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Truth be told, a chimpanzee of no particular political persuasion could have scored more votes than either Brown or Coakley in Tuesday’s election.

For all the wild speculation going on in the world of American politics regarding Scott Brown’s surprise victory over Martha Coakley in Tuesday’s Massachusetts special senate election it appears that both the Republicans and the Democrats are struggling in their effort to spin what they clearly do not understand, meanwhile, Scott Brown, the newly elected Republican senator from Massachusetts is looking to inflate the victory to its fullest capacity and avoid the very plain and simple fact that his victory had nothing to do with the fact that he is just another elitist political hack of a different brand.

Many Republicans are claiming that Brown’s victory is a referendum on President Barack Obama. They seem to be operating under the delusional belief that what happened yesterday in Massachusetts was a demonstration of the American people’s anger at the Obama administration and their belief that the Republicans have something better to offer. The Democrats are still in a state of shock, and their preliminary attempts to force a perspective on the situation are still all over the road. Some of them are obviously fearful of having pushed the American voters too far and too fast, some of the more dense liberal legislators have offered the opinion that the people of Massachusetts were demonstrating their impatience with the inability of congress to get the health care bill passed and a few have already decided to turn tail and run in the hope that they can retain enough salvageable image to get re-elected later this year. We have to give them a bit more time than the Republicans; eventually they will get their stories in line, corral the would-be deserters and come out in a more cohesive manner. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were busy early Wednesday morning trying to solidify the liberal’s position on the loss, and before 9:00am they had both made statements to the effect that the Democratic Party has gotten the message from the Massachusetts” voters and that message was not to drop the health care legislation but to hurry up and get it done, a good indication that both of them are a clueless and out of touch as ever.

As far as the health care legislation is concerned, some analysts are now saying they don’t believe it will pass now that Brown has been elected. Many of the potential major beneficiaries of the proposed legislation have seen their stocks take a nosedive this morning as Wall Street reacted to the news. UnitedHealth’s shares dropped 1%, Aetna went down by 0.7%, Humana slipped 2.3%, Tenant Healthcare Corporation dropped 3.3%, Health Management stock fell 2.7%, and the amid the pharmaceutical companies, Novartis AG fell by 0.5%, Merck & Co. dropped by 0.8% and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. lost 0.7%, however, Wall Street is fairly confident that the losses are temporary and has been urging investors to not get too excited. Some of the major investment firms have upgraded the three pharmaceutical companies to a “buy” status while they are down because they are historically strong performers and will recover quickly because of the enormous profit margins they pull in and because they are well connected politically to the current administration and because they have most of the Democrats and Republicans in congress safely tucked away in their back pocket.

Despite the glee of one side and the fear of the other, both have missed the message sent to them by the voters of Massachusetts and that fact is made apparent by the speculative news reports that are falling out of the sky like a heavy winter rain.

Sure, the voters in Massachusetts were pissed off about the health care legislation, but it had nothing to do with the inability to get the job done. The people of Massachusetts already have universal health care coverage so the message was clearly not a referendum on health care.

Comparatively speaking, other than their political affiliation, there is little difference between Martha Coakley and Scott Brown. Coakley would have provided the constituents with the same pathetically disconnected level of representation that Kennedy gave them. In what may be one of the nation’s most politically lackadaisical states, a state whose population pretended not to notice the cloying stench of corruption emanating from Hyannis Port while they put Ted Kennedy in the US Senate nine consecutive times in a row, the people certainly couldn’t hold Martha Coakley in that much disfavor. Actually, until a week or so ago, Coakley was the front runner in the race and Scott Brown was still an underfunded nobody Republican state senator in a historically liberal part of the country. What changed and what, if anything, does it mean?

I honestly can’t speak with any authority for the voters of Massachusetts and I am not going to play the spin game and try to convince you that my opinion holds any particular merit over anybody else’s opinion, but I will say that it could be the result of a few things that seem to be pissing folks off more than usual. The list is long so I’ll just scrape the scabs off of six of them and leave the rest for another day.

1. It could be that because Martha Coakley is your standard shrew-faced evil witch who feels that divine intervention tagged her specifically as the one person on the planet qualified to tell others what they should and shouldn’t do and it is very possible that the voters in Massachusetts feel that they are doing the nation a favor by keeping her home.

2. The lack of support by Coakley’s potential constituents could be related to the role she played as the grand inquisitor in the Amirault witch-hunt. If you can’t abuse your authority by locking up entire families of innocent people what fun is there in holding a high public office?

3. Many of the voters in Massachusetts cast their ballots for Obama in 2008 because they wanted to see the changes he promised. Instead of change they got 12 months of Bush bashing, finger pointing and a heaping dose of more-of-the-same. This could be their way of telling the omnipotent one that he needs to either wake up and smell the coffee or start working on his resume.

4. Having endured Coakley’s embarrassing campaign strategy of lies, character assassination and personal attacks, the voters might have felt that if she needed Obama to come to the state and pull her ugly buns out of a fire she started and then threw herself into, then she wasn’t worth saving.

5. It might be that the people of Massachusetts have began the long painful process of realizing that, like the rest of the American people, they’ve been conned by both political parties and for the time being the best we can do is keep them busy fighting with each other while we figure out how to get rid of them all.

6. There is a distinct possibility that while many people in Massachusetts were willing to buy into some of the liberal’s quirkier characteristics, they did so under the commonly held belief that what the American liberals wanted was in the best interests of the nation as a whole and benefitted the American people. The current leaders of the Democratic National Party and the presidential administration of Barack Obama appear to be going above and beyond what would be considered necessary to prove beyond the shadow of doubt that they want to marginalize the influence of the U.S. by agreeing with the biggest and most out-spoken critics of America’s foreign policy, furthermore, their policy decisions and legislative proposals are exceedingly destructive towards the welfare of the American people. In simple terms, the people of Massachusetts might have been willing to support the DNC’s liberal agenda insofar as it strengthened the nation and benefited the American people, but the current trend is to shove a noticeably Marxist agenda down the throats of everyone and it is very difficult to make that appear beneficial.

While the precise reasoning for Tuesday’s surprising political switch in Massachusetts might be open for debate the relevant facts associated with the outcome of that election are clear and irrefutable. The facts alone speak far louder and with greater accuracy than any of the speculative news articles offering an explanation for Brown’s victory. Clearly, the facts indicate a significant change in the voter’s perception regarding the Democratic Party.

1. After 46 years of supporting the extremely liberal Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy the people of Massachusetts filled that office with a Republican.
2. The Senate seat that Scott Brown won on Tuesday has been in Democratic hands for more than fifty years.
3. Health care reform was the centerpiece of Senator Ted Kennedy’s 46 year long hold on that Massachusetts Senate seat
4. Massachusetts hasn’t elected a Republican senator since 1972.
5. The governor of Massachusetts is a Democrat
6. Both houses of the Massachusetts’ legislature are solidly Democrat
7. Massachusetts’ entire congressional delegation were Democrats (until Tuesday).
8. Two weeks prior to the election Martha Coakley was the undisputed front runner and her outspoken support for health care reform was consistent with Kennedy’s position on the issue.
9. Scott Brown’s primary political stance during his brief campaign was to oppose Obama’s health care reform effort.
10. The people of Massachusetts were very aware of the fact that a victory for Scott Brown would end the Democratic Party’s 60-seat Senate supermajority needed to overcome GOP filibusters and thereby derail the Obama administration’s established legislative priorities.
11. Barack Obama easily won the support of the Massachusetts voters during his 2008 presidential campaign.
12. Massachusetts has only voted Republican for president twice in history and both of these exceptions were overwhelming landslides nationally.
13. In Massachusetts the Democrats outnumber Republicans 3-to-1.
14. Tuesday’s special election in Massachusetts marked the first inaugural anniversary of Barack Obama.

If there is one clear and significant message for the Democrats from Tuesday’s upset that message would be,

“Warning!  Extreme danger ahead,  Proceed at your own risk.”

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According to a report on Fox News, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has indicated that the senate health care reform bill currently under consideration would increase the insurance premiums for people not currently covered under an employer based health plan, and for the majority of those who are currently covered under an employer offered health care plan, the price will go up. The Congressional Budget Office also stated in their report that if the senate reform measure passes, by 2016 the premiums for health insurance can be expected to rise by as much as 13 percent.

At this point it appears that the only people who will benefit from health care reform are the insurance companies who will get to sell more insurance policies and charge a higher price for doing it, and the extremely impoverished people who have no insurance coverage and will be treated to a government subsidized insurance policy at the expense of the American taxpayers. The rest of the nation is getting screwed at least twice and in some cases, three of four times. The first time is the increase in the cost of your own health care insurance premium and the second time is for the increase in taxes to pay for the health care of those who receive government subsidized policies. The elderly on Medicare will get an additional screwing by having their benefits slashed and I forgot to mention the fact that we are getting screwed by simple fact that the quality of health care in the USA will drop through the floor. Private practice doctors, the hub of the American health care industry, will get screwed so many times over that they might as well start dressing like hookers. Not only will their insurance rates and their income taxes go up but they will be getting less for each patient they take care of, plus they get the added benefit of having to fill out tons of new government documents for every patient, as well as the cost of having to hire additional personnel to fill out all the new forms. Meshing their current office software with the new government system and forms will undoubtedly be another cost that doctors and hospitals will have to face, because the government is fairly insistent about be able to access all of the accumulated personal data now stashed away in those fat manila folders.

