Conor Rogers, Editor
Ideology: Moderate Republican | Writing from: Washington, DC
For the many conservatives from my TV screen to my facebook newsfeed who last night declared everything from the rise of socialism to the end of America, it’s time to take a step back, it’s not so bad.
There is no public option, President Obama is backed into a corner on abortion funding, and fourty-one Democrats from swing-districts have essentially handed their seats over to a tea-party Republican. There is insurance regulation, there are price controls and of course ‘consumer protections’ but they do not take effect until 2014.
Last night Speaker Pelosi reminded Americans why she was the Democrat’s minority whip and why she is now Speaker. She can create votes out of thin (well, hot) air. But the Liberal Democrats also reminded us why they have consistently handed elections over to Republicans over the past two decades – they push unpopular policies and cannot govern responsibly. So much so that more than ten percent of House Democrats voted against the party’s signature issue.
On the bright side for Republicans: the Democrats have just passed one of the most unpopular initiatives ever proposed, an irreparable rift has been created between the fiscally conservative Democrats and Speaker Pelosi, and finally, that President Obama now has to sign an executive order that will put him at odds with one of his staunchest backers: pro-choice groups.
The real reason conservatives, moderates, and any American should be concerned has nothing to do with anything explicitly written in the bill, or any specific provision of the House or Senate bills. The alarm that should be sounded and realized by all is that this is not a bill simply about health; it is a foot in the door for how the left side of things wants to govern America; how they envision the relationship between a citizen and their government. It is not socialism, but it is certainly not the individualistic ‘do-it-yourself’ that has defined American culture past.
Congress, as it rarely does, has created something completely new – a mandatory right to health insurance coverage. A right that if not obtained from a private insurer, must either be provided to a citizen by the government, or with the help of the government.
This is not how rights have worked in America, and it’s not how they should, not now, not ever.
We have a right to free speech, but I do not get my own newspaper to publish at birth. I have a right to worship, but the government need not build me a church. I have a right to own and protect my property, but that does not mean I have a right to be provided with a home. Apparently, I have a right to health coverage – but that does not mean I have a right to be provided with it. I have a right to have access to it. Just like I have a right to attend a church of my choice, read a newspaper of my choice, and purchase a home of my choosing.
The Liberals have gotten their foot in the door on re-defining healthcare, and ‘rights’ in America, but in order to not go the way of many high-tax social-democratic European nations, we must slam the door on the foot.
Near-universal healthcare is quite possibly a good thing for each American, it makes sure we have an easier life – but that does not mean it is a good thing for all Americans, or America itself. If Congress declared a right to own a house, it would be a good thing for each American, but it would not benefit America, nor would it be financially sustainable for our taxpayers.
The deficit is going to become unfathomable, and (Social Security & Medicare were also declared ‘deficit-neutral.’) Our taxes will likely be raised in the long-term as a result, and the amount of people on the public ward will skyrocket. Many Americans will be relying on the government for their very survival – a nightmare for any conservative who values the right of any man to be free from dependence upon his government, and anyone who realizes it was individualism and an all-out struggle to attain the American dream that has made America what it is today. The very America President Obama is trying to ‘change.’
Price controls and insurance regulations are not nearly as bad as the initial bill Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama crafted over a year ago, but the intentions and implications are the same. The job of conservatives and moderates over the next election cycle, and likely the next decade must be to keep the healthcare bill what it is now – a price control and corporate regulation statue. As with any government program, they will try to expand it, apply it to more people, lower the bar on who can qualify for the program, and eventually, complete its transition to a money-losing tax-eating entitlement.
President Obama said last night from the east room that ‘a new stone has been laid in the foundation of the American dream.’ Apparently, it has come to a point where the American President does not even understand the American dream – the dream is not to be given, nor to simply have. The dream is to create, to work, to own, and eventually, to prosper – and has historically been the case, with the help of parents, siblings, your sons and daughters, and co-workers not Washington, DC.
They’ve got their foot in your door. Slam it, slam it as hard as you can and keep them out.
“a new stone hung around the neck of the American dream” ….”we will get to pushing it overboard shortly”.
americans don”t have a right to food, money, freedom from fear or health care. life, liberty and the pursuit, PURSUIT!!!! of happiness. to call other things rights is to cheapen those that are real.
