Observers Say . . . Obamacare Tricks Aren’t Being Treated Well By Voters

The Wanderer Press.com ^ | Top Stories for Thursday, November 5th, 2009 | DEXTER DUGGAN

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Observers Say . . . Obamacare Tricks Aren’t Being Treated Well By Voters

By DEXTER DUGGAN

PHOENIX — Liberal Demo­crats’ plans to make nationalized health care into a Halloween house of horrors all year long —with nev­er- ending spooks, goblins, and, face it, fresh skeletons both in and out of the closet — are destined to fail.

Americans thrust into a haunt­ed house don’t just sit there and shiver. They get out.

The dark night is followed by All Saints’ Day.

In an October 27 telephone in­terview with The Wanderer, a Washington, D.C., analyst with the conservative Heritage Foundation recalled a previous congressional attempt to expand health coverage. In the late 1980s Congress, re­sponding to what it thought was public demand, passed a law pro­viding catastrophic coverage for seniors through Medicare.

It came with a tax hike. Higher pre­miums for fewer benefits. No less than President Ronald Reagan signed it. But seniors rebelled and lawmakers voted repeal within a year.

Chuck Donovan, a senior re­search fellow with Heritage’s De- Vos Center for Religion and Civil Society, said this showed that a measure expected to endure can be reversed through public pressure.

As Obamacare is debated, some major issues are rationing of care and the sanctity of life, Donovan said, as well as subsidiarity, mean­ing a preference for lower-level de­cision- making. Donovan mentioned a concern about families not being able to have control of their health care.

This aspect often is cited because secret crafting of Obamacare seems determined to raise costs on fami­lies, impose fines on solid citizens, dictate what patients will receive, and what necessary care they’ll be denied.

Still, the potential for a citizen uprising seemed lost on the majori­ty- Democratic Congress, despite the sudden blossoming of “tea par­ties” challenging legislators, then a mass rally of possibly more than a million people in Washington, D.C., in September.

“Tax protest has some history in the United States,” Donovan said. “. . . I do think if Congress passes an abusive bill, abusive in these areas . . . people do have voices as citi­zens to change their legislators.”

Tax protest was a possibility men­tioned by a veteran Arizona pro-li­fer in an October 27 interview.

The leader of a Catholic prayer organization in Phoenix, Tom Takash, said that people could con­sider withholding $350 of their tax payments — the average cost of an abortion.

Takash, the local president of Children of the Rosary, which prays in groups outside abortuaries, said that administratively it would be difficult for the Internal Revenue Service to collect if this protest was substantial.

“If enough Catholics join in, the IRS would be faced with a situation where they’d have to accept they’re not going to collect… as they’d have to spend a great deal of mon­ey to send the agents out” to claim the money from protesters, Takash told The Wanderer.

“And I do not think they have the will or the means to aggressively pursue the withheld taxes,” he said. In his 1995 encyclical, The Gos­pel of Life, Pope John Paul II ex­plicitly said (n. 73): “Abortion and euthanasia are… crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize. There is no obligation in con­science to obey such laws; instead there is a grave and clear obligation to oppose them by conscientious objection. . . .

“ In the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia,” the encyc­lical continued, “it is therefore nev­er licit to obey it, or to ‘take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such a law, or vote for it’.”

In n. 74 the Pope continued: “Those who have recourse to con­scientious objection must be pro­tected not only from legal penalties but also from any negative effects on the legal, disciplinary, financial, and professional plane.”

Takash said that Catholics should write not only to their own bishops to stress the importance of standing up for pro-life, but also write to the bish­ops of prominent Catholic politicians who oppose the pro-life stand.

Ask those bishops why they’re not calling these politicians to ac­count for their actions, Takash said. Tell these bishops, “We’re not be­ing led by our shepherds,” he said.

Even though the legislative lan­guage is still being put together in Washington, D. C., the Heritage Foundation’s Donovan said, “ It doesn’t look like quality health plans will come out of either house of Congress…. People need to let members of Congress know how they feel about these issues.”

Later in the interview he said that the national legislation being devised would “ interfere with health care across the board.”

He said that on the morning of the October 27 interview, pro-life Mich­igan Democratic Cong. Bart Stupak said on C- SPAN that he has “ 39 [House] Democrats who will go to the mat” along with him to oppose abortion funding in Obamacare.

With these politicians thus threat­ening their own standing with the Democratic leadership, it’s important for people to let the congressmen know of their support, Donovan said. “ I think the social- issue people have responded with great energy” this year, despite “starting out from a bleak position” after last fall’s elec­tion, Donovan said.

If there were widespread national opposition to some sweeping Re­publican plan, “Republicans tend to step back from their mistakes,” Dono­van said, “ but the Democrats are bold, much more ideological.”