As the Democratic National Party’s candidate for the office of President, Barack Obama repeatedly promised the American people that lobbyists would no longer run the American government. However, that was before he took office and it was certainly long before the DNC pinned their hopes for the future on the proposed Health Care Reform Act. Six months following the start of the health care reform debate the Obama administration reluctantly released the list of major players who have purchased ring-side seats in the formative discussions taking place behind closed doors regarding the proposed reform measures. While this is merely a partial listing it is still nice to know at least some of the people who are making the decisions that will affect the American people in such a significant manner as health care reform will undoubtedly do. The list includes the insurance companies that are looking out for themselves, the pharmaceutical industry which is there to ensure that their profits will not be affected, the labor movement is there simply because wherever you find dogs you find fleas, The AARP and the AMA are there to sell out their members for whatever they can get out of it and a whole slew of lobbyists are there to look out for the best interests of the companies that pay them. From the looks of the list the only people not being effectively represented are the American tax payers who will foot the bill for the mess once the U.S. Congress shoves it down our throats.

George Halvorson, chairman and CEO of Kaiser Health Plans

Richard Umbdenstock, chief of the American Hospital Association

Laird Burnett, a top lobbyist for insurer Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc.

Scott Serota, president and CEO of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association

Kenneth Kies, a Washington lobbyist who represents Blue Cross/Blue Shield

Billy Tauzin, head of PhRMA the drug industry lobby

Merck & Co. Inc. chief executive, Richard Clark, and a vice president, Richard Pasternak, along with in-house lobbyist Jane Horvath and Jonathan Hoganson, a lobbyist representing both Merck as well as PhRMA, the drug industry’s major trade association

Amador “Dean” Aguillen, former aide to Nancy Pelosi, turned lobbyist for pharmaceutical companies SanofiPasteur and Takeda Pharmaceuticals America, Pfizer Inc., and Amgen USA Inc.

Joseph Swedish, Trinity Health’s chief executive

Joshua Ackil, a lobbyist for U.S. Oncology Inc.

Joel Johnson, a lobbyist for United Healthcare Services Inc. and Kinetic Concepts Inc., a medical products maker

John Sweeney, former president of the AFL-CIO, and Gerald McEntee of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and their top lobbyists, Bill Samuel and Chuck Loveless

Richard Trachtman, Lobbyist for the American College of Physician Services Inc.

Dr. J. James Rohack, the AMA’s president and Richard Deem, the AMA’s top lobbyist

Barry Rand, the AARP’s chief executive, and top lobbyists, John Rother, Nancy LeaMond and David Sloane

At this point is anybody’s guess what sort of a truly bizarre nightmare the Democrat’s health care reform act will stir up. We are, after all talking about a government that can’t effectively place an order for a sufficient amount of swine flu vaccine to inoculate every American citizen. This is the same American government that created the Department of Education and sent our public school system into a fifty year downward spiral that has culminated in the dumbest generation of American teenagers in the history of the nation, and it is the same government that has largely banned drilling for oil anywhere in the U.S. and then needs an investigation to find out why we have become so dependent on foreign oil. How anyone in this country could come to the conclusion that government run health care would benefit the American people is simply beyond my wildest imagination. Then again, there may not be any American citizens worth talking about outside of the U.S. Congress that actually support the Democrat’s health care reform measures. A July 2009 Rasmussen poll indicated that just 28 percent of voters strongly approve of the way that the President is doing his job and the approval rating for the U.S. Congress is so low that it isn’t even worth looking at. Practically the entire country thinks we’re headed off on a wild tangent and nobody appears to be at the helm of this ship. The Democrats keep inventing one crisis after another and using them as excuses to spend huge sums of money that we don’t have and there is no accountability anywhere.

Make no mistake about it, the Democrats have far too much invested in health care reform to walk away, they’ve cut too many deals with all the big players, the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, the AMA, the AARP and the in-bred union leaders to back off now. They are going to pass something even if they know it is going to be a disaster, after all, they can always find somebody else to blame it on later. Between now and 2010 the Democrats are going to pass all sorts of legislation in the attempt to ensure their own job security. Health care reform will be the first of many and you can bet that amnesty for the nation’s 40 million illegal aliens will be right behind it.

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The American news media has broadcast the message across the nation that the Democratic push to shove the Affordable Health Care for America Act down the throats of the American people has the full endorsement of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), and one good example of the Democratic Party’s message is available online at “The Hill” in the article written by Jeffery Young that was published on November 5th. That article was entitled “AARP endorses House healthcare reform bill,” and it quotes the press conference statement of Barry Rand, CEO of AARP, as saying, “AARP is proud to endorse the Affordable Health Care for America Act. We urge members of the House to pass this critical bill this year so our healthcare system can work for all of us. This bill includes critical priorities for seniors – critical – ensures quality, affordable health coverage options for all Americans, provides and strengthens Medicare for today’s seniors and future generations and puts us on a path to improving our long-term health system.”

That is all well and good for Mr. Rand, but the article itself is misleading and much of what it has left out is more relevant to the issue at hand than the content written by Jeffery Young. The Affordable Health Care for America Act will cut $400 million from Medicare spending in order to help pay for the cost of the legislation’s initial implementation. That $400 million cut in Medicare spending will have a significantly adverse impact on American senior citizens, many of whom are AARP members, and it seems a wee bit odd that an organization purported to represent the interests of senior citizens would endorse a legislative act that will directly cause their members so much harm.

Inconsistencies such as this have always perked my interest and sparked the urge to research the causes behind them, however, his particular inconsistency proved to be less challenging than most and it didn’t take much work to ferret out the AARP’s justification for endorsing a legislative act that will create nothing but hardship for so many of their senior citizen members. In case your attention span is short, or you are easily bored with my rambling style of writing I will give you the short answer up front and then add the details. The AARP’s endorsement of The Affordable Health Care for America Act is motivated entirely by their own self-serving greed which has obviously overpowered the organization’s dedication to serving the best interests of the American senior citizens they have falsely sworn to faithfully represent. That is the most succinct summarization of what I have discovered and if you want the fact and the background behind that conclusion you will just have to bear with me and read on.

Jeffery Young’s brief article published in “The Hill” tells us what the AARP’s CEO had to say with respect to the AARP endorsement in the first paragraph. The remainder of the article is a liberally slanted description of a portion of opposition viewpoints presented out of context in an unflattering light, furthermore, these opposing viewpoints are presented in a manner designed to lead the reader to the conclusion that the AARP’s endorsement is somehow connected to the prior acts of those who now stand in opposition to the Democrat’s heath care reform legislation. By putting the statement’s of the opponents back into their proper context and eliminating the liberal slant of the author who is obviously an ardent supporter of all things dreamed up by the socialist leaning Democrats, it can be safely assumed that the only relevant part of Jeffery Young’s article is the first paragraph and the rest of it amounts to nothing more than trashy Democratic propaganda.

All things considered, there is more to be learned from the comment section appended to Jeffery Young’s article than there is in the article itself. At 7:14 am PST, four days following the publication of Young’s article, his “news” item had accumulated 40 comments. Of the 40 comments attributed to the article, three were somewhat vague and the author failed to make a clear statement regarding whether or not they supported or opposed the legislative proposal. Six of the comments submitted were by individuals who were obviously in favor of the Democrat’s proposed legislation, hook, line and sinker, however, none of the individuals who penned these six comments appeared to be senior citizens or members of the AARP. Thirty-one of the comments, the majority of which were made by individuals who admitted to being senior citizens, and either are current AARP members or have recently quit the organization as a direct result of AARP’s endorsement, were adamantly opposed to the Democratic Party’s proposed Affordable Health Care for America Act, and clearly expressed their outrage toward the AARP for endorsing a legislative act that will adversely impact the senior citizens who make up the organization’s membership. If you considered the 40 comments as an independent poll expressing the will of the readers, 7.5% were unsure what their position was on the legislation, 15% were in favor of the Democratic proposal for health care reform, and 77.5% were very opposed to the Democratic proposal and obviously so pissed off by the AARP’s endorsement that they have already severed their relationship with the organization or intend to not renew their membership in the future. In short, the comments appended to Jeffery Young’s article are a lot more relevant to the views of American senior citizens regarding the proposed health care reform act than Jeffery Young’s article.

The Chicago-Tribune published an article on November 5th by Grace-Marie Turner, president and founder of the Galen Institute, ( the Galen Institute is partially funded by the pharmaceutical and medical industries), with respect to the AARP’s motivation for endorsing the Democratic Party’s health care reform proposal. Grace-Marie Turner points out that the AARP takes in more than 50% of its annual budget in royalties paid to the organization by health insurance companies and other vendors who market services using the AARP name and logo. The largest percentage of the AARP’s royalties comes from health care insurers offering Medi-gap insurance plans to AARP members. Medi-gap insurance policies are insurance policies that cover the difference between what Medicare allows in payment to a health care provider for a given service and what the patient is charged for the service rendered. For many senior citizens, people who are living on a fixed income and who can ill afford to pay these additional costs, Medi-gap coverage is a necessity. The more AARP members purchasing Medi-gap insurance through AARP vendor insurance companies, the larger the royalties paid to AARP become  so the organization directly benefits financially by selling these Medi-gap policies to it’s membership. However, in 2003, under the administration of George W. Bush, Medicare began offering senior citizens a new Medicare option called Medicare Advantage, and that plan eliminates the need for Medi-gap coverage. The growing popularity of Medicare Advantage has hindered the AARP’s ability to sell Medi-gap coverage and reduced the amount of royalties the AARP earns from the insurance vendor offering Medi-gap. Inasmuch as the royalties the AARP derives from the sale of Medi-gap coverage is greater than the total amount of income they receive from the accumulated annual dues of the organization’s membership, it is easy to see why the AARP is concerned about the loss of income. However, the Democratic Party, always quick to see an opportunity when one arises, offered to help the AARP out of it’s growing financial predicament by incorporating a provision in their Affordable Health Care for America Act that cuts the budget of Medicare Advantage by $150 billion. By drastically cutting the Medicare Advantage budget fewer senior citizens will be able to take advantage of this existing plan and be forced to rely on the Medi-gap coverage plan sold by the AARP affiliated insurance vendor. Ultimately this cut in the Medicare Advantage budget will not only restore the AARP’s royalties to their former level, it will significantly increase the sales of Medi-gap coverage plans as well as the royalties paid to the AARP. By cutting Medicare coverage by $400 billion and by reducing the budget of Medicare Advantage by $150 billion, the senior citizen’s need for Medi-gap coverage will be significantly increased and the AARP will reap a financial windfall as a direct result despite the hardship caused to the senior citizens the organization allegedly represents. The provision to cut $150 billion from the Medicare Advantage budget and $400 billion from Medicare will result in greater overall revenue for the AARP by increasing the amount of royalties they earn from the insurance companies affiliated with them who offer Medi-gap coverage and that increase in the AARP’s potential future revenue was the price the Democratic Party paid for the AARP endorsement.