This bill is an assault on ALL Americans. Taxes WILL go up substantially, even Lawrence O’Donnell this morning on Morning Joe, admits that even those making less than 200-250k will have their taxes increased.
The biggest problem I have is the control government wants. This bill comes from the same people who blame McDonald’s for being fat, soda for making them obese, cigarettes for cancer, etc. We will see a soda tax which will drive companies out of business. Soon we will all be eating tofu and organic vegetables. Our freedom of choice is at stake!
Yooo Con,
Obama and his cohorts are laying a stone foundation for exactly what I don’t know; but I can say it is not America, it’s not to house the Constitution, and it will never, never be paid for. There will be many feet in the doors in the near future but let’s make sure they’re not around to knock. JAR
Yay paranoia.
Yay stupid.
Conor, I think you overstate the effects of this quite a bit. I also think you miss a portion of the population: those who opposed the bill for most of the debate, but who were won over. So, I’ll speak for them.
First off, the Republican Party will not pick up 41 seats in the House of Representatives. To even say that they’ll gain the majority is a stretch, though more feasible than a 41 seat gain. Yes, the Republican Party will probably gain several seats, maybe even enough for Pelosi to step down as Speaker, but this will not sink the Democratic Party, and here’s why.
The super-massive-government-wants-to-make-me-a-robot-healthcare-plan does not kick in until 2014. But what will kick in in time for elections are things that Republicans will have to work a lot harder to paint as evil. Is it really a bad idea to eliminate the benefit caps that bankrupt thousands of hard-working Americans every year? Is it un-American to say that the fact that a child born with a genetic disorder can be denied coverage is wrong? The Democrats get to point to these immediate effects and say “Was the old setup really better?”
You argue that you have a right to speech and worship, but that they are not provided to you. Tell me, did a corporate construction, such as the healthcare industry, try to deprive you of your ability to express yourself? Did they go into your mind and erase the concept of God? No. But by setting prices and rules as they have, millions of Americans have been told that they could not access healthcare.
I am an uninsured American. My aging father is a freelance lighting technician and is 72 years old, making his skills in a physical labor intensive job rather hard to market. My family of two parents and two dependent children made less than $40,000 last year. We are not below the poverty line, but we barely scrape by.
My mother looked into the cost of an individual insurance policy, but her medical history set the price of even a basic policy far out of reach. Shall we sell our home in order to ensure she can afford basic care? Or shall we just accept that she just better not get sick or she’s on her own?
I have mild asthma. That means, under the old system, if I were to be able to purchase insurance, but then suffered from some sort of respiratory illness or trauma, I could be told that my symptoms were a result of a preexisting condition and go into thousands of dollars of debt or be denied treatment. Should I have to deal with that because I was raised in a city where just about every athletic kid gets asthma?
The bill is not perfect. I don’t think a single person thinks it is. But it fixes injustices that Republicans and Democrats alike have allowed to be perpetuated. If the Democrats keep that as their message, I think you’ll be surprised by the willingness of the American people to reconsider.
Well said.
It’s too bad that anything that comes out of the mouth of a Democrat is denounced as treasonous, whereas calls for revolution float by unnoticed by certain Republicans who will go unnamed here.
Colin,
Over state? I believe I opened the article by saying this healthcare bill wasn’t all that bad and didn’t have much effect. “Essentially handing over their seats” was quite obviously not a mathematical electoral prediction, but a comment on the changed electoral climate.
–Re: your comments about companies taking away my freedom of religion, etc. I didn’t put my personal views on healthcare in here because I went more for the over-arching angle. I personally look at healthcare like a contract. Standard business rules should apply. If a company wants to deny you coverage -when you apply- they should be allowed to…just like any business can decline to do business with you. However once they enter into that contract, they shouldn’t be allowed to cancel that contract with you (a.k.a. ‘drop your coverage).