The Triumph Of Evil

In an October 25 Wanderer inter­view, an observer of Chicago poli­tics long before the city’s Democrat­ic machine descended to the level of Barack Obama cited the need to stand up against evil.

Larry Hillmert, now a Phoenix res­ident, recalled when it first became known that babies who survived abortions were being left to die at Chicago’s suburban Christ Hospital, a non-Catholic facility.

Medical staffers, “instead of tak­ing direct action, were at first para­lyzed by fear to offend. . . . Someone should have taken that baby and walked down the street to the Cath­olic hospital” to obtain care, he said. Although leaving babies in the utility room to die “was an obvious tragic injustice, no one felt strongly enough at the time to do anything about it immediately,” said Hillmert, who said his last job in the Chicago area was as an orderly at that hospi­tal.

Hillmert, 71, said he spent the first half of his life in the Chicago area but had moved to Arizona before these abortion incidents occurred. He still pays return visits to Chicago and takes in the political scene.

Christ Hospital nurse Jill Stanek was the person who made the inci­dents widely known, Hillmert re­called.

Stanek fought for baby-protecting legislation that was opposed by Obama when he was an Illinois state senator.

“Out of that evil, [Stanek] took ac­tion and has produced a lot of beau­tiful benefits,” Hillmert said.

Asked about the responsibility of Christians to resist evils such as those deemed likely in Obamacare, Hill­mert said he’d answer with the words of 18th-century political philosopher Edmund Burke: “All that is neces­sary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Pointing to “tea parties,” town meet­ings, and Fox News, he said, “Right now we have a lot of people starting to wake up and go into action. . . . But still we need a lot more efforts” to show politicians that “these are things we just can’t tolerate . . . abandoning peo­ple on both ends of life’s spectrum,” ba­bies and the elderly.

“. . . President Obama represents a type of celebrity society” where some people are rated highly, but “others aren’t worth giving the basic neces­sities to. This is one of the charac­teristics of a pagan society. . . . It’s our duty we don’t go any further,” Hillmert said.

He noted that opposition to Obama’s agenda developed fairly rapidly.

When Obama came to Phoenix to speak at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention in Au­gust, Hillmert said, “I was amazed at the turnout” against him. “There were young and old, minorities, the handicapped. . . . Those were peo­ple I would have thought would have been sympathetic to Obama. . . . But they were ada­mant” in favor of giving care to the handicapped and elderly.

Asked about his own reputation for charitable endeavors, Hillmert declined: “You don’t want to put that in” the story. He added, “It’s laudable and necessary to visit people at nursing homes, institu­tions, jails,” but there’s also a time to tackle “the political machinery.” Although standing up for life may make some people’s neigh­bors angry, “ Obviously people don’t realize how far we’re going [downhill] with respect for the dig­nity of every life,” he said.

With increasing government en­croachment over the years that has made medical practice increasing­ly burdened, it would be hard to imagine that anyone seriously thinks a massive new takeover by government would improve medi­cine now.

An October 25 opinion article in the Phoenix- area daily The Tri­bune

by a local physician recalled that when he began practicing in 1974, he needed only a nurse and a medical assistant to run the of­fice, with patients paying a fee up­front, then filing their own insur­ance claims.

But, wrote Dr. Dennis Haughton, “Now, a complex insurance billing system enslaves all health care pro­viders, multiplies costs and creates the need for a horde of workers to process claims and fill out count­less forms. Managed care only makes things worse by adding an­other layer of pricey bureaucracy, complexity and inefficiency. If plumbers used a similar system, all of the toilets in the country would be perpetually clogged.”

Creating a massive new entitle­ment would only make things worse, Haughton wrote. His own prescription: Insurance reform, tort reform, and getting politicians and bureaucrats out of the way.

Meanwhile, in an opinion col­umn posted October 25 at The Wall Street Journal’s web site, the pres­ident of the American Enterprise Institute, Arthur C. Brooks, ob­served that growing opposition to Obamacare comes from Americans’ realization that the president’s plan would dictate what kind of insur­ance they have, what doctors they see, what procedures the doctors perform, what drugs people take, and what options they have.

In sum, those who think Obama wants to improve the United States with massive government health care seem to have forgot­ten that affection for this nation has been the last thing on Obama’s mind.

On October 27 syndicated col­umnist and thinker Thomas Sow­ell noted that for years Obama’s close pals have been those raging against the U. S., from America­damning Rev. Jeremiah Wright to bomb-planting Bill Ayers.

Sowell observed that “the peo­ple [Obama] has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country.”
Now they have their chance, Sowell said, to dismantle it.

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