Needless to say, if the AARP honestly represented the best interests of America’s senior citizens who make up the groups membership, the AARP would have strongly opposed the cuts in Medicare spending and the reduction of the Medicare Advantage budget. If the AARP had any sense of integrity it would have intensified its lobbying efforts against the cuts and insisted the money to finance Obamacare be found somewhere other than peeling it off the backs of this nation’s senior citizens. However, as they have aptly demonstrated, the AARP has neither the honesty nor the integrity to represent the best interests of American senior citizens when the organization stands to greatly increase its annual revenues at the direct expense of the people they purport to represent.

Clearly, the best interests of the estimated 40 million seniors that the AARP purportedly represents are not being served by the organization that has sold them out to the Democratic Party’s agenda for cramming Obamacare down the throats of the American people at any cost, and the tens of thousands of American senior citizens that have expressed their outrage at the AARP’s endorsement by cutting up their AARP membership cards, withdrawing their support, severing their AARP membership, and shredding the AARP renewal applications are a good indication that the American Association of Retired Persons can endorse Obamacare all they want, but the truth of the matter is, that the AARP endorsement was bought and paid for by the Democratic Party, and it is less an endorsement of the Democrat’s agenda than a validation of the AARP’s greed. The Democratic Party is willing to adversely add to the burden of those who can afford it the least in order to further their destructive health care legislation and increase their socialistic agenda to the detriment of this nation. The AARP endorsement is an obvious demonstration of that organization’s truly shallow depth of character because that organization has consciously chosen to succumb to the temptation of greed rather than do what is right for the best interests of their membership.

Clearly the Democratic Party’s willingness to do anything necessary to further their agenda, regardless of the dishonesty or lack of ethical considerations involved, in combination with the AARP’s blatant demonstration of self-serving greed and their willingness to sacrifice the welfare of their members to increase their own financial gain serves as a glaring beacon of warning to all American citizens regarding the proposed Affordable Health Care for America Act. Dishonesty, unethical strategies, propaganda, the dissemination of blatant lies through the liberal media, and secret deals cut behind closed door meetings are not the characteristics of proposed legislation intended by honest representatives working to benefit the American people.

As Americans, we are all intelligent enough to comprehend that, in the silence of our hearts, honesty, like truth, is always apparent. If you have the capacity to put politics and partisanship aside for one minute and listen to the voice of reason speaking from your heart instead of incessant babbling of politicians and news casters trying to convince you one way or the other, you will instantly know that we are being played as suckers by both sides of this debate. There is more going on with this health care reform fight than we are being told by either side. The “benefits” of both parties’ proposals are not intended for the American people. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have any interest in providing the American people with anything that can be even remotely seen as beneficial in terms of increasing the quality of the health care we receive or making that health care more affordable and accessible to everyone. The blunt truth is that we the people are not being represented in this debate. The large corporations that provide medical insurance will reap most of the benefit along with their investors, organizations like the AARP will benefit by association with insurance companies who pay them royalties for the use of their name, the political party that successfully pushes their proposal through to become law will benefit by the increase in their political clout, and the myriad supporters of that political party will gain headway by that party’s success, but the American people will not benefit. In fact the American people will be made to suffer the consequences of either party’s success because both health care reform proposals will result in higher taxes and neither of the two party’s proposals guarantees lower insurance rates and better health care. As a staunch advocate for the Democratic Party or an equally staunch advocate for the Republican Party it is easy to come up with multiple justifications for supporting one side over the other but either way, it is entirely impossible to clearly indicate exactly how either proposal will benefit the American people because the fact of the matter is that they do not. As a unified whole, putting partisan politics aside and viewing the matter from the perspective of the free American people, it simply makes no sense at all to support any legislation that will further increase our tax burden, fail to reduce the high cost of health care, fail to improve the quality of our health care and provide greater financial gain to incredibly wealthy corporations, their investors and others, and do so at our expense. Inasmuch as neither political party is willing or capable of representing the best interests of the American people as a whole the most intelligent course of action for all American citizens is to enthusiastically oppose any form of health care reform legislation currently being debated in the U.S. Congress.

Our nation will not dissolve if health care legislation is not passed. The so-called “health care crisis” is a situation that has developed over a period of decades as a result of poor previous legislation and lack of law enforcement. When the professional politicians in Washington D.C. have been eliminated and replaced by people who will honestly represent the best interests of the American people instead of the best interests of the people and groups that contributed the most to their campaign funds, then it might be time to revisit the problem of health care, until that time we the people of the United States of America need to resist every legislative act proposed regardless of how dire the need or great the benefits according to what our news media reports tell us.

Sidenote:
For those interested, an alternative to the AARP exists in the American Senior’s Association. The ASA is a new association for American senior citizens and while it is not nearly as large as the AARP it does offer some of the same benefits provided by the AARP without the political backstabbing. I have not thoroughly checked out the organization since I just discovered their existence today, but since I have declined to renew my membership in the AARP this year I will probably be looking at the ASA as an alternative. In my opinion, being represented honestly by a small group is much better than being misrepresented by a large group.

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D. Michael Langford, the current President of the national Utility Workers Union of America (UWUA) perfectly sums up the AFL-CIO stance on the entire issue of health care reform as it currently stands in relation to the Democratic National Party. In the current quarterly edition of the “The Utility Worker,” the official magazine of UWUA’s National organization, UWUA National President Langford speaking to his more than 50,000 members on the issue of health care reform made the revealing statement, “The stakes are high. If national healthcare legislation is not passed, the President and the Democratic Congress will be weakened. This will directly affect us because, as a result, we will not be able to get other key bills that we support through Congress. The Employee Free Choice Act will go down to defeat, emboldening anti-union employers and making it that much harder to bring the benefits of a union contract to others.”

Initially, when the quarterly issue of “The Utility Worker” arrives in my mailbox, I will disengage it from the stack of mail with two fingers as though it were a rag used for cleaning chamber pots in some nasty disease-ridden infectious ward Hell’s most nightmarish hospital and deposit it in the black trash receptacle; the one meant for unrecyclable items of no redeeming value, things that are not even fit for the sludgy stench filled compost bin where I throw the worm & maggot ridden husks of rotten zucchinis found in my backyard garden. If I had prior warning of its arrival I would probably adorn a Tyvek suit, rubber gloves and face mask.  Okay, maybe I am exaggerating here, exercising my weird sense of literary license, and needlessly babbling. If you so desire you may consider this entire paragraph a demonstration of mentally aberrant multi-tasking. The magazine is not that loathsome, sometimes I even read parts of it, and before the Los Angeles trash police bust down my door to check, it is always quickly discarded in the appropriate blue recycling bin. In fact, the most recent issue went into the recycling bin so quickly that I didn’t have time to clip out Langford’s most memorable comment. I had to go online to find the article because the copy sent to was hauled off last Saturday in a big truck driven by someone who probably gets his own version of the same ridiculous propaganda sent to his house by a completely different, but entirely similar labor organization spreading identical absurdities to unwary union members who really ought to stop and consider the destination that lies at the end of the path their current labor leaders have chosen for them.

MY BACKGROUND AS A RADICAL UNION OFFICER
Before going any farther down this path I must first back and explain why the quarterly Utility Worker magazine finds its way to my mailbox. The short version of the explanation is that I was a full-fledged member-in-good standing of UWUA for nearly 25 years. The broader version includes the fact that I served one of their numerous Local offices as a member of the Executive Board, the group’s financial secretary, vice president, and briefly, as the president of the local. I was also the organization’s primary communication’s officer, an active member of most of Local’s negotiating teams, the most rapacious, combative and effective union steward they ever had, and served the organization faithfully as its representative in a large number of legal proceedings, including arbitration hearings, unemployment appeals, official inquires with the Labor Departments in two different states where we represented employees and I served as the Local’s only official intervener in the permitting process hearings held by the California State Energy Commission where my primary directive was to create as much havoc and chaos possible for the union-resistant corporations trying to push their way through the complex and expensive permitting process without paying respectful homage to our Local’s attempts to organize their employees, most of whom were former members displaced during California’s electrical restructuring.

