0908 Intrusive Health Care
It is amazing what liberties people will give up in the name of someone else’s perceived rights. Healthcare reform is a perfect example. For the sake of 3% to 5% of the population who cannot afford health insurance, we may be on the verge of another massive government takeover of another sector of the economy. Along with this creeping socialism is an unprecedented intrusion into the private lives of the other 95% to 97% of Americans.
While it is true that caring for those who cannot care for themselves is a good thing to do, even demanded by God of individuals and the Church, it does not follow that being cared for by someone else is a right or that government should be the one doling out the care. Being in need of something does not generate a right to the solution and surely does not license a corruptWashingtonbureaucracy to strong-arm over nine tenths of all Americans to bow to its politically motivated power grab.
The seizure of power, alarmist rhetoric and carefully manipulated statistics are not the only dangers. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has actually laughed at the idea that legislators should have to read the entire house bill before voting on it. He admitted that if lawmakers read what they were voting for, it would never pass. Sound familiar? Apparently, the Obama administration has forgotten about legislative accountability and transparency.
Health care reform has also become a vehicle for the social re-engineering that the left has only been able to dream of until now. One of its major causes has been to bring about abortion on demand in spite of annoying things like medical ethics or legal roadblocks. Every attempt by both Republicans and pro-life Democrats to attach amendments prohibiting the foreseen government program from covering abortion as a health benefit care has been soundly rebuffed.
This same House recently liftedWashingtonD.C.’s ban on the use of public funds for abortions. This same administration rescinded the Mexico City Policy clearing the way for the use of federal funds for even the most extreme overseas “family planning” programs. This president disbanded the President’s Council on Bioethics in order to make a new one focused on “consensus”.
Illegal aliens should also be thankful for the present health care reform measures. Three weeks ago, Rep. Dean Heller (R) introduced an amendment that would have caused all patients under government health care to be screened for immigration status. It was defeated in committee. Any agency or institution at any level receiving federal funds will have no requirement to check citizenship status. More than that, one of the Senate plans actually exempts illegal aliens from the mandate to buy insurance that citizens would have to obey.
Kathleen Sebelius, HHS Secretary, could gain sweeping new power as well. One Senate proposal stipulates the establishment of a database within one year of passage to track detailed information about anyone under the program. Sebelius would have the authority to develop “standards of measuring gender” for the database rather than going by such outmoded labels as “male” and “female”. The database would be made available to a host of federal agencies.
In reality, we are not in the middle of a health care crisis worthy of emergency government intervention. There are plenty of problems but they do not warrant running roughshod over free enterprise and private sector ingenuity; they do warrant a slow and careful restructuring. Plenty of solutions have been offered which do not kill the unborn, reward illegals, redefine gender or create over a dozen more federal agencies. The folks on the ivory hill are not listening.