Why I Oppose ObamaCare - H.R. 3200

Over the last few weeks I have been caught up with reading all about H.R. 3200 (also known as ObamaCare, Government Run Health Care, Single Payer Health Care, Socialized Medicine, Universal Health Care, Government Mandated Care, Public Option Health Plan).

Our elected officials in Washington, DC are attempting to pass a healthcare reform bill that would drastically change the healthcare system in our country.

"Health care cannot be a right, because rights cannot come from government. At best, they can be protected by government. The founders understood this, which is why our Bill of Rights is really a list of restrictions on the government in Washington." --National Review editor Jonah Goldberg



Members of Congress have admitted to not even reading the entire bill, which is over 1000 pages!! The bill can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/3200HR

"President Obama is pushing Congress to pass health care legislation that could nationalize as much as 10 percent of the economy. Most members of Congress will vote on this bill with no idea what's in it. Rep. John Conyers Jr., Michigan Democrat, disparaged lawmakers for even pretending to read the laws they pass. 'I love these members, they get up and say, "Read the bill,"' he said last week at the National Press Club. 'What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you've read the bill?' Mr. Conyers might think it's an antiquated notion that congressmen actually read legislation, but it is the most fundamental responsibility of elected representatives to know and understand laws and how they will affect the lives of their constituents. That is especially the case with such a gargantuan bill. The House version creates 53 new federal bureaucracies with everything from a Health Choices Administration to a Health Insurance Exchange Trust Fund to a Health Benefits Advisory Committee. Thirty-three entitlement programs are created or expanded. The notion is put to rest that government might cooperate with doctors and patients to work out what is best for providing care. The health care bill uses the assertive word 'shall' 1,683 times. These passages are government mandates that force doctors, consumers and others in the health care profession to do what Congress orders. The word 'penalty' is used 156 times for those who don't follow orders. 'Tax' is referred to 172 times. Mr. Conyers is right about one thing: A legal education would come in handy when reading through this legislation. The bill is 1,018 pages long, very complicated and surely will cause legal disputes about its meaning for years to come." --The Washington Time




A must see video to understand what Obama and his team of lefties are up to on the hostage care!


Find more videos like this on Patriotic Resistance
Self explanatory video



While Barney Frank acknowledges he has always been in favor of a “single-payer,” or government-run, socialist health care program, he readily admits the votes aren’t there to pass it.

Instead, he asserts, he would like to see a public option contained within the health care legislation, which would nudge us ever-closer to a single-payer, government-run system.
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Listen to former U.S. Senator Fred Thompson as he interviews someone who has read the Obama Health Care bill.

Click here to listen. (MP3 / M3U format)

Obama’s plan would deny medical care for the elderly. This interview is 8 minutes long. Please listen and then forward it to friends and family. This is a dangerous assault on the elderly. Medical Care would be denied based on a patient's birthday. Check out defendyourhealthcare.us for more information on the truth of H.R. 3200

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ObamaCareTruth.org is also a site where concerned citizens can get the truth about Obama’s socialist health care plans. Updated continuously with the latest news and commentary, ObamaCareTruth.org boldly exposes the truth about the proposed government takeover of your personal health care decisions that the liberal media simply aren’t interested in reporting!

As the health care crisis intensifies, I urge you to visit the site everyday, and to encourage friends and family to do the same. This is far too important an issue, and one that left ignored and unchallenged could radically change our lives forever!

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Sign the petition to stop obamacare! www.grassfire.org/122/petition.asp?pid=21407071



Don't believe for a minute that Democrat operatives are actually going on vacation in August. Barack Obama is back in full campaign mode... Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel is twisting arms like crazy... and Nancy Pelosi is making more deals than she can possibly keep track of!

In fact, the President's ploy of conceding a "missed deadline"and reluctantly accepting a vote "in the fall" was only designed to stop public pressure against the bill. The key work on ObamaCare is still rushing forward. I've personally have received several letters from the White House & Pres. Obama telling me how imperative it is that we pass H.R. 3200 ASAP. They are working hard to get it passed. WE MUST KEEP THE PRESSURE ON!!!! Write, fax, email & call your congressmen... TODAY & EVERYDAY!!!

Not sure who to contact? Find your Congressman here: http://tinyurl.com/MembersOfCongress (or individual sites here: Senators, & Representatives)

Not sure what to write or say? See the letter I wrote to my Senators & Representative regarding HR 3200 "ObamaCare" to express why it will destroy our health care and country:

(sample letter below)
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To (your congressman's name inserted here):

I am writing to let you know that I OPPOSE HR3200 and the government hijacking my private healthcare decisions. I do not want the government to have more control and influence over my health care.