As a brief digression I should point out that California’s Electrical De-regulation, an effort that began during the mid 1990′s was a legislative charade made possible only as a result of the state’s largest utility company’s willingness to bribe, buy and blackmail the state and local elected representatives of at least 12 different states along with a good many federal representatives who were willing to look the other way if their pockets were properly lined with cash and campaign donations. At the time when the state’s deregulation bill became law, it was recorded in the news media as the single most expensive lobbying effort in the entire history of American politics. The inept legislation that was written primarily by the states three largest utility companies for their own financial gain created total chaos and confusion and resulted in massive rolling blackouts across the state in 2000 and 2001. It entirely failed to reduce the price of electricity to California consumers and made numerous electrical generation companies wealthier than they ever dreamed possible by creating a legion of loopholes and game plans they alone could manipulate to their lucrative advantage. It also resulted in the unemployment of thousands of utility company employees across the state by closing down, dismantling and selling off generating assets to out-of-state exploiters who were more than willing to hire many of those former employees at half their previous scale, no appreciable health care benefits and no union representation to muddle up the works. Ten years after the deregulation bill was passed in California the state still suffers from constantly increasing rates, periodic blackouts, and less generation capacity than they need to meet the demands of their constantly growing population. The promises made to the consumers have been long forgotten and the utility companies that bought and paid for the entire travesty deny any involvement as they use their ill-gotten windfall to purchase electrical assets in distant states, other countries and continue to sap California’s consumers for all they can.

I should also point out, by way of explanation, that I considered my personal involvement with UWUA as being the oddest of all possible relationships. As an individual I have always maintained a personal philosophy of self-reliant independence and encouraged other to do likewise. The “union” was something we, as employees, were forced to pay dues to, but in reality provided little of any real value in return. The management of the Company we worked for was uncharacteristically draconian with respect to their union represented employees. Punishments for real and imagined infractions were severe and often unwarranted, and for many years I watched silently as incompetent supervisors and management personnel beat their subordinates into submission with a strategy they referred to as “progressive discipline.” Progressive Discipline is a euphemism for harassing helpless individuals into corners where they can be emotionally and physically tortured by psychologically damaged supervisors for the sheer enjoyment of causing pain. It is a painful thing to watch. Especially when it was initiated by one or more management personnel who are completely incompetent and were promoted to positions of authority by friends and relatives who are similarly incompetent and sadistic, and their frantic victim’s panic filled eyes grow increasingly fearful with the realization that escape is impossible and ultimately their termination is inevitable. After watching this game go on before me for about ten years or so something inside me cracked. I could no longer quietly stand by and watch, and I was possessed with the determination to turn the playing field completely over. The management of the department where I was working had recently eliminated the Union Steward with a series of threats and actions that resulted in his sudden retirement and the only person who was willing to step up to the job was a blustery fat-assed moron who spent most of his time with his face buried neck deep in the backside of the nearest boss. To the great surprise of many, I decided to run against him, and during the Friday election, I won the position in a near unanimous and entirely surprising landslide. As far as the Local Union and the Company were concerned, I was a completely unknown quantity. From the time I got home that Friday until very late Sunday night, I sat before my Computer scanning and reading everything I could find about Labor Unions, labor law, the legal rights of union stewards as representatives, contract law and every document that I had in my possession concerning our particular labor organization. I learned some important and surprising things. I learned that a union steward while in the performance of the obligations of his or her office is considered by state and federal law as being on equal footing with any management person that steward is dealing with, furthermore, I learned that there are ways to force the officers of the local to support the actions of a steward so long as those actions are consistent with the local union’s constitution and working agreement. The situation I had voluntarily thrown myself into was one that I knew this information would prove vital. The first thing on the Monday morning following my election I was approached by my immediate supervisor and told to report to the manager’s office. I went there and knocked on the closed door, heard the summons to enter and walked in to find myself facing not only the manager himself but his entire complement of most trusted management thugs. With every eye fixed on me with extreme malice I was directed to a take my place in a chair that had been strategically placed by itself directly across from where they sat. I walked to the chair, their idea of the “Hot Seat,” picked it up and moved it directly in front of them so I could sit toe to toe with the entire crowd, and before they could say anything at all to me I calmly announced to the assemblage that it was now a new day and things were going to change forever after. Despite the snorts of outrage and attempted interruptions I spoke over them as I firmly stated that from this point forward I was the duly elected representative of the their employees as provided under the labor agreement they, as management were obligated to honor and that my expectation was that all employees would be treated with courtesy and respect by their supervisors and that each of them would be afforded their full rights under the provisions of the union agreement and under the applicable provisions of state and federal law. I concluded my brief statement with the fact that I would hold everyone of them accountable for their actions, that I would prosecute to the fullest extent and the best of my ability every infraction of the contractual provisions, that I would not hesitate to use any available resource within the company or through state and federal departments to protect the employees that had voted for me and to enforce the provisions of the union contract. I got up turned around, picked up the chair carried it across the room and set it in it’s original position, walked out of the room and closed the door behind me and throughout the entire five minute period introduction, not one of them completed a full sentence and they sat in stunned silence as I left the office and returned to my job site where I did some deep breathing to settle my mind around the events that had just taken place. Amazingly enough, the remainder of the day passed without comment from anyone in management as I quietly went about my job as usual. The following day I was summoned into the office and told to report to the Union office for new steward training. Not a problem. I closed up my toolbox, hopped into my truck and drove over to the union office about ten miles from the shop where I worked. I was somewhat surprised to discover that I was the only new steward being trained and I suspect that it was quietly arranged the following Friday by a manager who wanted me to be bound, gagged, and drown in the nearest river as soon as possible and certainly before I could start any problems. Having been in this Local for about ten years I already knew that most of the officers were not worth a tinker’s damn and expected the worse. As it turned out, the training was conducted by the newly elected Vice-President of the local. His campaign for office was not supported by the Business Manager who considered him to be far too radical and the training he gave me that day, while brief, encouraged rather than discouraged my intended goal. I maintained my position as the chief steward for that facility until I transferred to another department. My primary operational philosophy was that the Union existed solely to serve the needs of the members. The members were the first priority, the Local was second and as far as the National Organization was considered, I could care less. On numerous occasions I would contradict the National’s political recommendations and when I was given pamphlets or circulars to hand out from the National Office regarding their recommendations during federal elections they normally ended up in the trash. Despite being a wild card, I prospered as a steward because I was persistent and willing to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week to get something accomplished. I dedicated a lot of my time in that shop to organizing the represented employees into a solid, cohesive force, and despite the contractual provision prohibiting the solicitation of grievances by stewards, I routinely badgered the members into joining the fight for our common good. I adopted the management strategy of progressive discipline and used it against the supervisors. Their first violation of the union contract earned them a grievance, their second violation earned them four or five grievances, if they continued to harass and abuse their subordinates I would normally approach them in private, discuss my perception of their inappropriate behavior and let them know in clear and specific terms that I was more than willing to dedicating the rest of my life making them as completely miserable as I possibly could. Most of them had never dealt with a steward who was capable of standing up to them and 96% of them fell into line to the best of their ability. Every time I filed a grievance, the supervisor who received it had the obligation of responding to it in writing. These were not overly intelligent people and it took a lot of their time to respond. The more grievances I filled the more time it took for them to respond and the less we had to see of them. As for the 4% who refused to fall into line, I inundated them in grievances, sometimes hundreds of them all served at once. Our contract had a three step grievance process and I advanced every grievance where the response did not meet my expectations to the second step so I could debate the issue at hand with the supervisor’s boss. Economically, the continually escalating war with management became an obvious drain on their budget and everyone in management had to spend all of their time writing responses to the grievances I had filed. After about a year of unrelenting siege warfare they caved in. During the first three or four years as the chief steward for that shop I managed to get one general foreman and a new manager terminated from the company and I got three supervisors reassigned to jobs in other areas of the company. The supervisors learned to come to me before approaching a represented employee about a problem. I would do what I could to straighten the situation out, resolve the issue and get the guy back on track. Usually this was a very successful strategy. If I met with resistance, or the employee continued his errant ways, I would get approach them in a more forceful manner, explain that their job was in jeopardy and immediate changes were required. It usually worked well. On the few occasions where it didn’t work I would go back to the guy’s supervisor and tell him the truth. A slacker hurts everyone else and the Union Contract worked both ways, the represented employees agreed to abide by specific rules laid out in the agreement and the company agreed to pay them a specific wage and provide them with excellent benefits in exchange for their compliance. Union members who violated the agreement damaged the credibility of the entire membership and if I couldn’t get them to change their ways I was willing to personally throw them to the wolves myself. In any business or endeavor, credibility means everything and if you lose it you lose everything. I viewed my job as a steward as an obligation to enforce the union contract, the side that provided protection, compensation and benefit to the represented membership as well as the side that required compliance with the Company’s rules and guidelines. Needless to say, I made a lot of friends and enemies on both sides but I maintained my credibility and advanced through the leadership positions in the Local to become President.