—My brother has a heart condition that has required thousands upon thousands in treatment. It’s expensive, because well, its expensive! Live-saving medical care is EXPENSIVE. We’ve grown up taking for granted the fact that the technology exists to keep your body running while your heart is stopped for surgery…that’s not cheap to invent, build, design, or implement. If we want the best care, it’s going to be expensive. When I was born, it costed hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep me alive in top-of-the-line pre-natal care…but thats because it was the TOP OF THE LINE care that required that. The government simply can’t subsidize the best care in the world, that’s why the private industry has done it. It takes investors, inventors and people with such rare technological talents that they are of course, able to charge what they think they deserve. As for me, no Colin, I don’t want to change that system. The fact I am alive and breathing is a testament to the fact it does a pretty damn good job.
I am saying that you are overstating the positive effects for the Republican Party.
We do not hold any other basic life saving service as something to be left to private enterprise: firefighters, police, the military, and so on are all paid for by the government. Why? Because it is a basic service that everyone needs and protections should not differ based on socio-economic status. And I daresay there is still quite a bit of money to be made in coming up with new ways to fight a war. It does not make sense that healthcare should be the sole exception. But then, perhaps I’ll go make my own fire department.
And Conor, under the old system, had I been born in the same situation as you, I would have died. My family would have lost its house trying to avoid that, but they would have still run out of money. I don’t think it’s a difficult leap to say that because you were lucky enough to be born into a family with money. I was not. Should a baby born into a family like mine have to die because we have less money? Tell me, is that the equality of opportunity that Republicans/Conservatives preach?
The purpose of the government is to protect us when we as individuals cannot protect ourselves. For millions upon millions of Americans like me, this is a time when we need the government’s help. We just don’t have the money to help ourselves. And that should not be a death sentence.
This debate has solidified one thing in my mind: When I get home, I’m going to the library. I’m getting a voter registration card. I’m re-registering as a Democrat.
“It is not socialism, but it is certainly not the individualistic ‘do-it-yourself’ that has defined American culture past.”
What? Maybe in the late 1700s. What about the populist movement? Or the Granger movement before it? What about the socialist and progressive movements? This is only a sampling of exceptions to your proposed “rule”. The thing is, Conor, you speak of “the left” as if we’re not Americans too. But we are — and we have played an integral role in American history.
The reality of American history, when every left-of-center person isn’t conveniently excised, is that people turn to one another and the government in times of trouble and crisis. When times are good, Americans like to go it on our own. When times are good, we elect Republicans. When times are bad, we elect Democrats to clean up the mess the Republicans left behind.
Noah, you can’t just say things that you want to be true. Nowhere did I say that people on the left aren’t a part of America, and assuming I did is either an insult to my own intelligence or a lack of it on your part.
-Your ability to not get the message I’m putting across never fails! Can you show me where I spoke of the left as not a part of America? I simply said the left is trying to push American in a new direction. I was urging the GOP and others to make sure this insurance reform stays just that: insurance reform, and doesn’t expand and bloat like other Gov’t programts.
–Conservatives always try to keep things the way they are and liberals try to change them, that is the fundamental difference between the two, and that’s not up for debate. I’m not sure where you got the idea that I think the left isn’t a part of American history. Conservatism has always tried to ‘hold the line’ on hard-work and ‘keep what you earn’ and the left has always tried to insert the government wherever it thinks it needs to be done. If you’re going to argue against that you’re the one who conveniently excises history.
—Your final point is a joke. Electing GOP when times are good and Dems when times are bad? Just ask Reagan Democrats who voted against Carter about that one.
Conor,
I fully explained what I meant: you can only justify your statement about “American individualism” if you ignore every left of center movement in American history. While my last comment was mostly tongue-in-cheek, the rest of what I had to say is entirely historically sound: Americans turn to the government for solutions when times are bad. Like I said, the Grange movement, the Farmers’ Alliance, the populist movement, the socialist movement (which while now largely irrelevant received 17% of the nationwide vote in the 1917 municipal elections and even had a congressman at one point), the progressive movement (including Republican Teddy Roosevelt), the Communist movement (remarkably strong throughout the 1930s and WWII), not to mention the Democratic Party and the vast majority of Americans through the New Deal.
While rhetorically powerful, it is simply historically inaccurate to claim that Americans are “individualistic ‘do it yourself’” people. As I mentioned before, we certainly do have those tendencies when times are good, but those tendencies have never been absolute, and those tendencies are shared by others, including communitarian and egalitarian values, as well as concerns with fairness.