I oppose the plan to nationalize our health care system and urge you to oppose it. There may be good intentions behind the legislation, but the unintended consequences will be massive and destructive to our economy.

Eighty-four percent of Americans say they don’t want ObamaCare -which amounts to socialized healthcare.

Here are a few reasons why ObamaCare will be destructive to our country:

* Healthcare rationing: Government takeover of health care also would allow Washington to use "comparative effectiveness research" to dictate to doctors which treatments they should prescribe and how much they should cost. That in turn would lead to rationing of health care services. (Page 29 - rations healthcare; essential benefits are defined and there is an annual limitation of $5,000/individual and $10,000/family).

* Government decisions about what healthcare benefits you can receive, even from your private employer: (Page 30 – the "Health Choices Commissioner" will decide what treatment/benefits you receive.) It ultimately would transform legislators into quasi health care practitioners. Legislators would become quasi medical practitioners because they would lead and guide the government-controlled medical boards, personnel and policies that would oversee the program. That would include abortive and end-of-life counsel and services. Federal politicians would rely upon relatively few chief physicians (appointed mostly by them), who in turn would oversee and implement the medical policies and procedures that they felt were best for the country.

* Family Planning Services (code phrase for government funded abortion Pages 769-770) – --every version of ObamaCare currently being discussed includes the devastating Abortion Mandate that will REQUIRE me and other pro-life Americans to fund abortion with our tax dollars! THIS IS WRONG!!! Why should we be required to fund abortions when we are morally against it. Government Funded Abortion is not a "right" guaranteed in our constitution.

* This legislation also requires euthanasia counseling - the frequency of which increases with age and illness. (section 1233 of the legislative proposal) This deals with a government requirement for an “Advance Care Planning Consultation.” One of the most shocking things is page 425, where the Congress would make it mandatory absolutely that every five years people in Medicare have a required counseling session. Dr. Betsy McCaughey who is a former New York state officer and health expert said. “They will tell [them] how to end their life sooner.” The proposal specifically calls for the consultation to recommend “palliative care and hospice” for seniors in their mandatory counseling sessions. Palliative care and hospice generally focus only on pain relief until death. That section may place seniors in situations where they feel pressured to sign end of life directives they would not otherwise sign. This provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia if enacted into law.

* ObamaCare is an economic suicide pill for our faltering economy! It will add to an already ridiculously high deficit. This legislation clearly would drive our country deeper into debt and cannot be paid for without massive across the board tax increases. America cannot afford the $1 trillion price tag of socialized health care during these difficult economic times. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Senate version of the health care legislation "would result in a net increase in federal deficits of about $1.0 trillion for fiscal years 2010 through 2019." Is that what you call good fiscal responsibility within an economy and government that already is bordering on bankruptcy? I flatly reject any health care proposal that increases costs or imposes new taxes on any American.

* This legislations will kill small businesses under a mountain of taxes, regulations and other cost. It will NOT save money, but will increase the rapid rise in healthcare cost in the country.

* All Employers will be required to auto-enroll all employees in ObamaCare with no options. Businesses will be pushing workers onto the government run plan, driving up costs, and shutting down private insurance. ObamaCare ultimately would limit the competitive market of health care. You don't create competitive markets by creating monopolies, yet that is exactly what government-run universal health care would prevent: competition. If government should do anything, it should crack down on medical insurance monopolies. If government wants to regulate one more thing, it would be better to regulate the medical insurance companies, not the American people.

* Mandated audits of the books of private companies: -Page 22 - mandates the government will audit the books of all employers that self-insure

* It also requires A National Health ID card, complete with government access to our personal information and even our bank accounts.

* It mandates counsel to "increase the frequency interval" between pregnancies (in other words, bureaucrats will tell us when we should have a child). And, it even requires taxpayers to pay for "sex change" surgeries!

* Other mandates: Page 317 – government can prohibit a hospital from expanding, Page 341 – gives government the authority to disqualify certain plans, i.e. Medicare Advantage (Medicare Part B), Page 353 – sets limitations on enrollment of special needs individuals

And what about the taxpayers who would pay for the program? Would having universal health care encourage their future productivity? Further taxing members of the upper class (which would mean further penalizing their productivity) certainly would not provide incentive for Americans chasing the American dream. And their added taxes obviously would trickle down to consumers, as well. Or do we just assume they would pay 47 million Americans' universal health care out of their surpluses?

One needs only look at the failed and deeply flawed TennCare in Tennesse and Massachusetts’s government run health care plans to see that Government-run Universal Healthcare is a bad idea that will end up devastating our nation.

