Why would any thinking person believe that Ted Kennedy, Henry Waxman and Nancy Pelosi would write a bill that didn’t include a ton of mandates?
While those things are myths, this is an outright lie:
Costs could decrease and quality of services should increase across all plans.
The CBO reports that the House legislation would add $239,000,000,000 to the deficit over the next decade. That’s not counting the tax increases that they’ll need for reforming health care. That’s before considering the justifiable worries that rural hospitals have about government-run health care.
Ms. Juetten also wrote this whopper:
The national movement for a public insurance plan is building and has a broad coalition of supporters.
That isn’t a fact according to polling done by Rasmussen and Gallup. In fact, support for health care reform is slipping dramatically with no end in sight for the slippage. The ‘movement’ Ms. Juetten is talking about is nothing more than an astroturf campaign put together by the SEIU, the AFL-CIO, Health Care for America Now (HCAN) and the Center for American Progress. It’s a movement built by lobbyists and Washington insiders, most of whom have served in the Clinton administration. That isn’t an honest person’s definition of a grassroots movement.
There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between what Kennedy, Pelosi and Waxman are doing and what the DFL has quietly advocated. In January, 2008, I attended a health care forum hosted by Tarryl Clark. Sen. Marty was the featured guest. Sen. Marty told the audience that we needed to look at health care as a “community need, just like we look at the fire department and the police department.”
Within minutes of the gavelling the forum to order, a woman named Loretta Linus made this statement:
“The doctors are wonderful. You get good care. And it just makes me mad when they talk about how they have to come over here to get good care & that’s not true.”
“Now they say that Canadians have to come over here for good treatment. Well don’t you believe it. Don’t you believe it one bit. That government is so good to all its people. I don’t care if you’re rich or poor. They take care of you. And so many of the people come & they talk crap about how awful their system is. Well, don’t you believe it. Single payer is wonderful if it’s run right.”
Another woman who identified herself as working for the Greater Minnesota Health Care Clinic made this outlandish statement:
“We don’t need health insurance. We need health care.”
I went to a health care forum and before I knew it, a single-payer convention broke out. The only difference between St. Cloud’s ’single-payer convention’ and the public option that Kennedy, Pelosi and Waxman are dreaming of is that Kennedy, Pelosi and Waxman are being devious about how they talk about the subject.
People aren’t buying President Obama’s pitch because they don’t trust him after the stimulus/4,000,000 new jobs created sales pitch fiasco. They want to read the billover the August recess so they know what they’d be getting. They want to know that their representatives and senators are listening to them. Most importantly, they want to know that their representatives and senators are being responsive to them.
The last thing they want is for their senators and representatives to hold high profile photo ops, then return to DC and vote the way Speaker Pelosi and President Obama tell them to vote, especially if their senators and representatives admit that they didn’t read the legislation.
The Democrats’ and DFL’s myths are being debunked. The momentum has clearly shifted in this debate. That’s why President Obama wanted the House and Senate to pass their bills ASAP.
Technorati Tags: Reforms, Health Care, Single Payer, John Marty, Tarryl Clark, Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman, Community Need, Read The Bill, Stimulus Bill, President Obama
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog
July 22nd, 2009 at 9:39 am
When L.A. County ran King-Drew.
July 23rd, 2009 at 8:08 pm
When did government-run anything provide “quality, affordable” anything for anyone (other, of course, than the health and retirement plans of our elected representatives)?
The biggest entitlement rip-off in our government is what they pay themselves with our money, the insurance they provide for themselves with our money, and the retirement they have approved for themselves paid for with our money.
They justify it, though, by letting us know that governance would grind to a rapid halt if they weren’t doing so much to help us spend our money.