If you don’t believe me, I recommend that you read Hofstadter’s “Age of Reform”, where he points out that both individualist and communitarian/pro-government tendencies could be found in the vast majority of the American people throughout the 19th century and 20th century (because his focus is on the social movements from 1890 until 1920, his analysis largely omits the concerns of Americans before the Civil War).
This is complete hooey. Vultures move in when they see fresh carrion, or when a near-kill has been left to die. Communists and their forebears preyed on our weakness, usually brought on by the previous gang of “progressives.”
Woodrow Wilson was perhaps the worst president until Jimmy Carter, and he was the highest rise of the “progressives”(a dress-up term for communists, before they turned to “liberal”) Interesting that just as my spell-check still doesn’t know(disavowal?) the name “Barack Obama” it also doesn’t know how to spell “Woodrow.” What does spell-check know that Noah doesn’t know?
A summary of O&D’s comment: the only “real” Americans are the ones that agree with him.
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson originally wrote of our rights to life, liberty and “public happiness,” by which, according to his contemporaneous manuscripts, he meant civic action, participation in politics and public affairs.
To me, this is the essence of America. Not because the Founders “divined” it, though it might have been Jefferson’s intention, but because it was what made the American founding so utterly novel. This concept of public action to produce something “new,” above and beyond “liberal” ideas about social justice or “conservative” ideas about unbounded individual freedom, is our essence. We see it in this forum, in the streets, and on the airwaves.
Conor, you infer that we today stray from our cultural and collective history in passing health insurance reform. With all due respect, I think you are mistaken. New beginnings produced by public political action IS the collective history of our people. It was the fount of the New Deal, the conservative revival, the Great Society, the Contract With America, and yes, last night’s health insurance reform.
So yes, what happened last night will redefine the way Americans interact with their government. This is something “new,” but newness is hardly novel to our grand republic, and may it ever remain that way.
Adam: While we’re talking previous drafts of the Declaration, you might as well bring up that those “inalienable rights” in a previous draft, were called “sacred” and Jefferson caucused with FRANKLIN, and he took it out. That old womanizing miserly cad. Anyway, Jefferson called the rights “sacred”. If you get to contort the current miscarriage of “health care reform” into a tradition of “civic action” (BTW that makes me wanna scratch) as referenced, supposedly, in the Declaration, then do I get my sacred rights back? Hmmmmm…?
I don’t think anyone “took” your sacred rights with healthcare reform, but if you want to get into founder’s intent—which I said is not the point, but we can do it anyway—the fact is that Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Jay, Adams, Washington etc. were all “Deists,” not traditional Christians. They believed that some single God (ostensibly the God of Abraham) created the universe according to universal natural/physical laws (e.g. Newtonian physics) and then retired to let the “clockwork universe” progress on its own without reference to its “first cause.” His use of the word “sacred” would have been referring to the fact that political liberty is something inherently human, and that it is legitimate as something “human” not God-given.
All of this strays from my point that the American essence is public political action to create new beginnings that have no foundation in tradition. Our tradition is breaking with tradition to spontaneously create novelty. This essence is at the core of health reform, as it is in the various other events of the 20th century I listed before.
Yes, the Deism slur. I’ve heard it before. All that stemmed from a heresy, very popular in its day, which goes by other names today, but back then was called “Arminianism,” and it believed that God had wandered off and left us to our own devices. Ask the born-agains today if they believe that claptrap. You’ll find that they believe God is quite active, watches and knows everything, and has by no means “wound the watch” leaving us to our own devices. Neither the Founders. Claptrap. But it feeds the “we are our own Gods” heresy. Very popular. Yes, bad stuff happens in the name of “progress.” One was called the “Soviet Union.” Commies in Europe and America cheered. Broke up in the early 90′s. Reagan gets the credit. Some bad stuff needs to be rolled back. The Intolerable Acts 1775.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, PROMOTE THE GENERAL WELFARE, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
I admit, not my own writing. I think it’s from some vaguely important document.
OK , I gotta mole on my back might be a melanoma or just a wart. That’s my neighbor’s problem? Uncle Sam’s? That’s nuts.