Along the lengthy path to becoming the president of that Local I learned quite a few things about the Labor Movement, Labor Organizations and their numerous affiliations, labor strategy and the development of organized labor’s agendas that I did not agree with. At first I did my best to ignore most of these objectionable practices but ultimately the accumulation of dishonesty that pervades organized labor as a whole undermined my perception of organized labor as a credible and worthwhile cause. The practice of forcing non-members or “Agency Members” to pay dues while the organization treated them as if they were scabs is something I can never condone. The fact that Agency Members are legally entitled to reimbursement for all dues not used to directly benefit them is something they are not advised of and most Local unions force the Agency members to jump through impossible hoops before their “representative” relinquishes only the minimal percentage they determine appropriate. The formation of Union political action committees and the solicitation of funds for what amounts to outright bribery of public officials is another thing that I find completely distasteful. PACS undermine the honest operation of government by currying favor with elected representatives. Most Local union spend in excess of 85% of their yearly dues collection on the bribery of public officials, additionally, every local sends a portion of its monthly dues to the Nation organization to pay the wages and expenses of moronic labor leaders like the character mentioned in the first paragraph of this posting, and a good portion of the money left over is used to bribe the elected representatives in Washington. 99.9% of the member’s dues money used to curry favor with politicians goes directly to the Democratic national Party and its candidates despite the fact that more than 40% of the Union members in this country are registered Republicans or Independents. The spending of a Local’s PAC money is not determined by the membership who fills their treasury. It is determined by the Local leadership and the National officers. The rank and file members have no say in the matter regardless of their personal political affiliation and 40% of them are forced to pay support to candidates they would never vote for. The National labor organizations know all the tricks and loopholes in the system and they are extremely proficient at getting the money to the politician by one means or another. The AFL-CIO and its affiliate unions are the single largest money laundering system in the United States today and the sole purpose for their existence is to funnel their accumulation of member’s dues money into the Democratic National Party to fund campaigns for Democratic candidates and finance advertising campaigns supporting legislation that will ultimately affect the members of those labor groups in a variety of adverse ways. In 2001 I formally challenged the Local for the dishonesty of many of its top officers. I realized at the time that it would be the end of my union career but I did it anyway because it was the right and honest thing to do. The charges I filed were investigated by a committee made up of individuals selected by those I had charged with improprieties and quite naturally they ascertained that my charges were without merit. I remained in office for the remainder of my term despite the organized effort to destroy my character and undermine everything I had accomplished. When I appealed to the National for assistance, I was faced with massive amounts of entirely fabricated documentation regarding numerous unfounded allegations. Despite proving each of them to be without substance, the National refused to assist me. The final straw came a few months after I left office when the Executive Board voted unanimously to drop a termination grievance against a member who was irrefutably not guilty of the charge against him. At that point I became an Agency fee member of the same Local I had served for so many years and much to their dismay, I continued to send out weekly letters to the union membership enlightening them in well substantiated detail how they were being shafted by a group that was unwilling to represent them according to the agreements that remained in effect. During the last two years of my employment, prior to my retirement as an agency member, the number of members in that Local dropped from 2300 to around 840. Unfortunately, after witnessing the character assassination of a former President of the Local, there was nobody left in that Local with the stamina and tenacity to fight the leadership and at this point in time what remains is a toothless ineffective operation led by a few self-serving clods who spend the majority of their time pillaging the Local’s treasury with padded expenses while investing their ill-gotten money in business ventures in Baja-California where they hope the IRS will never look. I am not bitter about the way things ended for me, I didn’t like what I saw going on, spoke out against it and got tarred a feathered for my efforts. Realistically it was the best thing that had happened to me in years because it gave me the freedom to speak out without being subject to the Local’s disciplinary process. As an agency fee member the union couldn’t touch me. The leadership that came after were all idiots, and not only are they still there, but they are still idiots. Eventually, if their own member’s don’t turn on them first, the company their members work for will squash them like the bugs they are.

Labor Organizing & The Transformation of Labor Philosophy

UWUA President Langford’s statement is hardly an endorsement for Obamacare. He is smart enough and has intelligent advisors who have undoubtedly told him that the passage of the Democrat’s health care reform measure will result in lower quality care and higher taxes for his membership. Despite the fact that he knows this is true, he is willing to tell his members that they must see this bill pass, not because it is a good thing or that it will benefit them in some small way but because if it doesn’t pass it could weaken the Democratic Party and destroy their ability to get the Employee Free Choice Act passed later. The AFL-CIO desperately wants the Employee Free Choice Act to pass because it will give them the upper hand necessary to force companies to allow union organizers to intimidate their employees into joining unions they don’t want to join. It destroys the secret ballot requirement that has effectively allowed employees to resist union intimidation for the last fifty years and without those secret ballot elections the Unions can steamroll companies easily by sending their best, biggest and most slow-witted organizers out to pound on the doors of prospective members while they are at home with their families and extract the necessary signature from them by threat, harassment and intimidation. Every Local will deny that they resort to these tactics but that is a bald-faced lie. I have seen it myself and I know that these strategies are routinely employed by most locals during organizing campaigns. UWUA used these strategies against the employees of Redondo Beach Generating Station during their failed attempt to organize that facility after it was sold to the anti-union company AES. The employees most resistant to their efforts received a late nigh visit from a group of organizers that included one bearded character that was nearly seven feet tall, weighed in around 400 pounds and was previously employed as a bar room bouncer in one of the shadier nightclubs of Laughlin, Nevada. The locals ability to get their cards signed was uncanny, nearly every AES employee approached signed whether they wanted to or not but during the secret ballot election overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, those employees voted overwhelmingly to reject the union. It wasn’t the closed door meeting with management that convinced them to vote against union representation. The dishonest approach of the organizers was sufficient to convince them that any affiliation with an organization that would stoop to those strategies was not going to be beneficial. The AFL-CIO sees those secret ballot elections as an impediment to their ability to gain more money for the Democratic National party and that is the reason why the Democrats and the Unions support it. It has nothing to do with what is best for American workers, its all about more money for the Democrats and more political power for the Unions. UWUA President Langford doesn’t give a rat’s ass about how the Democrat’s health care reform measure creates unwarranted hardship on his own members, he doesn’t care about the fact that it will raise their taxes, provide them with lower quality health care and restrict their access to medical procedures that are necessary to save the lives of their wives and children, he doesn’t care about any of these things because he wants the Democratic National Party to remain powerful enough to pass the Employee Free Choice Act that they promised the Unions they would pass when those unions turned over untold and untraceable billions of dues dollars during the last presidential election. The employee free choice act is nothing more than the Democrat’s way of saying thanks for the billions of dollars you gave us. It will increase the political power of the labor unions and ensure the steady supply of dues money flowing endlessly into the coffers of the DNC for years to come. As for the American workers, the employee free choice act will destroy the long standing practice of providing them with an unimpeded Democratic election, it will take away their right to express their true desire with respect to union representation in the privacy of a balloting booth and it will encourage union organizers to become even more aggressive in their use of intimidation and harassment of targeted employees resistant to labor representation.

The current leaders of today’s Labor Movement are less concerned with the welfare of the workers they represent than they are in increasing their membership which directly translates into more income for them and more money to invest in enlarging their political power. Their bottom line, a favorite phrase employed by most union leaders, is that the potential for increasing union membership, no matter how remote that potential might be, is worth the sacrifice of their current membership, their current member’s rights and any adversity, great or small, that their current members must endure, while they collectively chase that bird in the bush disregarding entirely the bird in their hand.

One classic example is the popular Democratic issue of immigration reform and amnesty. The national average unemployment rate is now approaching 9%. Its tough to estimate because the Democratic administration ordered the Department of Labor to quit counting the people who have exhausted their employment resources and given up hope of finding a job, the actual number may be 10% or 15% but nobody really knows because the figure are being skewed purposely to provide the illusion of economic recovery that simply is not possible when we owe the world more than 9 trillion dollars that we have no way to pay back. But back to the example – Illegal immigration reform and amnesty at a point in time when unemployment in this country is rampant, companies are going belly up all over the place and American workers are losing their homes is sheer insanity. American corporations and government agencies like FEMA are hiring contractors whose employees are 95% illegal aliens while American citizens, many of whom are members of Carpenter’s unions, IBEW, Lath & Plasterer’s unions and the entire spectrum of union represented construction occupations, are sitting at home drawing unemployment checks waiting for the bank to foreclose on their homes and yet their Union leaders at the local, national and international level stand united in support of illegal alien’s rights and amnesty for the future cheap labor replacements of their own members. Furthermore, the dues money paid into the treasuries of the assorted Building Trades Unions is being funneled into the Democratic Party’s push for amnesty. Some union leaders would argue that the September edict of Obama’s Office of Management and Budget that bans non-union workers from all federal construction projects over $25 million is a good indication that the allegation I am making here is false. However, what they aren’t telling you is that 99% of the construction work being done by the federal government is being bid out on a piecemeal basis. Most of the large projects have been broken up into small pieces and each piece goes out for a separate bid to the lowest bidder capable of doing the job, union or not. The federal ban on non-union workers on federal construction projects over $25 million has a hole in it that is ten miles wide and the entire thing is nothing more than lip service for union leaders to carry back to their locals and say “See what we got with your hard earned dollars,” and if those jerk offs had an ounce of honesty anywhere in their bodies they would be holding up a giant greased up rubber dildo while they told their members what the Obama administration had in store for their future. Furthermore, since union members only make up about 15% of the American population this edict leaves the rest of the American population out in the cold and any labor organization that would sacrifice American workers in favor of illegal aliens who might become union members at some point isn’t worth a tinkers damn even if the union leaders consider it a fine idea.

What sort of country do the rank and file union members want to raise their families in? Are they willing to sacrifice their fellow citizens and ultimately their constitutional own rights just so their leadership can gain political power off the backs of treasonous politicians? In the past ten years labor unions have dumped billions of their member’s dues money into the Democratic Party and what do these members have to show for it? The Democrats have promised them everything under the sun but what have they actually delivered and is it worth what it cost? The only people who are reaping any real benefit in this outrageous game are the labor leaders. The wages and benefits of the union members aren’t going up that fast, your health care benefits are costing you more every year and nothing going on in Washington DC is going to make your situation any better than it is right now. The Democrats health care reform bill is written to benefit the insurance companies who wrote it. There is nothing in that guarantees lower prices to anyone and it is not going to alter any negotiated benefit plan between a company and a union. Next year you will pay even more for less than what you get today and even if it passes there is no guarantee that the employee free choice act is going to pass regardless of what jackasses like Langford have to say on the matter. With the money that UWUA collects from its members every month the National could afford to pay every members portion of their health care benefits and still have plenty left over to do whatever the heck it is they do in their Washington D.C. office when they’re not busy stabbing each other in the back.

