Look, most of us agree that we need some kind of health care reform. I’m willing to entertain more government regulation of health care than I entertain in most other industries because health care is, indeed, something that everybody should have access to. This is a moral truth that all Christians should agree on, although good Christians can surely disagree on the best way to provide that access.
But the health care plans being foisted upon us by President Barack Obama (D) and the Democratic super-majorities in both houses of Congress are pretty reprehensible. While some parts of these plans are fine (like limitations on insurance companies holding ‘preexisting conditions’ against you), the whole idea of a government plan—even as an optional alternative to private plans—is frightening. With artificially limited prices, this government plan will likely supplant private plans in time and it will almost definitely begin to exhibit the same problems that all other public health care plans have exhibited in countries that have attempted this dangerous experiment. Beyond these ‘big picture’ concerns, however, there is the fact that the plans being considered in Congress are thousands of pages long and nobody—nobody—has actually read them in their entirety.
Doesn’t that scare you? Doesn’t it frighten you that Congress might pass a massive rewrite of our health care system un-read? It should. If they don’t know what’s in the thing, how can anybody know what it will do to our health care system?
Sure, some on the ‘right’ are saying some crazy stuff about these plans. Lying about them to discredit them is wrong. But, honestly, our president is trying to convince us to support this thing even though he doesn’t even know what’s in the darn bills either! We know that at least some, possibly all, of the bills would provide federal funding for murdering unborn human beings—which has lost the support of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), who officially support universal health care but cannot support any plans that would fund abortion. We know at least one, possibly all, includes provisions for government officials to go into people’s homes and instruct them on how to properly raise their children. What else is buried in these bills? What secrets are buried in its pages, and can we safely assume that they’ll be things we’ll like and support?
In his attempts to convince us that the ‘government option’ in health care wouldn’t force private insurers out of business, Obama pointed out that, “UPS and FedEx are doing just fine. It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. Like the federally-operated U.S. Postal Service is drastically inferior to privately-operated UPS and FedEx, federal health care will be inferior to our existing private health care system. Period.
It’s time to go back to the drawing board on health care reform and develop a plan that solves problems instead of creating them. It’s time to develop a plan that is understandable to the average human being. It’s time to develop a plan that respects life instead of destroying it. It’s time to develop a plan that supports parents and families instead of usurping them. It’s time to develop a plan that improves our world-renowned private health care system and makes it available to all instead of trying to replace it with a dysfunctional socialist system.
Most importantly, it’s time for our elected representatives to listen to America. We do not trust the government to run our health care system, and we are suspicious of this effort to slip thousand-page bills through Congress super-fast before anybody has had a chance to read and digest them. This is not ‘change we can believe in.’ This is not transparency in government. This is not what Obama promised, and we voters are paying attention.