The Time-Tested Socialist Big Lie Gambit

There are many lies in the Obama - Pelosi - Reid plan to exercise fascist controls over health care insurance and through that mechanism over the entire health care industry. Whether they succeed in getting their "public option" or not, they may get the biggest plum of all, which is the power to set the requirements for what is a legal health insurance plan in the United States. In the effort to do this, Obama has said over and over,

If you like your private health insurance plan, you can keep your plan. Period.

Well, no you cannot. The media has often backed Obama on this assertion, but nothing is further from the truth. This is an overt lie, except in the childish sense in which he can say this in the context of a short period of time. The law does not take effect immediately, so you can keep the insurance you like until then. Or, in some cases you can keep your insurance for up to 5 years. But, most Americans will not be able to keep the insurance they now have into the slightly longer term future. Period. Do not take just my word for this, but read Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute on this here.

According to the House bill HR3200, an approved plan must cover

• hospitalization
  
• outpatient hospital and clinic services
  
• services by physicians and other health professionals
  
• supplies and equipment incidental to their services
• prescription drugs
• rehabilitation services
• mental health
• substance-abuse treatments
• preventive services, a list of which will be determined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force
• maternity, well-baby, and well-child care
• dental, vision, and hearing services for children under 21
• additional requirements set by the Health Benefits Advisory Committee

Now, if you lose your present insurance coverage or significant changes are made to the plan you have now, you will be required to get an approved plan. The onset of this new legislation is going to change the health insurance market so greatly, that it is very unlikely that plans will not have to change significantly, so you cannot count on a unchanged plan for protection.

70% of those now covered by a health insurance plan get that plan through their employer, and all of these plans will have to meet the federal requirement in five years. This means your plan will change. Of course, your plan may also change because the new legislation is predicted to cause as many as 89.5 million workers to lose their coverage from their employer, according to the Lewin Group.

Many others will lose their current plan because it is a high deductible plan. This was the kind of plan I had in the earliest years when I started my business. It was all we could afford for my family at the time, but it served us well under the circumstances. Now, such high deductible plans are often very beneficially combined with Health Savings Accounts, which the new bills will almost eliminate. The new bills do not allow high deductible plans, since they require that 70% of claims be paid by the insurance in the House bill and that 76% be paid by the Senate bill. No deductible or co-pay is allowed at all for preventive care! So, you lose this kind of plan, no matter how well it suits your needs!

Seniors on Medicare can participate in the Medicare advantage program and 10.2 million now do so. This program may be ended by the Obama - Pelosi - Reid bills also.

So, "If you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it" is a blatant socialist lie, in the great tradition of the Big Lie Told Over and Over Again of the fascists and the communists. Besides which, the dedicated socialists define the truth as that which leads to socialism, so they really do not think this is a lie. But, those of us who live in the real world, must recognize this as the cruel and brutal fraud it really is. And we are not the ones who say, "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is." We will leave that otherworldly nonsense to the socialists.

Those of us who recognize our own existence and our own uniquely individual characters and lives, must be adamant in demanding our right to exercise control over our life, most necessarily including our individual control over our personal health.

Richard Rahn - Feel like a chump?

Richard Rahn, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth wrote a hard-hitting commentary in the Washington Times on 22 January 2009 about Federal taxes in this time of huge government bailouts for favored industries, local governments, and other Democrat causes. He asks if we "feel like a Chump?" We should be feeling very much like chumps as these politicians laugh at our gullibility.

He points out that when Congress wants to spend $825 billion on a so-called "stimulus program," which many economists are rightly pointing out is actually a de-stimulus program, Congress and the new administration have some very interesting views on taxation. Among these are:

• Chairman Charles Rangel of the House Ways and Means Committee, which writes tax legislation, did not pay taxes on some of his income, such as rent from Caribbean property.
• Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has repeated said that paying taxes is "voluntary."
• Tim Geithner, the new Treasury Secretary under Obama, failed to pay income taxes for many years, when he worked for the IMF. He then served as the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York while still owing those taxes. [Can you imagine the tax penalties most of us would be assessed over those years if we had not paid taxes we owed?] [Wikipedia presently says he "served as the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and was a small-time tax chiseler."] He now controls the IRS.
• Many Congressional and media defenders of Geithner and Rangel correctly argue that the tax law is complex and some laws are vague and unclear. Rahn notes that, like everyone else, he does not understand how to obey the 65,000 page Internal Revenue Code. So if the well-connected politically do not have to pay their taxes, shouldn't the rest of us be treated equally under the law as required in the Constitution?
• He thinks all Americans should pay the same tax rate and remembers that when Sen. John Kerry ran for president in 2004, his billionaire wife paid a lower tax rate than most Americans did.
• The typical American family of four is paying $132 to subsidize Goldman Sachs and already committed to paying $662 to Citibank, even before Treasury guaranteed $300 billion of additional debt for Citibank.
• The Obama "stimulus" program of an additional $825 billion will cost the American family another $20,000 in taxes and/or losses to inflation.

He concludes, 'Just remember, those members of Congress who vote to tax you and spend your money on "bailouts" and phony "stimulus" may be calling you a "chump" behind your back.'

Coming Federal Land Grab

Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader, intends to pass the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2008 in the lame duck session of Congress. As I recently noted, the federal government already owns ridiculously large amounts of U.S. land. See my post of 17 November 2008. This Omnibus ( I am beginning to associate this word with rampant socialism, as I do the word solidarity.) Public Land Management Act will put further restrictions on property ownership and will make it still harder to explore for oil on American soil. How do they get away with such nonsense?

This lard-filled act will put further controls on privately owned land and property. It will buy up still more land to be added to the more than 650 million acres of land the government already mismanages. The act will put aside land for more wild and scenic rivers, create new heritage areas with property use restrictions, and put more land into wilderness areas, along with about 100 additional land-use restriction programs. It will spend $4 billion on pork-barrel spending projects. Of course, it will also create many jobs for more government bureaucrats and require private citizens to file a blizzard of applications to bureaus and offices simply to use their own land and properties.

Who knows what further attacks upon property are hidden in its more than 1,000 pages? We can be sure that Congress does not know and that the courts will be discovering additional federal powers for decades among its pages.

The removal of more land and resources from productive use and the further empowerment of government is to be dreaded by all who believe in the American concept of the sovereign individual.

Eco Underwear, Vacations, and Housecleaning

Thanks again to Robert Bidinotto's blog, for pointing out an interesting column by Melanie Reid on how women will fare in the Green, Eco-friendly future. Since women are commonly even more enthusiastic supporters of environmentalism than men, Reid points out how their future will change as we live in the poorer and duller world of high environmental conscience. Are you women really looking forward to your hemp sleepwear, the end of energy wasting washing machines, dryers, and dishwashers, carrying your groceries home on the bus, and wasteful skiing vacations? She seems to think that a return to the old ways, which Greens seem to look upon with such nostalgia, means a return to boredom and endless drudgery.

For those of you who enjoy shopping, can you imagine having to take public transportation from one store to the next? Well, look forward to it or start sending a very different message to our politicians who are only too happy to have a looming crisis to address with more government power and more regulations and restrictions.