Obama Endorses Socialized Medicine!Wait till the hard right finds out.
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2009, at 5:54 PM ETClick here for a guide to following the health care reform story online.
The White House may be hedging on its insistence that health care reform contain a public option, but in an Aug. 17 speech, President Obama endorsed something far more radical: a scheme in which hospitals and doctors work directly for the government. A concept less "uniquely American" would be difficult to imagine. Yet this collectivist arrangement is already in place and has been in one form or another since 1811!
It falls to me to sound the klaxon because Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are too fainthearted to criticize the president's enthusiasm for a plan even more socialistic than Canada's or France's dread single-payer systems. Indeed, when Obama last spring briefly considered a free-enterprise alternative, Limbaugh attacked him for being stingy!
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
Facebook
MySpace
Mixx
Digg
Reddit
del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Sphere
StumbleUpon"We're dramatically increasing funding for veterans health care," the president told a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention.
This includes hundreds of millions of dollars to serve veterans in rural areas, as well as the unique needs of our growing number of women veterans. We're restoring access to V.A. health care for a half-million veterans who lost their eligibility in recent years—our Priority 8 veterans.
Priority 8 veterans have injuries that aren't service-related. Some of these freeloaders have incomes approaching $40,000. And get this: They became eligible by working for the very same government on whose teat they now suck. Where's the outrage?
Obama continued:
And since there's been so much misinformation out there about health insurance reform, let me say this: One thing that reform won't change is veterans' health care. No one is going to take away your benefits—that is the plain and simple truth. [Applause.] We're expanding access to your health care, not reducing it. [Applause.]
You want to know what really burns my butt? The health care these veterans will receive has been certified by the New England Journal of Medicine, the Rand Corp., and the National Committee for Quality Assurance to exceed in quality the care available to paying customers in more authentically American private-sector fee-for-service hospitals. The VA hospital system's mere existence is an affront to everything true patriots hold dear. That it manages to offer an emphatically successful model for socialized medicine in the United States insults the very principles on which our republic was founded.
Quick, somebody tell Betsy McCaughey. This could be bigger than death panels.
What It Will Cost You To Deny Illegal Immigrants Health Insurance
Stupid Drug Story of the Week: NBC's Today Show Discovers Huffing
Can the Government Call God Jesus? What About Allah?
How Twilight Made Goth Fashion Mainstream
Is Disney's The Suite Life Making Your Child Into an Evil Lothario?
The Blind Side: Illegal Use of Sandra Bullock
In January 2010, one month after my 9-month post-layoff COBRA subsidy runs out and the cost of maintaining that policy jumps to $1050 per month (unless it goes up -- as it has twice in the past eight months), I will be an eligible Category 8 Veteran. Since I'm in my 50s and the journalism business is unlikely to need my services again, my wife and I are building a local video production operation. We're not seeing, and do not anticipate, any kind of large income anytime soon. We don't mind this. We live in a small (but unmortgaged) house trailer on a lot we own, and we don't have expensive habits.
Aside from health care costs, which are not low due to both of us having pre-existing conditions, all we need to get by is around $2000 per month, which is well below the VA Category 8 cutoff.
Yay, socialized medicine!
Now if we can just find a reasonable plan for my non-veteran wife...
-- roblimo
(To reply, click here)