As a former member of the Worldwide Church of God or one of it's daughter churches, what does government run health care mean to you? Some of us who were in these organizations considered ourselves politically conservative, and others have taken a liberal approach to life. Here is a selection of opinions from former members of the Worldwide Church of God.
Obama-Care
and Other Idiotic Ideas
I once had a friend who loved to talk
about “Priests and Politicians”. In his view, politicians and
religious leaders were cut from the same block of ice. Certainly both
groups have many things in common, the most significant being their
need to frighten people into supporting them.
Religious leaders (“priests”) have
no power over their followers without fear. A corrupt politician in a
third-world country might terrorize his population with guns and a
murderous militia, but most religious leaders have to find another
path, as guns tend to tarnish the image of religious piety. The
solution is really quite ingenious — the priest still uses the fear
of death, but not in this life. A politician’s militia can
be overcome and neutralized by an organized uprising if enough people
sign on, but how can you defend yourself against a threat to kill you
after you are already dead? Witness the widespread belief in an
ever-burning hell fire and eternal torment.
This religious power is not a modern
invention, of course. Ancient priests came up with the idea and
recorded it in scriptures, to be handed down so that congregations
could be controlled down through the ages. Today’s religious
terrorists only embellish the ancient texts with frantic prophesies
of nuclear war, earthquakes, and asteroid strikes. Witness the rising
hysteria over 2012.
Birds of a Feather
Like preachers, politicians have
recognized that, to get votes, they need to get the public’s
attention. As a class, politicians are a well-known joke. “They’re
all the same!” most people declare, yet most of us still vote for
them. If we really believe that politicians are so corrupt, why do we
do that? Why not run them out of town with tar and feathers and find
someone honest to elect?
One answer may be that, like preachers,
politicians have tapped in to the one emotion that resonates with
almost everyone…fear.
Have you noticed over the past couple
of decades that almost every election year we hear about this crisis
and that crisis? It seems that everything is a crisis. We hear
about an education crisis, a global warming crisis, and a health care
crisis. The politicians proclaim it, which might make some
suspicious, but then the media blasts it into our living room day
after day. (Hey, if Katie Couric is scared, maybe there’s something
to it!)
In short, in order to get your vote,
politicians will find something that scares you and wave it under
your nose, calling it a crisis…even if it isn’t.
generally think of a crisis as an emergency, something that is going
to get everyone killed if we don’t fix it right
now!
For example, finding an armed, mentally unstable intruder in your
home would be a crisis. Hurricane Katrina was a crisis. The attack on
9/11 was a crisis. But very few of the causes promoted by politicians
fit that definition.
At this writing, we in the United States are bombarded daily with two political causes that are billed
as crises. One is global warming, the other is Health Care. Former
Vice President Al Gore is cheerleading the first, and President Barak
Obama the second. This article will deal with Health Care.
Health Care Crisis?
Is American health care really in
crisis? Or does it just have problems? When you see emergency rooms
closing all over the country for lack of funding, that approaches a
crisis. When you see medical personnel getting into other careers —
and fewer students studying medicine — that portends an approaching
crisis. When the cost of medical care and health insurance
skyrockets, that suggests a crisis. But the causes of these problems
are external, and not a failure of health care itself.
President Obama wants to nationalize
health care, to put the government in charge. The popular term for
this is “socialized medicine”, which has been tried in numerous
countries over the past century, with overall poor results. If we
think health care is in crisis now, imagine how it will be when you
have to go to the equivalent of the Department of Motor Vehicles just
to schedule a doctor’s appointment.
I realize that many people think this
is a good idea, because when the government takes over health care,
doctor visits will be “free”. The truth is that someone,
somewhere, is going to have to pay the bill. No doubt doctors will be
forbidden to charge the same rates they charge now (which will result
in even fewer people willing to spend eight years in college and four
more doing internships and residencies just so they can make $50,ooo
a year), but someone still has to pay the bill. That someone will be
the working stiff who, already taxed to exhaustion, will be taxed
even more. There is simply no way for the government to pay the
doctor bill without raising taxes, and anybody who tells you
otherwise is either shortsighted or just plain lying.
