Posted on 12/11/2013 7:20:35 AM PST by markomalley
Time Magazine recently listed the fifty worst cars of all time. The communist East German Trabant made the list with this description: "This is the car that gave Communism a bad name. Powered by a two-stroke pollution generator that maxed out at an ear-splitting 18 hp, the Trabant was a hollow lie of a car constructed of recycled worthlessness A virtual antique when it was designed in the 1950s, the Trabant was East Germany's answer to the VW Beetle a "people's car," as if the people didn't have enough to worry about."
Fast forward a half century and the description of that vehicular lemon also applies to its modern healthcare equivalent, Obamacare.
Almost daily, polls reveal that the American people strongly oppose this ill-conceived government takeover of our nation's healthcare system. Frankly, this should surprise no one. As virtually every Republican in the House and Senate predicted when opposing this horrendous law, millions of Americans are losing plans that they liked in return for underperforming and expensive Obamacare policies. That doctor the president said you could keep? Forget about it. Faced with enormous uncertainty, businesses and families are being thrown into health security chaos, while medical professionals are determining that government-run programs are too complex and refusing to accept Medicaid patients. Just like the stooges the East Germans appointed to design and build the Trabant, the Obama administration carries on the tradition by wreaking havoc on a good healthcare system, effectively destroying something it claimed it was improving.
ObamaCare was a skillful deception foisted on the American people under the guise of expanding healthcare coverage. Yet, the true goal of ObamaCare was never about expanding coverage - it was to implement government control over our daily lives. Five million Americans and their families have lost coverage, while recent reports indicated that only 120,000 had signed up for government mandated plans. This effort is little more than a deeply cynical furtherance of the presidents social-engineering ideology, using raw political power to steal what one person has earned so he can give it to a political interest of his that he believes helps preserve his power. But like a poorly built engine, ObamaCare is ripe for a big backfire.
Looking for ways to fix what's wrong with this horrible law would be like trying to re-engineer the Trabant into its incredibly popular contemporary, the VW Beetle. Impossible, so why waste our time? Instead, we should implement practical healthcare reforms to address the problems, not erase the successes. Americans deserve real-world options that allow market-based solutions to address the supply and cost of healthcare, keep medical professionals practicing, as well as expand our ability to seek and provide cutting edge technologies, drugs and treatments.
Thats why Congress should repeal ObamaCare and lift restrictions that prevent health plans from being offered across state lines, allow individuals and families to find the best plan at the best price, and create competition based on value. The greater competition fostered by an expanded market will lower prices and improve the quality of healthcare. We should also help level the playing field between employer-based and individual market insurance by providing all Americans with a standard deduction for health insurance. Individuals could receive a $7,500 tax deduction while families could benefit from a $20,000 tax deduction. This would give individuals and families the flexibility to choose a plan that best fits their needs.
ObamaCare not only requires you to buy health coverage and taxes you if you do not but it also designs the coverage you get. Manipulating both the supply and demand of a market is the truest form of socialism. It will not only ruin the healthcare market, but it also drags down the economy. It's time to recall ObamaCare - the Presidents Trabant - and give Americans a ride built for the long haul.
Olson has served Texas' 22nd Congressional District since 2009. He sits on the Energy and Commerve committees.
No doubt, but in the end, I can’t help but wonder which population is going to control which.
Good article but the content does not comport with the title.
I actually drove a Trabant once. A perfect example of what central planning gets you.
Specifically, I believe Zero wants to phase out rinky-dink stuff like rubbers, spermicides and diaphragms, and go straight for the permanent spay implant. Then, nobody can have babies unless they do whatever rigmarole it takes to get their hormone-derangement rods or coils removed.
All women available for f***ing, no female fertile unless she's an outlaw, or licensed.
They started out with the equivalent of "Unborns don't have souls." They're progressing to "... because nobody has a soul." Mrs. Don-o Huxley
So Obama’s method is to import as many immigrants as possible and give them all Death Panel healthcare, birth control, and abortions to control their future impact on Mother Earth? In other words, get ‘em all inside our borders and under US government control? Sounds like a plan. /S
How do you get out from under the obligations (Social Security and Medicare) made to baby-boomers after you've already spent the money they spent a lifetime paying in?
First, inflate the currency into nothingness and then deny health care to an aging population.
Ta-Da! Problem solved.
Oh, now let's implement a confiscatory death tax and voila, enough money coming in to buy low-information votes and live like kings.
And we thought our politicians were stupid.
Not stupid - evil.
See my comment as warddorrity at The Hill site.
Always wondered why the commies didn't just make Beetles, which weren't bad cars.
“Instead, we should implement practical healthcare reforms to address the problems, not erase the successes. Americans deserve real-world options that allow market-based solutions to address the supply and cost of healthcare, keep medical professionals practicing, as well as expand our ability to seek and provide cutting edge technologies, drugs and treatments.”
Too late for that, the welfare-healthcare cat is out of the barn and will never go away.
By the time Conservatives gain control their will be millions on the free healthcare gravy train and nobody will dare toss them off.
It’s over, the RATS destroyed the best healthcare system in the world!
Back on December 11, 2012, Freeper "livius," posting about the ACA, said:
"This is worse than before. What we are now being forced to pay for is essentially a government funded and (as yet) indirectly government administered population control program." - livius
My post on that thread:
Writers have been exposing socialism's tyrannical principles and goals for a century now. Those who have understood it best declared that its policies lead to tyranny and oppression.Does Robertson's last point not pretty well sum up what is happening to American citizens at this very moment because of the Democrats' and their arrogant Administration's insistence upon "negating" the "Freedom" under the "disguise" of something innocently called "health care reform"?Yet, we have arrogant Americans, born in liberty, and viewing themselves as "intellectuals" and "progressives," who have embraced socialist ideas over the ideas of liberty and are determined to impose its deadly limitations on a once-free people. Note the writer's warning that the "scheme of socialism is wholly incomplete unless it includes the power of restraining the increase of population."