I gotta tree down in front of my house. They gotta come chop it up–it’s the general welfare!
My neighbor’s house is burning down. Not my concern though. Or the government’s! Get the government’s hands off my fire departments!
Your neighbors house catches his trees on fire, which burn your house down, so yes. My heart surgery does not hurt you. In terms of controlling the spread of disease (like fire) we have the CDC, health offices in public schools, etc.
Noah: This is the reason you are perceived as irascible. If a melanoma is on my back, it’s on my back; ain’t your problem. The only reason fire departments were started was so my house didn’t catch YOUR house(back when they were all in little quaint villages and proto-cities, the kind you learned about in Howard Zinn’s American history textbook)on fire. This protected the GENERAL welfare.
Logically, yes, it should be. The fact that people are dying should be all of our concern. If your neighbor cannot afford food, your tax dollars subsidize food stamps. The money still winds up in the hands of private food manufacturers, but the government helps them pay. That’s what would go on with this new plan.
When we can, we save people’s lives. Even if that inconveniences us, we do it. That is the American way.
Then Colin, you can’t conceive that the coming “death panels” will indeed be to ration care? I believe they will come in order to force lower the average age of Americans in order to re-capitalize the insolvent, but much-beloved, social security and medicare.
I honestly am starting to really wonder if you are actually a leftist who simply comes here to make a mockery of the right wing. You really are quite a caricature of the right wing. Be careful, if you were more convincing, FOX would offer you a TV show.
The idea that “death panels” are going to determine anything is laughable. And frankly, I’d like to know your thoughts on the insurance companies deciding to deny benefits to people under loopholes in contracts? Aren’t you just asking to be at the mercy of a privately operated death panel?
Yeah, right. I’m a closet leftist that gets off playing right wing chops on a kid’s blog just to get off, like the old blues guys used to dress up and play gospel on Sunday! No, I really believe this stuff, and if you widen you sights and your ears(try The American Spectator, lotsa laughs and real economics for a change, or Reason Magazine), you’d find some of it and you’d like it. We’ve gone too far left; we’re following Great Britain down the rathole of irrelevancy because we’re too damn kind to immigrants, some sort of warped shame complex wrought on by our leftists for crimes we didn’t commit, but for which we have to pay by, well, paying, and playing second fiddle for a century. The left wants its boot on our neck; they’re getting it. And for them it’s all about power. That’s why politics and government are their Gods. No, I’m deadly earnest, no self parody. You’ve been too shielded by the ivory tower. Get out and have some fun with real Americans sometime. They’re nice people. They’ll fix your flat tire for free, some of ‘em, so you don’t have to call AAA. And stop watching Sex and the City. Right now. Rots your brain.
And the death panels you liken to the insurance companies. I find the animus in this simply a distrust of the “profit-earning company” that is inherent in the young and the socialist: why do those people incline to trust the gov’t to do something well, but not a corporation? I don’t get it, never have.
The “death panels” are scarily named by us righties because they are scary: I don’t have to imagine. How did lampshades get made from Jews’ skin in Germany, an otherwise very modern, civilized, technocratic, advanced(good music! try Wagner!)country? It happened because Fascists took over, anti-Christian, who thought their technocratic ways “knew better” than the people. The people largely didn’t know what was going on, or if they did, they thought it was “bigger than them” or “not their problem.” After the liberation of the camps, the big question in the neighborhoods where they were was “How did this go on in our midst and no one did anything?” Fascists are good at calming the people with rationalizations that sound so sweet, but are the product of the Devil, and promulgated by fascists, socialists and dictators. So someone decided in that sick country to make a lampshade out of jewskin, and lots of other depravities.
The Germans are on balance nice, kindly hardworking people.
So are we.
They were mislead.
Just as we are being.
What will prevent the coming commissions, committees, groups of “experts” from understanding their mandate to wring costs out of the system by rationing care: Nothing. They know it’s their job. That’s why we passed this obnoxious thing. So don’t try to snow me with some moral equivalence between the insurance companies and the coming death panels: they’re as different as night and day. I mean this stuff.
I figure it’s gonna kill me one way or another, and by the time it’s your turn, it’ll be real good at killing you so your loved ones don’t even know it happened that way. Lotsa Jews looked away when thier cousin got made a lampshade, too…
Is Glenn Beck secretly poking around The Politicizer?
