Healthcare Passes

[OldSchool]

Because I am not in favor of civil unrest does not mean I am thrilled with the US government. During the worst of the Bush years I never felt that way.

There are better ways -- democratic ones. Let's us hold to the constitution as well, since the remedies are spelled out in that document. We'll be OK in the long run, even if highly disappointed in some people until then.

We've seen worse, believe me.

[boomerang]

What about a blatant violation of the BoR?

Since the Senate bill imposes sharp limits on health-insurance companies' ability to raise fees or exclude coverage, it likely will force many of them out of business. Obamacare is unconstitutional because it violates the Bill of Rights protections against takings without just compensation and deprivation of property without due process of law.

Actually, it's UN-Constitutional because regulating medical care and mandating insurance aren't powers delegated to the United States by the Constitution

[marksiwel]

What about a blatant violation of the BoR?

Since the Senate bill imposes sharp limits on health-insurance companies' ability to raise fees or exclude coverage, it likely will force many of them out of business. Obamacare is unconstitutional because it violates the Bill of Rights protections against takings without just compensation and deprivation of property without due process of law.

Actually, it's UN-Constitutional because regulating medical care and mandating insurance aren't powers delegated to the United States by the Constitution

neither is Public Education

[boomerang]

Actually, it's UN-Constitutional because regulating medical care and mandating insurance aren't powers delegated to the United States by the Constitution

neither is Public Education

That should be under local control with local funding. If it exists at all.

[Oldgringo]

Other than possible constitutional questions and the obvious nefarious political chicanery (practiced by both parties), why do y'all have your bowels in an uproar? The folk who passed this bill don't know what's in it so why don't we wait until we have it unfolded and understood by all before we take to the streets?

While we're waiting, ask your parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents how Social Security and Medicare is working out for them. No, I did not vote for Obama. I've voted for every Republican POTUS candidate starting with, and since, Goldwater.

[joe817]

Other than possible constitutional questions and the obvious nefarious political chicanery (practiced by both parties), why do y'all have your bowels in an uproar? The folk who passed this bill don't know what's in it so why don't we wait until we have it unfolded and understood by all before we take to the streets?

While we're waiting, ask your parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents how Social Security and Medicare is working out for them. No, I did not vote for Obama. I've voted for every Republican POTUS candidate starting with and since Goldwater.

Well put Oldgringo! I totally agree!

[LaUser]

Perhaps congress should pass an amendment to this health care reform act allowing a one time, can't change your mind, opt out for those who are opposed to it.

[pbwalker]

Perhaps congress should pass an amendment to this health care reform act allowing a one time, can't change your mind, opt out for those who are opposed to it.

I would love to, if I can also opt out of the taxes being taken from me to pay for those who want it.

[Kythas]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/03/ ... healt.html

There was, of course, nothing unpredictable about Sunday's health care vote. It was fairly obvious that the Chicago mobsters would, using the Escobarian silver-or-lead principle, scare up the votes needed to pass Obama's baby. It was plain that "pro-life" Democrats such as Bart Stupak would, after the requisite posturing, find the rationalization they needed to cast aside a position that was never really a principle. That it came in the form of an executive order with the credibility of the Hitler-Stalin Pact is of little consequence. It was also predictable that the Monday after would bring talk about the extinguishment of liberty and the republic, and heads hanging so low that good Americans could look up and see their shoelaces.

Yet there is a somewhat larger view a person can take here. It is one that distinguishes between symptoms -- even very severe ones -- and the underlying disease.

Some have asked a very predictable question: "Where were you the day the republic died?" But there is a better one: Where were you when you first knew our republic was dying? As for me, I can't tell you exactly where, only when. I believe it was the early 1980s. And I was still a teenager.

Our moral decay -- or, as some would say, progressivism -- which yields political decay, was not predictable a generation or two ago. It was in progress. And this was obvious. Big government programs -- the great exception to the rule that it's easier to destroy than create -- are spawned but hardly ever slain. Laws, regulations, and mandates -- which by definition are the removal of freedoms and imposition of values -- are instituted but hardly ever rescinded, resulting in the true progressivism of our times: the progressive loss of liberty. And do we only now have our Tea Parties and complain about the "loss of constitutional government"? For decades our national contract has been trampled, from the separation-of-church-and-state ruling to misapplications of the Commerce Clause and the General Welfare Clause. But people start to notice only when their own oxen finally get gored.