If labor unions are going to lobby in Washington then they should lobby for things that will benefit their members instead of cause them more problems. They should support the use of E-Verify, they should push for legislation that makes it a felony to knowingly hire an illegal alien, they should propose legislation that would make it a crime to solicit illegal alien day laborers, and they should work to get every form of social welfare denied to illegal aliens and deny education opportunities to illegal aliens. All of these things would benefit union members by making good jobs available for American citizens, making educational opportunities available for the children of union members and allow union members to raise their families in an environment that was not infested by illegal alien street gangs and sexual predators, however, there is no labor union in this nation, including UWUA, that is doing any of these things and the simple truth is that they aren’t doing them because they don’t care about their members or their country. The only thing they care about is political power and they are using your money to buy it leaving you, your spouse and your children to suffer the consequences.

The sole purpose for any labor union’s existence is to protect and benefit its membership. That is the bottom line. How is your union providing you protection and benefit by destroying your nation and supporting socialism? If Obama can cut the wages of a company’s CEO what is to stop him from cutting the wages for electricians, carpenters, masonry workers and plumbers? If you don’t like where your labor union is spending your dues money you have a legal right to object and demand reimbursement for all money spent on political campaigns that you don’t agree with. You cannot be forced to support dishonest politicians who are destroying our nation. The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to remain silent. I’ve been there and seen it from one end to the other. I had the benefit of experience as a rank and file member, I have represented more union members in grievance meetings than I can remember, I’ve negotiated agreements, contracts and benefits for the union members of multiple companies, I’ve represented the interests of UWUA in hearings, arbitrations and court cases, and I have sat in Langford’s office back when Wightman was the top dog, so I know exactly what I am talking about here. The leadership of UWUA and every other labor organization in this country are lying through their teeth to their members because they know that you are too busy working your ass off to find out the truth, and when you have finished digging the hole they’ve conned you into digging for them, they will push you in hire illegal aliens to cover it up. Just because some wise guy sports a five hundred dollar haircut and a three thousand dollar suit none it increases his credibility so you need to start thinking independently and critically about what you are being told.

The only thing dumber than getting screwed repeatedly is paying monthly for the privilege of getting screwed repeatedly.

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AFTERNOTE: This posting is the one exception to my long standing promise to post all replies. I will accept comments, but anything coming in from mindless union freaks with an axe to grind might not get published unless I find them particularly entertaining. As ususal all intellegent debate is welcome, less than intellegent debate is acceptable as well, and all comments are held for review by the author and owner of this site.

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The Honorable Michael J. Rogers, U.S. House of Representatives from Michigan’s 8th district says more about the current Democrat’s health care plan than anyone in the American media is willing to tell you. You owe it to yourself to find out what this man has to say and to understand it because he is telling the absolute truth about a piece of legislation that has been written for the benefit of the big insurance companies and health care providers and guarantees the American people higher taxes, lower quality care, and gives no assurance of lower prices, or the coverage you need if disaster strikes and you become very ill. All Republicans are not equal, some are little better than the lying Democrats who are trying to shove this garbage down our throats, however, Mike Rogers is telling the truth in this video and his words need to be heard.

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I‘ve been out of town for a few days. Per my standard practice, when the “gone fishing” urge strikes, all news papers, internet news sources and televised news coverage ceases to exist unless something truly amazing takes place. I’m never too concerned about being out of the loop on current events because I’m not in the loop to begin with. When something news worthy occurs we don’t need news papers or the television news shows to find out about it because everybody around us is talking about whatever it is and the only thing the papers and the television news reporters do is repeat the same facts again and again every ten to fifteen minutes and fill in the gaps with speculation and slanted perspective. I used to subscribe to two Southern California newspapers; the Orange Country Register and the LA Times. When the Register leaned hard to the left I dropped my subscription because I figured I could get the same stupid viewpoints from the LA Times, and to date, they have never disappointed me. The LA Times may be one of Southern California’s leading sources for leftist propaganda and I am constantly amazed by the depth of stupidity demonstrated in their pages. At any rate, after three days absence I returned to find three copies of the LA Times stacked neatly on my front porch. I peeled off the front section and the business section from each, threw the rest in the trash and scanned through them to discover the latest trend in persuasive liberal journalism. Unsurprisingly, I discovered that Obama is undeterred in his effort to cram Obamacare down the throats of the American people and it now appears that he and his fellow conspirators have managed to cut a deal with the AMA to get their buy in. This does not give Obamacare any more credibility than before; it simply substantiates the fact that everybody, and every organization, has their price. I imagine the buy-in of the AMA was accomplished the same way that the AARP deal was cut and the support of some of the insurance companies came about. The Obamacrats can alter the perceptions a many stalwart opponents at the negotiating table because they are the ones walking into the room with Santa Clause sacks full of tax-payer money, tax incentives, government grants and legislative proposals designed primarily to give previously non-existent advantages to cooperative organizations. The AMA has been fighting government regulation of the healthcare industry for nearly a half a century and suddenly they become convinced that Obamacare is the best thing that could happen for the doctors, hospitals and health care industry they represent despite the multitude of disastrous problems it will cause for everyone. Obviously, the AMA is not wasting a lot of their time talking to the doctors they represent. The AARP endorsement came about the same way. The AARP is supposed to represent the best interests of American seniors and most of their membership remains adamantly opposed to Obamacare; however, the hollering outrage of their membership was put on the back burner when the Obamacrats came in with an offer to significantly increase the groups federal funding. The AMA and the AARP now represent the liberal agenda more than they represent the best interests of their membership or the high standards of health care in America because they have been bought off. Their endorsement of the Obamacrats agenda does not increase it’s credibility in any way; it’s just another indication of how dishonest this nation’s political environment has become. One recent poll of general practitioners operating out private offices around the nation indicates that more than 40% of them are so adamantly opposed to Obamacare that they have decided to leave the medical field behind and pursue other business alternatives if the legislation is passed into law. During a recent appointment with my own personal physician, a man that I have known for nearly 40 years, and a general practitioners that has attended to my healthcare needs for at least the last thirty years, I asked for his perspective on the healthcare reform proposals. Thirty seconds into the former combat decorated, Army corpsman’s profanity laced tirade regarding the issue of healthcare reform, I realized that if the proposed legislation becomes law I will be hunting for a new physician. Like many GP’s with years of experience behind them, he has saved his money and invested wisely. He has recently purchased another business, unrelated to the healthcare industry, and Obamacare will make it nearly impossible for his small family oriented clinic to continue its operation. he will be forced to close down his operation, lay off the excellent nurses and highly effective clerical staff he has carefully accumulated over the years, and despite Barack Obama’s promise that we will all be able to keep our current doctors if we wish to do so, his numerous patients, like millions of other American citizens, will find that they will be forced to find new doctors, not because Obamacare has forced them to do so but because Obamacare has forced so many of America’s finest and brightest physicians to leave the field of medicine.

A recent survey published by Investors Business Daily indicates that as many as 45% of the participating physicians questioned have stated that they will probably be shutting down their practices and laying off their staff members if Congress approves the 1000 plus page healtcare reform act currently being pushed by the Democratic majority and Barack Obama. 65% of the physicians who participated in that poll unequivocally stated that they opposed the reform measure despite what the Washington elitists claim, and in direct contradiction to the endorsement given by the American Medical Association who purportedly represents the interests of this nation’s doctors. The overwhelming majority of the physicians participating in the poll clearly expressed their collective doubt that the United States government could provide lower cost and higher quality healthcare coverage for the estimated 47 million residents our elected representatives now claim are without healthcare coverage. Admittedly, all polls are flawed to some degree and the results of the poll published by Investors Business Daily is no different, however, even if the error rate for this poll were as high as 10 or 15%, which is not, the fact remains that many of the best and brightest currently practicing American physicians will be leaving the healthcare industry behind if Obamacare becomes law. Initially it would seem that the most likely question would be how will this benefit the American people, but from my perspective, the push for healthcare reform is not about what is good for the American people as much as it is about controlling the American people. The better question is how the passage of this disastrous legislation furthers the current government’s less than entirely transparent agenda. Most American citizens have not fully considered the ramifications of implementing the 1017 page healthcare reform act, like their elected representatives in Washington, they have not read the actual proposal and everything they know about it has been carefully selected to indicate either beneficial or adverse affects of the bills various proposals depending on the perspective of the individual or group doing the pointing. Most of the information published in the American news papers, explained on the television news shows, discussed by radio talk show hosts and recited in public speeches off of Barack Obama’s ever-present teleprompter is slanted one way or the other, taken entirely out of context, excludes significant and very relevant facts and is essentially both meaningless and misleading. Basically, the American people know little or nothing about what their elected representatives in Washington D.C. are considering with respect to healthcare reform, and the honest fact of the matter is that, despite the size of the massive proposal, most of the details and the real impact of the proposal’s implementation is entirely unknown because there are so many aspects of the thing that clearly state further study will be required after implementation. In very simple terms, the proposal is not complete, it is far from comprehensive and it is so lacking in relevant detail that nobody can accurately predict how, or if it will work and what effect (positive or negative) it will have on any particular group of people.

