Why Trump will be remembered as ‘Obama-lite’ if he doesn’t stop the GOP’s health plan

Conservative Review ^ | March 07, 2017 | Jen Kuznicki

[TBP]

I backed Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas (A, 97%) in the primary last year because he is thoroughly educated on the perils of big government and how it destroys personal freedom. I was very skeptical about Donald Trump because he kept saying that the government was going to pay for our health care upon repeal of Obamacare. That meant, and it still means, that he has no intention of increasing my personal freedom, because he was interested in keeping big government.

So we demanded he repeal Obamacare, and he promised he would. He sort of stopped saying that he was interested in letting it blow up in the Democrat’s faces, because, he said, “that wouldn’t be right.” He was right about that. As we sit around twiddling our thumbs, people are still mandated to buy insurance or pay a penalty. People are still subject to reams of paperwork and good doctors deciding to retire early rather than face the leviathan in charge of their practice. Americans are sick of having to disclose information to their podiatrist about whether they have guns in the home, and other stupid, invasive questions. And young healthy twenty and thirty-somethings who are healthy are still paying huge penalties for not buying something they don’t want ... IN AMERICA!!

The whole reason Obamacare was a bad idea to begin with, was a simple point. Well, several. First of all, as Ronald Reagan in his argument against socialized medicine in the 1960’s, that the perils of government getting involved in our healthcare is that it is the statist’s imposition of socialism upon the people.

https://youtu.be/BnLa1BvtaxM

Now, back in 1927 an American socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket, said the American people would never vote for socialism. But he said under the name of liberalism the American people will adopt every fragment of the socialist program.

One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.

If Donald Trump was with the American people in 2009 and 2010, he would know that over two-thirds of the American people opposed Obamacare. He would know that the Tea Party sprang up and pleaded with their congressmen to oppose it because it was the fulfillment of socialism that the Democrat Party had been working on for one hundred years. Reagan argued against it in 1961, and the entire Republican leadership is arguing for it in 2017.

Before 2009 and 2010, health care in the United States was not as freedom-based as it was in 1961. But it was not distributed by government, it was not directed by government, nor was it mandated by government. If Trump and the Republicans successfully implement Obamacare-lite, Trump will forever be seen as Obama-lite.

Reagan explained how, when government takes control of something, the individuals affected are always affected negatively.

Now in our country under our free enterprise system, we have seen medicine reach the greatest heights that it has in any country in the world. Today, the relationship between patient and doctor in this country is something to be envied any place: the privacy, the care that is given to a person, the right to choose a doctor, the right to go from one doctor to the other.

But let’s also look from the other side -- at the freedom the doctor loses. A doctor would be reluctant to say this. Well, like you, I'm only a patient, so I can say it in his behalf. The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They're equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him, "You can’t live in that town. They already have enough doctors." You have to go someplace else. And from here it's only a short step to dictating where he will go.

This is a freedom that I wonder whether any of us have the right to take from any human being.

If Trump wants to Make America Great Again, a slogan taken from the 1980 campaign of Ronald Reagan, he apparently needs a reminder of what made it great in the first place. He needs to know that the above video of Ronald Reagan, in which he fought against socialist health care, was one of the most passed-around items among the nation’s activist patriots against Obamacare before its passage. The people haven’t changed. Our leaders in Washington haven’t changed; they’ve just traded jerseys. Donald Trump was supposed to change things because he is an outsider, working for the “forgotten man.” But he’s allowing, with this health care proposal, the GOP to screw the forgotten man once again, as the middle class will continue to shoulder the burden of another government program.

Americans are told they are free. Now, we say we are free, except for ... everything the government says we aren’t capable of doing for ourselves, which is not the reason for government. Not in America. Americans are supposed to be free. Trump’s fawning over the new health care bill in a tweet today means he’s not interested in the people being free. Freedom for Americans, for some Republicans, means an inability to control them, and they don’t want that, just like the Democrats don’t want that. What they are really saying is freedom is dangerous to politicians, and so it must be curtailed, because they want the credit for taking money from some to give to others.

I get it. Trump wants to be applauded. He wants a wall with his name on it. He wants to be remembered as the greatest ever, the smartest, the fastest, the most under-budgetest ever. But he’s messing around with American’s ability to be free. Nobody will remember a health care plan that is administered by the government as being Trump’s improvement upon it. He will be remembered as Obama-lite, because the whole premise behind the Tea Party’s rise was that socialized medicine is just socialism finally realized,.

And that fact touches every single one of us.

[dead]

Rebranding Obamacare into Trumpcare, as this bill does, is like buying a house on fire.

[itsahoot]

But, it’s still somehow all his fault. According to them.

Well he is apparently the only one that can stop it. In any case he will get credit for the failure and it will fail, because it is not a repeal.

[itsahoot]

If you like your suppository, you can keep your suppository.

I had just as well stuffed those thing up my arse for all the good they did.

[Jay Thomas]

You’re right. I’ll wait till then.

[RegulatorCountry]

I’m liking the theory that it’s setting up Ryan to fail along about now. Trump knows who wants to take him down, and who doesn’t. We’ll see with the Paul proposal. If the Ryan bill gets through and is signed I will be thoroughly dismayed.