Even more telling symptoms of this moral decay are the cultural shifts. Sexual mores are ever-loosened, never tightened; child-rearing becomes continually more permissive, education more dumbed down, entertainment more decadent, and the media more frivolous. This is inevitable in a morally relativistic civilization, by the way. After all, a corollary of the idea that there is no Truth is that there is no morality, and hence, no moral boundaries. And without them, the only thing left to guide our moral decisions is emotion. Thus do we hear "If it feels good, do it." The problem is that passion is a siren; follow your heart, and you'll follow it straight to Hell.

Now, we generally identify this phenomenon with euphemisms such as liberalism, leftist ideology, socialism, or cultural Marxism (yes, even that's too kind), but it is something else entirely: A philosophy of vice. It is evil.

This isn't hard to understand. Vice-ridden people are greedy, covetous, envious, and slothful, so they want the fruits of others' labors. They are lustful pleasure-seekers and dismissive of life, so they want abortion on demand. They are irresponsible and animalistic, so they will accept the collar in exchange for promises of security. They are wrathful and uncharitable, so playing the race and class warfare cards can easily make them scapegoat their fellow man. Divorced from Truth, they are emotion-driven and thus easy prey for demagogues. And the "left," craving power, wants vice-ridden people.

So ObamaCare was entirely predictable, even decades ago. Oh, I couldn't have told you it would pass the House on Sunday, March 21, 2010 by a margin of 219-212. But given our decay, socialized medicine was inevitable. And unless something upsets the rotten apple cart, so are amnesty for illegals, faux marriage, hate-speech laws and...well, civilizational death is the limit. Don't believe me? Know that each generation is more liberal -- that is, more vice-ridden -- than the preceding one as we venture farther on the road more traveled. Polls show, for instance, that while a majority still opposes faux marriage, young people do not. They will change as they age, you say? You dream. A few will, but the pattern is unmistakable: One generation put homosexual characters on TV and laughed at them, while the next (today's majority) accepted civil unions, and now the new wave thinks that faux marriage is a "right." Should this pattern continue, we will next have polygamy, and one day even pedophilia, which some are already joking about (e.g., the "Pedobear" internet meme).

If talk of sexuality makes you nervous, another example is our departure from constitutional governance. Many scream about the unconstitutionality of Obamacare, but the next generation will be inured to it just as we've become inured to Social Security, the "greatest generation's" comfortable constitutional trespass. Hey, if it feels constitutional, do it.

So what is the solution? Is it political? Will we talk about the next Reagan when even the first couldn't halt moral decay? The "Reagan Revolution" was incorrectly named; it was only the Reagan Impedance. And will we talk only about the next election when that also is, at best, an impedance? No, we cannot understand the solution 'til we grasp the problem: the people. The citizenry has been for almost a hundred years now degraded morally -- or, as some call it, pulled toward the left.

This has been effected in two ways, one of which is through the importation of socialist voters. Eighty-five percent of today's immigrants come from the third world and Asia, and the vast majority vote for leftists once naturalized. Is this a surprise? Some support socialists in their native lands (e.g., Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, and Robert Mugabe), and stepping on American terra firma doesn't magically transform one's ideology.

To illustrate the tangible effects of this, I'll mention just two things. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that since new immigrants generally oppose enforcement of immigration law, their population's constant growth guarantees eventual amnesty for illegals. It also, of course, ensures the eventual death of our traditions and the attendant descent into über-statism. And if you would dispute this, just ask, why would these folks care about American culture and history? Do you care about promoting others' culture and history, such as, let's say, that of the Mayans? These new arrivals are not American. And we become less so all the time. We are being colonized.

This is where some will say that it just takes time for acculturation, that immigrants always become "American." But how is this realistic when we don't even agree anymore on what it means to be American? Assimilation is impossible unless there is something to assimilate into; it's not likely unless that something is appealing. And what do we offer? Reality TV? An amorphous, whatever-works-for-you cultural blob of we know not what? What works for these folks is to retain their own culture.

This brings us to the crux of the problem and the second way in which the people have been transformed: through academia, the media, and entertainment. The destroyers of civilization -- or, as some say, the left -- long ago seized control of these all-important agents of change. Through these vehicles they make all that created Western civilization seem wholly unappealing and toxic, thus ensuring that the native-born will become anti-American and that the alien will, at best, remain un-American. After all, why preserve or adopt something seen as the bane of man?