The founding fathers of this nation wrote the entire United States Constitution by hand on the single side of one large piece of paper. The healthcare reform act now being debated in the U.S. Senate is 1017 pages long. That fact alone should tell every American citizen that they should be extremely cautious. The United States government currently runs a few excellent examples of healtcare programs. The most obvious of these is Medicare and Medicaid, another is run through the Veteran’s Administration to provide care for American military members who were wounded or disabled in numerous wars, foreign police actions, and undisclosed skirmishes fought in places that we know next to nothing about. None of these government run healthcare programs are cost effective or user-friendly. Reports of fraud and abuse are associated with all of them and the quality of care given questionably varies from excellent to abysmal. All patients are not treated equally and the red tape and bureaucratic hassle endured by the patient’s seeking care are characteristically commonplace. Waiting lists for standard procedures are lengthy, approval requests take months and sometimes years to process and people have died while waiting for committees to meet where the cost of the care they require and the potential impact that care will have on the patient’s productivity or lack thereof, is casually discussed by bureaucrats with no absolutely medical training. If these currently established examples of government run healthcare were models of medical excellence, providing effective medical care for all patients equally and in a timely manner with a minimum of fraud, abuse and neglect, then Obamacare might seem more attractive than it currently is. However, that is not the case and most American citizens, including myself, know by far too much personal experience, that any effort that is controlled and regulated by the United States government instantly becomes extremely costly, completely ineffective and essentially worthless to all parties concerned. Government run healthcare in the United States will become this nation’s single biggest mistake ever. It will be a nightmare, a very costly disaster and result in total chaos.

The definition of stupidity is making the same mistake over and over while expecting different results. The federal government has failed to provide equitable, effective, high quality medical care through Medicare, Medicaid and the through the Veteran’s Administration for decades. Billions of American tax dollars have been funneled off from each of these programs in fraud and abuse and little effort has been made to control the growing costs despite all the rhetoric and talk about controlling the waste. The current healthcare reform act being debated in the U.S. Congress will dwarf all current government run healthcare programs combined. The opportunities for fraud and abuse in such a massive undertaking are beyond comprehension, oversight will be provided by individuals selected on the basis of political favoritism, not qualification, and possibly worst of all, another major and very important part of this nation’s free enterprise system will fall under the control of a federal government that makes all determinations on the basis of the controlling political party’s personal agenda rather than what is good for the American people.

In the long run, I suspect that the Democrats who now control every aspect of the current American government will force healthcare legislation down the throats of the American people whether they want it or not. It will be done not because it brings great and lasting benefit to the American people, but because it increases the power and the control of the federal government over every aspect of the lives of the American people. The healthcare reform act is not the U.S. government’s attempt to make the American people more free, to enhance the sacred liberty guaranteed to all men by their creator, or to make this nation a better place to live. The healthcare reform act is intentionally designed to make the American people more dependent on their federal government than they have ever been in this nation’s history. It is a reduction of our freedom and an insult to the concept of liberty upon which this nation was founded, and ultimately the American people will see the end result of this legislation’s passage as the chains of our slavery become appreciably tighter and the tyranny of our out of control government becomes far more oppressive. This is no wild-eyed conspiracy theory; it is an obvious, apparent and completely blatant fact that even a fool should be capable of figuring out if that fool took the time to consider what exactly is staring them in the face.

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On August 20th, 2009 I posted a piece about the impact of our approximate 40 million illegal aliens and the fact that the majority of them have no medical insurance, make up the biggest percentage of the uninsured population, and are the primary cause for the high cost of medical services and medical insurance. In that discussion I pointed out that the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act requires hospitals and emergency medical service providers to provide emergency medical services to any patient that walks through their doors regardless of the patient’s ability to pay for the medical care. I further stated that the federal government does not reimburse the hospitals for the financial losses they incur as a result of treating illegal aliens. That is all accurate, but what I did not mention (because I did not know it at the time) is that the federal government reimburses the state government, however, with that being said, the method used by the federal government for calculating the amount of that reimbursement is remarkably odd and has nothing to do with the financial losses suffered by the individual medical facilities who treated the illegal aliens. Inasmuch as that posting was the only thing published on this site on the date given above it should be easy to find if you want to read it and witness the extreme rarity of an unintentional mistake made by myself.

Under section 1011 of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, the Federal government set aside $1 billion dollars in the U.S. Treasury for the reimbursement to medical service providers for services rendered to illegal aliens. Section “a” of this provision states that the money is to be distributed to the individual states at a rate of $250,000,000 for each of fiscal years 2005 through 2008 providing it is not otherwise appropriated for some more pressing need such as purchasing a herd of goats to devour the weeds in Harry Reid’s backyard in Searchlight, Nevada. In other words, whatever money is unnoticed by the most greedy, corrupt politicians on the planet (likely a very small sum), but no more than $250,000,000 in one fiscal year is distributed among the 50 states and Washington DC. In the unlikely event that the full $250,000,000 is available, and hasn’t been spent on cocaine and liquor for political fundraisers, the Secretary takes $167,000,000 of that money and distributes it according to the following formula.

“The amount of the allotment for payments to eligible providers in each State for a fiscal year shall be equal to the product of the total amount available for allotments under this paragraph for the fiscal year; and the percentage of undocumented aliens residing in the State as compared to the total number of such aliens residing in all States, as determined by the Statistics Division of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, as of January 2003, based on the 2000 decennial census.”

The remaining $83,000,000 (of the $250,000,000 set aside for each fiscal year) is divided among the 6 states with the highest number of undocumented alien apprehensions for that fiscal year. This is calculated on the apprehension rates for the 4-consecutive-quarter period ending before the beginning of the fiscal year for which information is available for undocumented aliens in such States, as reported by the Department of Homeland Security.

Ironically, the last provision sounds vaguely like a contest among the states to encourage the apprehension of illegal aliens, and that is something the federal government really isn’t all that concerned with. Cash-strapped California has the most illegal aliens in the nation and receives the least portion of this allotment despite the fact that they spend the most on illegal alien healthcare. Arizona is the consistent winner and sweeps most of the pot for all each year designated. This is another example of liberal logic in action.

Inasmuch as this system for reimbursement was not implemented until 2003 and the money allotted for reimbursement ran out at the end of 2008, I may not have been entirely wrong when I said that the medical care providers were not reimbursed, because for a brief period of time somebody was reimbursed, but whether or not the hospitals and emergency care facilities ever got the money they lost is another matter altogether. At any rate, since the pot is dry nobody is getting reimbursed for losses incurred in 2009 and I suspect that this was designed to encourage the hospitals and emergency care providers to support Obamacare. Obama’s healthcare reform act will take care of this problem forever, at the expense of the American tax-payer, who, in case you haven’t realized it, means you and I will have to pay for the illegal alien’s healthcare.

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The funding for Barack Obama’s pro-healthcare reform ads, or at least the $24 million dollars of it that is being used to produce video ads for television and the internet has been supplied by a special interest group calling itself “Americans for Stable Quality Care.” This is the same group that used to go by the name “Healthy Economy Now.” Both groups were formed by a coalition of interests made up by The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the American Medical Association (AMA) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

The advertisements produced by this coalition press for the same changes in healthcare that Obama argues for and both make the statement that healthcare costs are delaying the country’s economic recovery and that changes are needed if the economy is to rebound. Every effort is made to make the viewer of these ads believe that the push for healthcare reform is a grassroots movement instead of what it actually is, the federal government’s attempt to control American healthcare while providing great and lasting financial benefit to their major contributors from the Pharmaceutical industry, the American Medical Association and most especially SEIU.

SEIU, the same labor organization that represented the nurses at the now closed Drew King Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, is now calling itself the “The Voice for Health Care Consumers.” Drew King Medical Center, and as it was later called King Harbor medical Center was the subject of numerous news articles after a number of patients in their cardiac care unit who were all connected to cardiac monitors died after their deteriorating vital signs were ignored by union represented nurses who couldn’t be bothered to check them. In another case a meningitis patient reportedly received a potent anti-cancer drug for four days because the attending nurses who injected the patient with the drug were too lazy to read the patient’s chart or the label on the bottle. When the news came out that nurses in the hospital’s psychiatric unit were routinely using Taser guns to subdue their patients the shit hit the fan but the hospital survived closure thanks to the resistance effort of the neighborhood led by U.S. Representative Maxine Waters, Jesse Jackson and the children of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The nurses, who were terminated from their positions at Drew King were protected by their union who kept their records unblemished, and they all got jobs at other hospitals. The hospital became widely referred to as “Killer King” because of the incompetent nursing staff, the bungling doctors and the generally atrocious conditions, but it continued to operate until 2007 when Edith Isabel Rodriguez, an emergency room patient bled to death on the floor of the emergency room over a period of 45 minutes while hospital staff and nurses completely ignored her. SEIU, the voice of the Drew King Medical Center Nurses is now casting itself as “The Voice for Health Care Consumers.” SEIU contributed more than $60 million dollars to Obama’s campaign efforts and they stand to gain substantially once Obamacare goes into effect because it will give them a foot in the door of every American hospital.

PhRMA, the AMA and SEIU are not the only strange bedfellows in Obama’s healthcare bed, a quick check of the list of Obama campaign contributors turned up a contribution by Michael S. Teitelbaum. Mr. Teitelbaum is a demographer at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York City. From 1985 through 1990, Michael S. Teitelbaum was also the president of the American Eugenics Society.

As long as I brought up the term “Eugenics” I might also point out that in Adolph Hitler’s book Mein Kampf, published in 1924, he quoted American eugenic ideology and made the observation that, “There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.”