O&D, just because bad stuff happens in the name of progress doesn’t mean that progress is bad, or, that bad stuff doesn’t happen in the name of tradition or conservatism.
Indeed, many atrocities have been committed in the name of Christianity. Yet I doubt O&D would argue that Christianity is inherently flawed because of those bad eggs.
Oh not again. *Ceasefire on Christianity = Good/Bad debate goes here*
I would!
Colin has the situation correct. For way too many years, the insurance situation has been a travesty. There was no fairness. Try changing jobs with a dependent who has a significant pre existing condition. What happens to your children who graduate college and have no job or a job that does not provide health care. File a claim and get denied, and try to go through the appeal process. Lose your job and struggle to make the outrageous COBRA payments that may be more than unemployment benefits– or chance and go without- and hope a child doesn’t fall out of a tree and break an arm, get appendicitis, need antibiotics that aren’t generic, or live with medical bills that could you bankrupt you. But don’t put those bills on your VISA, your America first Republicans overhauled bankruptcy laws on credit cards so now you can’t even make a fresh start. For those of you who think this law is the end of America, go ahead and work to repeal it, but in the mean time, don’t accept any of its benefits (particularly if you are under 26 and will need your parents health care insurance when you graduate college). A better use of your energy would be to reform the financial (de)regulations.
Yikes, Debra, you got too many problems for me to fix. That’s a lot of bad luck piled up on top of one rickety card table. How in the world, before we started nationalizing every pool of risk, did we ever become the country we are, that dared to take on dictators, hegemonists, genocidal maniacs east, west, north, and south, in the face of those troubles, did we overlook nationalizing the problems that you itemize?
May I submit a rejoinder: your bad luck is your bad luck. I might have some, too. My response might be different: 1)self insure for a while, and wait for my luck to change, 2) visit my local church, and see if there might be some help there, 3) visit a local fraternal organization and see if there might be some help there for me. What wouldn’t occur to me is to visit my local congressman(they used to call them “The Honorable” but I think that form of address is not long for this world) and lobby him/her for WHAT I WANT, to make life easier to bear. Why is it his/her problem? And why does he/her arrive at a solution– to cure your problem by making little slivers of it my problem, and the taxpayer around the corner, and across the country? It’s the lottery solution, the only one they know, and it’s immoral.
What’s interesting is that Conor’s piece brought about a discussion here about what we expect from the body politic, and what we think it owes us. What scares me is that this “Internet generation” thinks it owes them quite a lot.
Dear O&D
So you don’t want to fund health care for the common good of all Americans. Ok. I may not like my federal tax dollars going to build or repair highways and bridges that I will never use (like that bridge in Alaska), federal subsidies for corn based ethanol fuel, elementary school programs that neither I nor my kids will attend, a war I disagree with (pick one from the last 40 years), or federal college loan/grant programs (hey I worked my way through college and law school, so should the rest of you-why should i subsidize your education). But I recognize that funding these programs may not benefit me directly, but does so indirectly because it makes all of us better citizens and a better country– sometimes one needs to improve the common good to improve the good for the individual.
Debra: I agree with you–the definition of ‘the common good” or in other words “the general welfare” has run amock. Now even an ice cream stand in Anchorage gets federal subsidies. They just can’t stop spending, so we might just have to stop paying. When a junkie die of the inevitable overdose, is it his, or his pusher’s, fault? You intertwining of funded programs “related” to me or more distantly “related” to me or unrelated to me presents such a subtle spectrum of diminishing returns to me, I wonder where you permit it to stop. Where does my welfare stop, the common good pick up, and your individual welfare overlap with either of those. Clearly your conception of these overlaps is wider than mine. My original bitch stands: the taxpayer can’t be the insurer of last resort of all of life’s potential bad luck. All of the supporters sound like people lining up for something-for-nothing to me.
The biggest question to me, is what do we do with all the people unemployed as a consequence of this bill? We’re in a nasty recession, and this bill will, unquestionably, increase unemployment–significantly.
In that respect, it’s nothing more than a tax increase during a recession. If nothing else, those who voted for it failed basic macroeconomics.