It is this, the lack of moral health care, that is our problem. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, the teaching in the schools today is the ideology of tomorrow. As for our "entertainment" and media, Hitler's filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, could only dream of such power to twist minds. Antonio Gramsci's "War of Position," which places leftist ideologues in positions of influence in the West for the purposes of undermining its culture, is long over. And as Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov pointed out, once the process of "demoralization" is complete, you are "stuck with 'them,'" meaning the degraded and deluded. You cannot change their minds because, as they are divorced from Truth and hence immune to reason, that isn't what you have to do. You have to change their hearts.

The political merely reflects the moral, and political campaigns don't shape morality; rather, they are referenda on how it has already been shaped. And he who controls the media, entertainment, academia, and immigration policy molds the American mind.

Republicans may win the next election; there is even the off-chance that they will repeal ObamaCare or that the courts may overturn it. But these would just be movements toward the right on a ship steadily drifting left. As for how to take control of the helm, the solution isn't hard to figure out --- just hard to accept and effect. And all I'll say for now is this: After years of the Gramscian corruption of America, only a third of the population would do what's necessary to protect our culture -- even if armed with the correct information.

I have given you the dots. All you have to do is connect them.

[chabouk]

Other than possible constitutional questions and the obvious nefarious political chicanery (practiced by both parties), why do y'all have your bowels in an uproar? The folk who passed this bill don't know what's in it so why don't we wait until we have it unfolded and understood by all before we take to the streets?

Isn't that reason enough to be in an uproar?

While we're waiting, ask your parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents how Social Security and Medicare is working out for them.

Yet more reason to be strongly opposed.

[SQLGeek]

Kythas, all I can say is very well written. I believe this decay you speak of was foretold thousands of years ago and we are simply seeing it in motion.

For me, these latest events have given me pause to the thought of living in the now and to consider a more eternal perspective.

[Kythas]

I was just thinking about something.

A large reason the State requires us to purchase automobile insurance is for the medical provision; that is, to make sure the parties involved in an automobile accident are covered by insurance for any injuries sustained in an accident.

One of the big items on homeowner's insurance policies are liability; that is, to ensure a guest or visitor to your home who is injured on your property will be covered for any injuries sustained while there.

Now that everyone will have Obamacare, will we be able to remove these provisions from our auto and homeowner's policies, thus reducing our premiums there? Will we be able to do away with auto insurance entirely?

What about worker's compensation? Employers are required to pay for this insurance to cover any of their employees injured on the job. Since we'll all now have Obamacare, there's really no need for worker's comp, right?

I'm pretty sure I already know the answer to this one.....

[Oldgringo]

Other than possible constitutional questions and the obvious nefarious political chicanery (practiced by both parties), why do y'all have your bowels in an uproar? The folk who passed this bill don't know what's in it so why don't we wait until we have it unfolded and understood by all before we take to the streets?

Isn't that reason enough to be in an uproar?

While we're waiting, ask your parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents how Social Security and Medicare is working out for them.

Yet more reason to be strongly opposed.

Well, a long time, many moons, ago I tried holding my breath when things didn't go to suit me. That didn't change much except the color of my lips. This bill has passed the house. Now we must wait and see where it goes from here. In the meantime, perhaps protesting until one turns blue in the face may make a difference somewhere?

[Kythas]

Other than possible constitutional questions and the obvious nefarious political chicanery (practiced by both parties), why do y'all have your bowels in an uproar? The folk who passed this bill don't know what's in it so why don't we wait until we have it unfolded and understood by all before we take to the streets?

Isn't that reason enough to be in an uproar?

While we're waiting, ask your parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents how Social Security and Medicare is working out for them.

Yet more reason to be strongly opposed.

Well, a long time, many moons, ago I tried holding my breath when things didn't go to suit me. That didn't change much except the color of my lips. This bill has passed the house. Now we must wait and see where it goes from here. In the meantime, perhaps protesting until one turns blue in the face may make a difference somewhere?

"Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case.You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish, than to live as slaves." - Winston Churchill

[carlson1]

"Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case.You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish, than to live as slaves." - Winston Churchill[/quote]

Excellent Statement