Canada and Europe already have proved that national health care translates into national nightmares, with a plethora of new government regulations and new systems of rationing medical attention. Under government-run services, personal health care would transform into more impersonal harassment.

I urge you to stand against the loss of personal freedom, the skyrocketing tax increases and the healthcare rationing that will result from H.R. 3200, "Obamacare". Please know that I am watching your actions on this bill. I urge you to take time to listen to your constituents during the August recess.

Respectfully,
(your name)

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Opponents of a government run take over of health care have put together an organizational chart of what this plan would look like. House Democrats DO NOT want the American people to see this and even constructed roadblocks in approving communication between Republican congressman and their constituents. To view what House Democrats don't want you to see, click here.

Six More Reasons Why ObamaCare is Bad Medicine (Click link to read a very informative article by Chuck Norris on ObamaCare)

Yes, America desperately needs real change in our health and healthcare system. Americans are paying more and more money for less and less quality care. There does need to be Health Care Reform, but H.R. 3200 will not solve the problems, instead it will create a mountain of new problems.

Here are some actual solutions proposed by the Center for Health Transformation, they have been working for the past six years to develop solutions for the problems in our health care system, which don’t rely on higher taxes, bigger government, and more bureaucrats.



Six Straightforward Steps to Better Healthcare

To create a system that delivers more choices of higher quality health care at lower cost we need to take the following six straightforward steps:

1. Stop Paying the Crooks. First, we must dramatically reduce healthcare fraud within our current healthcare system. Outright fraud — criminal activity — accounts for as much as 10 percent of all healthcare spending. That is more than $200 billion every year. Medicare alone could account for as much as $40 billion a year. (Read about our latest CHT Press book, Stop Paying the Crooks, edited by Jim Frogue.)

2. Move from a Paper-based to an Electronic Health System. As it stands now, it is simply impossible to keep up with fraud in a paper-based system. An electronic system would free tens of billions of dollars to be spent on investing on the kind of modern system that will transform healthcare. In addition, it would dramatically increase our ability to eliminate costly medical errors and to accelerate the adoption of new solutions and breakthroughs.

3. Tax Reform. The savings realized through very deliberately and very systematically eliminating fraud could be used to provide tax incentives and vouchers that would help cover those Americans who currently can’t afford coverage. In addition, we need to expand tax incentives for insurance provided by small employers and the self-employed. Finally, elimination of capital gains taxes for investments in health-solution companies can greatly impact the creation advancement of new solutions that create better health at lower cost.

4. Create a Health-Based Health System. In essence, we must create a system that focuses on improving individual health. The best way to accomplish this is to find out what solutions are actually working today that save lives and save money and then design public policy to encourage their widespread adoption. For example, according to the Dartmouth Health Atlas, if the 6,000 hospitals in the country provided the same standard of care of the Intermountain or Mayo health clinics, Medicare alone would save 30 percent of total spending every year. We need to make best practices the minimum practice. We need the federal government and other healthcare stakeholders to consistently migrate to best practices that ensure quality, safety and better outcomes.

5. Reform Our Health Justice System. Currently, the U.S. civil justice system is the most expensive in the world — about double the average cost in virtually every other industrialized nation. But for all of the money spent, our civil justice system neither effectively compensates persons injured from medical negligence nor encourages the elimination of medical errors. Because physicians fear malpractice suits, defensive medicine (redundant, wasteful treatment designed to avoid lawsuits, not treat the patient) has become pervasive. CHT is developing a number of bold health-justice reforms including a “safe harbor” for physicians who followed clinical best practices in the treatment of a patient.

6. Invest in Scientific Research and Breakthroughs. We must accelerate and focus national efforts, re-engineer care delivery, and ultimately prevent diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease and diabetes which are financially crippling our healthcare system.

Other Solutions!!!

"Every doctor knows, as I did when I practiced years ago, how much unnecessary medical cost is incurred with an eye not on medicine but on the law. Tort reform would yield tens of billions in savings. Yet you cannot find it in the Democratic bills. And Obama breathed not a word about it in the full hour of his health-care news conference. Why? No mystery. The Democrats are parasitically dependent on huge donations from trial lawyers." --columnist Charles Krauthammer

"We hear a lot of talk about eliminating waste and having more preventative health care. But the most powerful health care initiative we could get is the last thing they will propose: Traditional family values. The same values undermined by the liberal abortion regime and moral relativism they promote." --columnist Star Parker

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The Double Standard:

