Wake up, Republicans in Congress, and feel the tide rolling across grassroots America. The tide is rushing against government controlled health care, and you have two options. Step out in front and act like you are leading this sea change in public opinion, or be drowned in the swirls of the tide.
Speaking out forcefully for freedom over socialism will point the way to Republican victories. Lapdogging the President and/or compromising with federal control of health care will make you and the Republican Party irrelevant to the steady increase of Big Government.
The American people are looking for a leader to fill the vacuum in the White House today, and no one can be a leader who defaults on this No. 1 domestic issue. Anyone who aspires to be a Republican leader must say loud and clear that we will not accept any health care legislation that includes any of the following “dirty dozen” requirements:
- Cancels Americans’ present insurance and forces us all into a government approved “plan” or “alliance” or “cooperative.”
- Sets up a system under which all plans are forced to offer a government approved “benefit package.”
- Mandates employers to carry or pay for government-approved health insurance or to pay additional payroll taxes.
- Imposes penalty taxes on individuals who choose to carry only low-cost, high-deductible catastrophic health insurance.
- Requires individuals with healthy lifestyles to pay the same insurance premium or health tax as those who smoke, drink too much alcohol, use illegal drugs, or engage in unsafe sex. (This is called “community rating” and it is fundamentally unjust.)
- Sets up a system under which workers and taxpayers are limited to the same level of care for a particular condition as people on welfare who pay nothing into the system. (This is called “one-tier” coverage .)
- Threatens individuals with prosecution for Health Care Bribery if they try to go outside of their “plan” to see another specialist or to buy substitute insurance.
- Forces doctors to report all care of individuals to a national data base . (This is the purpose of Clinton’s Health Security Card and the unique number on it.)
- Forces everyone into a “managed care” system in which gatekeeper doctors are rewarded with bonuses for limiting access to specialists. (This is one of the techniques that produce rationing of health care.)
- Sets up a National Health Board with the power to impose price controls, deny access to medical specialists, or reduce the number of specialists.
- Requires everyone to pay into a plan that pays for abortions. (Currently, most abortions are not covered by private insurance because they are not medically necessary – they are optional, like face lifts and tummy tucks.)
- Treats federal employees any differently from the rest of Americans.
When the media ask you if you support “universal” coverage, your answer should be: Not if it includes any of the above.
The genuine problems in our health care system – such as the risk of losing your insurance when you change jobs – are primarily caused by the huge tax preferences granted to company-paid group insurance. Republican proposals for reform must be based on the following:
- Tax fairness – so self-employed and part-time employees will have the same right as big and wealthy companies to
(a) buy health insurance with pretax dollars and
(b) self-insure for all but catastrophic medical expenses.
2. Individual Medical Savings Accounts, portable and shielded from federal income and payroll taxes – so all Americans can spend or save their own health care dollars.
Republicans should also be demanding full disclosure of the facts, personnel, salaries, and conflicts of interest of the people who met in secret with Hillary Rodham Clinton to develop her Health Care proposal. Why are the Republicans so slow to pick up on the political dimensions of the yearlong lawsuit waged by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons to force disclosure?
The principal reason for the task force secrecy was to conceal the conflicts of interest of influential task force members. The task force included officials of several large managed-care corporations that stand to profit immensely from the Clinton bill because it would force all Americans into managed care groups. The Clintons themselves even held stock ownership in one of these managed care groups.
Some task force members with conflicts of interest never filled out the required ethics forms. Others appear to have been written by someone other than the person who signed the form.
Hillary’s health care task force appears to have spent $4 to $16 million in consulting fees (up to $300 per hour), salaries and expenses, rather than the $100,000 heretofore claimed by the White House. We now learn that the health care working group had more than 1,000 members, rather than the 511 heretofore made public.
We learned these facts from the 30 pounds of documents Hillary Rodham Clinton has just released under court order. What other skeletons are contained in the thousands of still-secret documents?