Based on information from such
countries as England and Canada, which both have nationalized health
care, we can surmise how this system might work. An accountant
somewhere in DC will establish a budget for a given year that will
pay for health care. X number of dollars will be set aside for each
type of procedure; X for radiology, Y for appendectomies, Z for
coronary bypass, etc. In a given year, the actual number of cases
requiring any of those procedures may exceed the allocated budget, so
what happens then? If the budget for coronary bypass is exhausted by
September, what do you do if you need one in October? It is entirely
possible that you will have to wait until January, when the next
budget kicks in. If you can hold out that long.
And if appendectomies have exhausted
their budget, what then? If you have acute appendicitis, your
survival is measured in hours. You simply can’t wait until next
year.
I know that Obama and other politicians
will tell you that, unequivocally, emergencies will be handled no
matter what. But will they? If you are 85 years old (or even 65),
someone somewhere may decide that you have already lived most of your
life and place you at the bottom of the priority list. No matter what
you think of doctors (and I’m not especially fond of most of them),
the vast majority of medical professionals do care about saving
lives. Yes, they get paid well for doing it, but most of their hearts
are in the right place. Can the same be said of low-level
bureaucrats? They are the ones who will be making those life
and death decisions when your child’s fever spikes at one o’clock
in the morning, not the doctors. How are you going to feel about
government health care then?
The Real Problem
I don’t know any sane person who
doesn’t believe there is a problem with health care. Costs are too
high, insurance is too high, and many other problems exist. But in
spite of that, it’s still the finest health care system in the
world. If it wasn’t, wealthy Canadians wouldn’t be crossing the
border in herds to take advantage of it, nor would third
world-dictators come here when they need help. What we need to do is
define the problems with health care and solve them, not replace the
entire system. After all, if your world-class Mercedes develops a
rattle in the trunk, you don’t rip the car apart and install a
wood-burning engine.
That’s what Obama wants to do with
health care.
The root of the health care “crisis”
is that costs are too high. As a result, insurance premiums are too
high. As a result, several million Americans simply don’t have
health insurance. That is the dilemma in a nutshell. So why are
medical costs so high? Are the doctors just greedy, as Obama’s
mindset would have you believe?
Some of them are. You will find greedy
individuals in every class of society, including lawyers. The real
problem is medical malpractice. Not actual malpractice, but
malpractice insurance. Frivolous lawsuits filed by greedy lawyers
like former presidential candidate John Edwards have driven
malpractice insurance through the roof. I have heard doctors describe
what it costs them for malpractice premiums. The premiums are
astronomical, causing many doctors to question whether to continue in
their profession.
The other effect of the malpractice
threat is that, to avoid being sued, doctors are now forced to run
multiple tests, mostly redundant, just to cover their bases on the
most routine diagnoses. These additional, unnecessary tests, run up
the cost of treatment, which snowballs the cost of medical care.
The Real Solution
If health insurance premiums are too
high, they can be lowered dramatically by removing the need for
redundant medical testing and outrageous malpractice premiums. The
simple solution to those issues is to put a muzzle on lawyers. You’ve
heard it many times…it’s called tort reform. Shakespeare said
“Kill all the lawyers”. Maybe he was right.
It’ll never happen, of course,
because most politicians are also lawyers.
John Bowers
—10/25/2009
Today, unfortunately, many confuse the corporatism that has taken over this country with the capitalism intended by the founders. Just after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment was added, with its definition of "persons" more clearly defined as all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States, or the
state wherein they reside.
As a result of Supreme Court decisions regarding the power of corporations, it was gradually accepted, though never clearly ruled, that a corporation was a "legal person". As a person with privileges and immunities of the "natural person" you and I, the corporations began to enjoy immunities allowed by the Supreme Court under the guise of "free enterprise".
Corporations, however, are obviously not an individual person, but a collection of persons who have pooled their time, talents, and skills for specifically targeted purposes. Corporations could retain lawyers, command large sums of money, and gradually influence congress to vote for bills in their favor.
As a result, by the time of Franklin Roosevelt, corporations had become controlling powers that had forced the growth of counter powers called unions. It was the violence created by this attempted balance of powers that allowed greater growth and power by the federal government. What had been free enterprise had been taken over by collectivist enterprise, or collectivism, which was only a stepping stone
to Marxism or socialism.