"If socialized medicine is good enough to force on American taxpayers, it’s good enough for Congress. I like this House resolution from Rep. John Fleming requiring lawmakers in Washington to enroll in any government-run health plan it decides to foist on the rest of us." - Michelle Malkin

This is a resolution that will offer members of Congress an opportunity to put their money where their mouth is, and urge their colleagues who vote for legislation creating a government-run health care plan to lead by example and enroll themselves in the same public plan and give up their own private insurance. Hmmm, I don't think Senator Ted Kennedy will opt to do that with his current diagnosis of brain cancer. With a new Government requirement for an “Advance Care Planning Consultation,” the Health Choices Commissioner will be asked to evaluate if Senator Kennedy's life is valuable enough to dedicate millions of dollars to extending it another month, another day, another year? "Because Barack Obama and Ted Kennedy agree with each other that they of all people are entitled to make that decision. Your decision to live or die will now be in their hands. Ted Kennedy is now 76. Average life expectancy in the United States is 78.06. For a man who has already reached 76, life expectancy is somewhat longer than average (since people who die younger lower the national average); for a wealthy white man it may be somewhat longer statistically; but for a man with diagnosed brain cancer it is correspondingly less. As far as the actuarial tables of the Nanny State are concerned, Kennedy is due to leave this life some time soon. The socialist State is not sentimental, at least when it comes to the lives of ordinary people like you and me.
The socialist question -- and yes, it is being asked very openly in socialist countries all around the world, like Britain and Sweden -- must be whether extending Senator Kennedy's life by another day, another month or year is socially valuable enough to pay for what is no doubt a gigantic and growing medical bill. Kennedy is a US Senator, and all that money has been coughed up without complaint by the US taxpayer." --James Lewis, American Thinker

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The Lies:

The BIG Lie: "[T]he [health care] reforms we make will help bring our deficits under control in the long term. Those who oppose reform will also tell you that under our plan you won't get to choose your doctor, that some bureaucrat will choose for you. That's also not true. Michelle and I don't want anyone telling us who our family doctor should be, and no one should decide that for you, either. Under our proposal if you like your doctor, you keep your doctor. If you like your current insurance, you keep that insurance. Period. End of story." --President Barack Obama

Furthermore, according to The Wall Street Journal, "[W]hen Mr. Obama says that 'If you like your health-care plan, you'll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what,' he's wrong. Period. What he's not telling the American people is that the government will so dramatically change the rules of the insurance market that employers will find it impossible to maintain their current coverage, and many will drop it altogether." But pay no attention to the man behind the curtain -- Obama "will keep government out of health care decisions."

The LIE gets BIGGER: "Opponents of health reform warn that this is all some big plot for socialized medicine or government-run health care with long lines and rationed care. That's not true, either. I don't believe that government can or should run health care, but I also don't think insurance companies should have free rein to do as they please." --Barack Marx Obama

If only he really meant it: "[H]ealth insurance reform cannot add to our deficit over the next decade and I mean it." --Barack Obama

Deficit disorder: "This is legislation that will not increase the deficit. Half of the funds for the bill will come from savings, others from the revenue stream. I hope that we can change that percentage, that we have much more coming from savings. That I believe that all the costs of the health care reform bill can come from squeezing more savings out of the system." --House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on health care

"The last time the president made grand promises and demanded passage of a bill before it could be reviewed, we ended up with the colossal stimulus failure and unemployment near 10 percent. Now the president wants Americans to trust him again, but he can't back up the utopian promises he's making about a government takeover of health care. He insists his health care plan won't add to our nation's deficit despite the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office saying exactly the opposite." --Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC)

Paying for "choice": "I think we handled the issue well. We like the idea that people have choices and, indeed, the law of the land permits people to make those choices, and we respect that, and we are going to pursue that. Again, we do not want to discriminate when people have -- they have convictions, moral convictions and religious convictions." --Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) on requiring abortion services to be part of health insurance.

What's in the bill: "We also want to start rewarding doctors for quality, not just the quantity of care that they provide. Instead of rewarding them for how many procedures they perform or how many tests they order, we'll bundle payments so providers aren't paid for every treatment they offer when they chronic -- to a patient with a chronic condition like diabetes, but instead are paid for how are they managing that disease overall." --Barack Obama in a townhall meeting **Exactly how is BO or any of his elite minions authorized or qualified to decide the quality of a doctor's care?

Perhaps columnist Ann Coulter put it best when she quipped, "All the problems with the American health care system come from government intervention, so naturally the Democrats' idea for fixing it is more government intervention. This is like trying to sober up by having another drink."

(cartoons in this post from the Patriot Post & Patriot Update)