Earlier this week, my post included the following:
From the Liberty Fund Library is "A Plea for Liberty: An Argument Against Socialism and Socialistic Legislation," edited by Thomas Mackay (1849 - 1912), originally published in 1891, Chapter 1, excerpted final paragraphs from Edward Stanley Robertson's essay:
"I have suggested that the scheme of Socialism is wholly incomplete unless it includes a power of restraining the increase of population, which power is so unwelcome to Englishmen that the very mention of it seems to require an apology. I have showed that in France, where restraints on multiplication have been adopted into the popular code of morals, there is discontent on the one hand at the slow rate of increase, while on the other, there is still a 'proletariat,' and Socialism is still a power in politics.
I.44
"I have put the question, how Socialism would treat the residuum of the working class and of all classesthe class, not specially vicious, nor even necessarily idle, but below the average in power of will and in steadiness of purpose. I have intimated that such persons, if they belong to the upper or middle classes, are kept straight by the fear of falling out of class, and in the working class by positive fear of want. But since Socialism purposes to eliminate the fear of want, and since under Socialism the hierarchy of classes will either not exist at all or be wholly transformed, there remains for such persons no motive at all except physical coercion. Are we to imprison or flog all the 'ne'er-do-wells'?
I.45
"I began this paper by pointing out that there are inequalities and anomalies in the material world, some of which, like the obliquity of the ecliptic and the consequent inequality of the day's length, cannot be redressed at all. Others, like the caprices of sunshine and rainfall in different climates, can be mitigated, but must on the whole be endured. I am very far from asserting that the inequalities and anomalies of human society are strictly parallel with those of material nature. I fully admit that we are under an obligation to control nature so far as we can. But I think I have shown that the Socialist scheme cannot be relied upon to control nature, because it refuses to obey her. Socialism attempts to vanquish nature by a front attack. Individualism, on the contrary, is the recognition, in social politics, that nature has a beneficent as well as a malignant side. The struggle for life provides for the various wants of the human race, in somewhat the same way as the climatic struggle of the elements provides for vegetable and animal lifeimperfectly, that is, and in a manner strongly marked by inequalities and anomalies. By taking advantage of prevalent tendencies, it is possible to mitigate these anomalies and inequalities, but all experience shows that it is impossible to do away with them. All history, moreover, is the record of the triumph of Individualism over something which was virtually Socialism or Collectivism, though not called by that name. In early days, and even at this day under archaic civilisations, the note of social life is the absence of freedom. But under every progressive civilisation, freedom has made decisive stridesbroadened down, as the poet says, from precedent to precedent. And it has been rightly and naturally so.
I.46
"Freedom is the most valuable of all human possessions, next after life itself. It is more valuable, in a manner, than even health. No human agency can secure health; but good laws, justly administered, can and do secure freedom. Freedom, indeed, is almost the only thing that law can secure. Law cannot secure equality, nor can it secure prosperity. In the direction of equality, all that law can do is to secure fair play, which is equality of rights but is not equality of conditions. In the direction of prosperity, all that law can do is to keep the road open. That is the Quintessence of Individualism, and it may fairly challenge comparison with that Quintessence of Socialism we have been discussing. Socialism, disguise it how we may, is the negation of Freedom. That it is so, and that it is also a scheme not capable of producing even material comfort in exchange for the abnegations of Freedom, I think the foregoing considerations amply prove." EDWARD STANLEY ROBERTSON
ObamaCare was foisted on us, but it was definitely not a deception for the majority of the American people who intelligently knew what this control mechanism was all about. It only fooled the Democratic legislators into thinking that American people do not know what is in their best interest.
It’s the big Democrat math problem.
Dividend/Divisor = Quotient.
Resource/Population = How much each gets.
To increase the quotient, you can increase the dividend or reduce the divisor. The Democrats want to reduce the divisor (population) to increase the quotient ( amount each person gets).
Now, the big questions for the Democrats.
1. Who says you can’t increase the dividend?
2. Why don’t you just return your portion of the resource into the dividend? That would increase the quotient.
3. Who in the hell made you the big mathematician to work on this?
4. Are your motives pure, or are you just trying to get a bigger piece of the dividend for yourself and your family?
The real goal of Marxism is human extinction.
The other meaning of "population control" also works, if you mean giving elderly GOP voters the bum's rush off life's stage.
In that case, it's genocide against Norman Rockwell's America.
That so hard to figure out? It's a scheme to screw other people. When has that been rare?
Someone once wrote an interesting article about motive and drives, the nut of which was that many areas of life are ruled by dominative "red" personalities whose agenda revolve around relative standing in the group, as opposed to real accomplishment.
The point of the article was that people like that began to dominate American life and the American People when Franklin Roosevelt brought his "Brains Trust" to DC and began implementing massive, tentacled government.
Previously, change in America had been driven by creative, innovative people who were motivated to do well by doing good: better mousetraps or (if you were George Westinghouse) air brakes on trains -- that kind of thing. Overreached and dominated by the "red"/dominator personalities, they are now shoved aside and their efforts discounted or shoved aside by people motivated only by being ahead of you in line, in life, in money earned, in political power.
That's why U.S. patents have lagged since the minute Bernard Baruch showed the Brains Trusters to their new offices, and inventiveness began to suffer at the hands of competitive, Ivy League-educated power junkies.
No, that is not what I mean at all.
It is with regret that I am unable to specifically clarify what I mean by that statement.
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