As the collectivist defenders of "free enterprise", the large moneyed corporations, which Jefferson so often denounced, maintained a climate of non-intervention for themselves while individual citizens were being increasingly forced to live in the streets.
Today, we see that taxpayers are still called on to bail out these international "persons" while the very citizens who bail them out are forced into lives of depression and fear.
While citizens cry for `help, for laws to bring back liberty, the corporations hire million dollar lobbyists to alter and "gut" legislation that might actually be helpful. We are at the mercy of large centralized systems, and now, after these same systems have broken us and left us destitute, they try to offer us a centralized health care system that will give them even greater power over our lives.
In his early writings, Karl Marx gave away his plans for Marxism when he described a system in which one currency was the "universal equivalent" of all value. When money becomes the universal equivalent, wrote Marx, the so-called inalienable rights and the fixed property relationships corresponding to them break down before money.
If money could become the universal equivalent of all value, wrote Marx, then everything becomes alienable, everything becomes exchangeable for money. Nothing more could be owned, nothing more would be allowed for the individual to claim freedom and independence.
That system by which money became the universal equivalent is known as the Federal Reserve Board. The word "federal" in its name does not imply that it is an agency of the federal government, but simply a confederation of banks, a group of the very largest banks that determine and control our economic destiny.
Through that banking system and the control of the issuance of money by usury, the federal reserve Board has increased its power and control over us, and has now allowed the collapse and bankruptcy of hundreds of thousands of Americans, setting them up to be in a position of begging for the smallest handouts and favors of government, ready to accept universal health care or anything else the government will
offer just to allow citizens to survive.
The giant corporatism we see around us today was not the original intent of its founder Adam Smith, who wrote "Wealth of Nations". When Smith published his book in 1776, he warned that what he called "joint stock companies" would harm the capitalism he envisioned. He brought out several reasons, but two main reasons were:
1.The people, investing in joint stocks, would begin to focus on profit over quality
2. The executive officers of these stock companies, using other people's money, would tend to become corrupt in their dealings, taking chances they would not take if it was their own money and liability at stake.
Today, we see the breakdown of quality in the US, being beaten by other countries such as Japan, and names such as "ENRON" have become household words.
Today, banks have already recouped their losses and are making profits on the market, and what do they tell us? "It will take a while, but things will improve".
In the meantime, we hope and pray that the government will do something, anything, to help us out. Many of us have no choice but to "sell out" just to feed our families, to hold them together, to keep out of the street.
This is not the failing of capitalism, but a cancer which has grown on the country, called corporatism, a pretender, a deceiver that appears, like Satan, as an angel of goodness, but is in truth a devil of corruption.
It was as the first Baron Rothschild was alleged to have said: "Give me control of the issuance of a nation's money, and I care not who makes the laws."
For centuries, the bible condemned usury, or interest, yet the central banking system controls us by the use of interest, raising it to keep business from "heating up" and lowering it to keep business from getting too slow. No more free enterprise, but a controlled economy, gradual forcing everyone to be alike, think alike, live alike.
Business guru Peter Drucker wrote that mass movements were not created in Europe or some ancient religious country, but were created right here in the United States, by such men as William Randolph Hearst, who used their newspaper empires to control and organize a dependent readership. It was Hearst who, with his wife, attended a crusade by Billy graham and told his editors to "puff Graham". Why?because
Billy Graham preached a homogenized form of religion that sought to "convert" the masses to a singular view of God that would accept a variety of religious views.
Today, what we call fundamental Christianity is little more than a shill for the corporate powers of this nation, supporting the corporatism of the mass media, mass religion, and mass monetary system, teaching us that it is only necessary that we believe, just believe, and sacrifice, and give our young for the expansion of the "christian" goals of nationhood. Like another god mentioned in the bible,
these dedicated true believers wander the earth, seeking whom they may devour.
Instead of "coming out, and being a separate people", they tell us to join in and believe, just believe. Support our missions overseas, fight the terrorism Muslims, and we will be taken care of once they have made the world safe for mobocracy.
If we're lucky, maybe we can get our health taken care of when the world is one single mind under one single leash. The system has methodically taken over every other aspect of our lives. They can now pass most any law they wish whether we like it or not, because we are no longer free, we don't know the law, and we are afraid of the very government that was once created for us.
Obviously the health care debate shouldn't even be a debate. The state has no right to take money from people (theft) in order to take care of other people. This was debated years ago in the Medicare/Medicaid debate. When the government subsidizes anything, it drives competition out of the market. That's what Medicare did, and that's why we're having to replace it now. It failed. Government projects always
failed.
Ron Paul pointed out something interesting recently in an interview. The government is trying to get H1N1 vaccine to all the people and they're standing in line waiting for it. Shouldn't that be some indication of how things will work if the government gets control of health care?
The cost angle of the health-care issue has been covered ably and often. It's hard to imagine anyone can believe that the sorts of measures being proposed will save money (unless there's big-time
rationing)--indeed, it's hard to imagine anyone who's heard of Medicare can believe that whatever program
passes won't turn out to be a money suck way beyond the chipper projections.
So giving Washington more control over health care won't solve the problems with mushrooming costs. But it also won't solve the other big problem, which is that health care is always going to involve wrenching compromises and unpalatable decisions.
The technocratic fantasy--which never really died but which has been openly resurgent over the last year or so--says that if we just get enough smart, experienced, educated, civic-minded people to staff a committee or an agency, they'll engineer a big, lovely, shiny new program that makes things fairer and more beneficial for us all. But in health care, more than in just about any other field, value varies
from individual to individual. We can all agree in very general terms on what "well-being" is, but we'll never agree on how to prioritize when resources are scarce. Is it worth covering a very expensive procedure that has only a 40% probability of saving a terminally ill child's life? Is it worth covering laproscopic surgery when conventional surgery requires
more recovery time and more risk of complications but also costs a lot less? Is it better for a 25-year-old to shell out for health insurance or to bank on staying healthy until she lands a job with benefits? Does the equation change if some of the money saved is going toward a potentially injurious hobby like snow-boarding?
Giving more responsibility to the federal government for health-care decisions doesn't make these trade-offs go away; it just means that those who have the final say are less likely to
be those who are most directly affected by the outcomes. (And those big questions don't even get into the picayune minding-your-neighbor's-business issues that nanny-statists, with their ever-expanding definition of "public health," have really, really been getting exercised over lately. What happens to people who are willing to trade potential longevity for the pleasures of smoking, Jack Daniels, or Entenmann's coffee cake?) Offloading accountability for the hard stuff on faceless functionaries
may sound comforting in the abstract, but it's not the way most Americans are happy dealing with specific situations as they arise.
There's plenty that could be done to improve our health-care system: tort reform, decoupling insurance from specific jobs, and lifting the McCarran-Ferguson anti-trust exemption. But since government meddling in insurance markets, with its attendant inefficiencies and distorting effects on decision-making, is a big part of the problem,
greater federal involvement is highly unlikely to help. The emotional appeals that are being made suggest that costs will be contained and hard choices will be avoided; neither is likely to pan out.
Sean
—11/02/2009
“Back in 1927 an American socialist, Norman Thomas, six-times candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket, said the American people would never vote for socialism. But he said under the name of liberalism the American people would adopt every fragment of
the socialist program. There are many ways in which our government has
invaded the free precincts of private citizens, method of earning a
living; our government is in business to the extent of owning more than
19,000 businesses covering 47 different lines of activity. This amounts
to 1/5th of the total industrial capacity of the United States.
But at the moment I would like to talk about another one because this threat is with us, and at the moment, more imminent.
One of the traditional methods of imposing state-ism or socialism on a
people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a
medical program as a humanitarian project, most people are a little
reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who
possibly can’t afford it. Now, the American people, if you put it to
them about socialized medicine and gave them a chance to choose, would
unhesitatingly vote against it. We have an example of this. Under the
Truman administration it was proposed that we have a compulsory health
insurance program for all people in the United States, and, of course,
the American people unhesitatingly rejected this.
So with the American people on record as not wanting socialized
medicine, Congressman Ferrand introduced the Ferrand bill. This was the
idea that all people of social security age, should be brought under a
program of compulsory health insurance. This would not only be our
senior citizens, this would be the dependents and those that are
disabled, this would be young people if they are dependents of someone
eligible for social security.”
—RonaldReagan, 1961
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