In 1926 Rockefeller awarded $250,000 to the German Psychiatric Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, later to become the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. Among the leading psychiatrists at the German Psychiatric Institute was Ernst Rüdin, who became director and eventually an architect of Hitler’s systematic medical repression. In 1929 another Rockefeller grant of $317,000 allowed for the expansion of the German Institute for Brain Research, again led by Hitler’s medical nightmare, Ernst Rüdin. Another Rockefeller endowment funded the German Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a hero in American eugenics circles, functioned as a head of this Institute. Verschuer’s long time, trusted assistant was none other than Dr. Josef Mengele. While the Rockefeller’s severed ties with the German government in 1939 when the war first broke out, the Rockefeller’s have always been ardent supporters of eugenics and health care reform. John D. Rockefeller III gave financial support to Margaret Sanger’s efforts to develop contraceptives. Nelson Rockefeller, as the governor of New York often spoke out about the dreadful conditions in Harlem and the need for contraception and abortion as a solution for the problems of the people trapped there. Throughout the 1960′s the legalization of abortion was viewed as the primary goal of the American Eugenics Society. In the 1970′s, Nelson Rockefeller signed one of the first state law allowing widespread abortion, and the Rockefeller family gave money for the first legal abortion facility in New York State. Here we are 80 years after the Rockefeller’s began funding German eugenics that ultimately resulted in Hitler’s genocide and we find that the Chairman of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Health Care is none other than the Democratic U.S. Senator from West Virginia, John Davison “Jay” Rockefeller IV, the great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller. Ironic isn’t it?

As a side note, the influence of eugenics on American abortion law is made obvious by comparing Roe v. Wade and the text of the book “The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law,” by the Professor Glanville Williams, a popular figure in American eugenics and a member of the Eugenics Society. Justice Blackmun, the author of the decision in Roe v. Wade lifted his entire argument from Professor Williams’ book and based his entire decision on eugenics.

Barack Hussein Obama is the most ardent supporter of abortion that has ever existed in the U.S. government. He has consistently opposed every attempt to restrict abortion law at any point in a woman’s pregnancy. Full birth abortions are fine by him. The idea of flushing a live infant down the toilet doesn’t bother him in the slightest and yet he emotionally claims in a recent public statement that the death of his grandmother deeply touched him and he’s not about to kill off somebody else’s grandmother with his healthcare reform bill. Of course this is the same character that said that lobbyists wouldn’t be running the government days before putting a slew of them into his cabinet positions, and this is the same person who talked about honesty and accountability in government before appointing another slew of tax evaders and other petty criminals to positions on his cabinet. How can anybody believe what Obama says? His entire life is one giant fabricated line of bull. Obama’s healthcare reform bill leaves a lot of things unstated. Important aspects that should be figured out ahead of time will be figured out later when there is no chance to oppose it. That is not a smart way to do business and its certainly not a good thing when it comes to government policy and legislation. If he wants to reform something let him start with the U.S. Congress. Kick out the crooks, the conmen and the swindlers, expose all government corruption, waste and fraud. Start enforcing all American laws equally for everyone and deport the illegal aliens. After that’s accomplished he can come back and talk to us about healthcare.

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1. YOUR HEALTH CARE COSTS WILL GO DOWN
If you have private insurance you like, you will keep your insurance – and your costs will go down. What’s not to like? When there’s only one gas station in town, they can charge whatever they want and people have no choice but to pay. When there’s only a few insurance companies, they can charge whatever they want, too. We have no other choice. Competition is what drives down prices. And health insurance reform, including a public health insurance option, will hold the insurance tycoons accountable and make them lower prices and out-of-pocket fees to compete.

THE TRUTH:
SEC. 123 of HR3200 covers the creation of the Health Benefits Advisory Committee. This group of bureaucrats will re-define the requirements for all medical insurance coverage plans, including those offered by employers. If the company you are working for does not meet the new requirements or decides it would be cheaper for them to drop their current plan and shove every employee onto Obamacare, you will be on Obamacare and another bunch of federal bureaucrats will then determine the level of coverage that you will receive and what doctor or government run clinic you will be assigned to. The current government subsidized healthcare insurance plan created under the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) of 1986 provides terminated or laid-off employees, retirees, spouses, former spouses, and dependent children the right to temporary continuation of health coverage at group rates. On an average, the cost of coverage under this government plan runs as much as 150% over what the employee was paying for medical insurance while employed. The politicians in Washington D.C. can say anything they want to get public support for their legislation, but their ability to deliver what they promise is very doubtful if you look at their historical record. By the time you add the cost of their government medical insurance to the increase in taxes (or fees) that you must also pay to cover the cost of employing millions of new government bureaucrats to run this crazy system and supply benefits to everyone who is not currently covered, what you are paying now for medical insurance will look like nothing. If you are currently insured through your employer or your former employer in the case of retirees, and in a healtcare plan that allows you to go to any privately practicing General Practitioner, then you might want to discreetly ask that Doctor about his or her opinion regarding the proposed “reform” measure. Most privately practicing General Practitioners still in existence are struggling to make ends meet. They spend more time fighting with the government to get minimal reimbursement for their Medicare patients, and hassling with the state worker’s compensation board or HMO administrators to get authorizations for patient treatments and testing than they do actually treating their patients. Despite their extensive education and extremely long hours in the office, few are getting rich, and a surprising number of proficient General Practitioners have given up the practice of medicine and gone to work in completely different fields unrelated to the practice of medicine. The vast majority of those who still ply their trade are deeply disturbed by the proposed “reform measures.” They know that additional government intervention will result in even more paperwork demands, longer waiting for authorizations and less compensation for the services they now provide. If the federal government successfully reduces your cost for medical care, most General Practitioners know that the reduction will come at their expense, not at the expense of the insurance companies. Inevitably, this will result in fewer General Practitioners in private practice simply because it will not be feasible for them to remain in business, pay the staff required to process all of the paperwork, and still make enough money to justify the increased hassle. Considering the fact that most General Practitioners are fairly intelligent human beings who made it through the additional years of college required to become Physicians, it would be safe to assume that they can figure out other ways to make a good living outside the field of medicine. Nobody likes their insurance company, what they like is their doctor and the care they receive. It will not do any good to keep your current insurance if your doctor is forced into bankruptcy and you can’t find a suitable replacement.

2. QUALITY OF HEALTH CARE WILL GO UP
When insurance companies have a monopoly, they can deny your claims and deny you treatment and what can you do? But if there’s competition, you have another option. That holds the insurance companies’ feet to the fire. Plus, health insurance reform will regulate the insurance companies so they can no longer deny coverage for pre-existing conditions and other technicalities. The quality of all of our care will go up.

THE TRUTH:
There are more than 1200 different medical insurance companies in the United States today. There is plenty of competition among them already. The cost of medical insurance is based on the cost of providing medical services plus the accumulated financial losses suffered by hospitals and emergency care providers as a result of the federal law that requires them to provide treatment to anyone that walks in the door regardless of their ability to pay. More than 40 million illegal aliens use American hospitals and emergency care providers as their own personal free clinics. Those financial losses were passed along to every patient that enters a hospital or emergency room with health insurance. The insurance companies were forced to raise their prices to cover those increased costs. The insurance companies are not the boogeyman in this situation and if the federal government creates their own insurance company to compete with them it will have to pay the same increased costs or raise it’s premiums to pay for the losses it incurs. The federal government runs numerous insurance and medical coverage plans already, SCHIP, Medicare and the healthcare for members of the military and disabled veterans are a few examples of government run healthcare programs. The care given under all of these programs has never been without numerous problems, in many cases it has been described as horrific. Senior citizens on Medicare are routinely denied their benefits by government bureaucrats simply because those government lackeys are having a bad hair day and decide to take it out on someone who can’t defend themselves. Government healthcare programs are characteristically known for the intense hassle the patients must go through in order to get anything accomplished; many senior citizens with Medicare wait months and months just to get an appointment with a specialist. They often complain that they are treated like dim-witted children. While they are assigned a case-worker within the system, that individual rarely offers any assistance of value and certainly nothing that could be considered helpful. Case workers routinely withhold relevant information about various Medicare programs and shortcuts that would ease the time it takes to cut through the insanity of dealing with the Medicare bureaucracy. Medicare is not “user-friendly” by any means and it should be viewed as the federal government’s finest and largest example of government subsidized healthcare.

Another good example of government subsidized healthcare is the Veteran’s Administration. The Los Angeles Times has reported on three different cases where the patients of the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Medical Center were subjected to medical experimentation without their knowledge or knowledgeable consent. In one case an elderly patient was kept on an operating table with an electrophysiology probe inserted in his heart for an extra 45 minutes to collect research data despite twice telling his doctors that he did not want to be used as a human guinea pig. Another patient had his heart catheterization treatment prolonged for research purposes, despite the fact that he did not give his legally required consent. Robert Hanson, a stocky World War II veteran who was 71 years old and in relatively good condition despite his age, was tricked into signing consent forms permitting his doctors to forego his standard therapy and dose him with a purely experimental heart drug, some of Mr. Hanson’s caregivers as well as his daughter insist that he was incapable of understanding the forms he was tricked into signing or the risk they implied. Robert Hanson dropped dead of a heart attack in the hospital parking lot after taking the experimental heart drug. As far as quality care is concerned, we should consider the well documented cases where American veterans have been infected with HIV as a result of the improper sterilization of colonoscopy equipment at government provided health care facilities, or the 92 out of 116 U.S. veterans with cancer whose cancer treatments were egregiously and incompetently administered at government provided health care facilities.

The problem with government subsidized healthcare is that the money used to fund it flows through the furry fingers of greedy politicians. When they need the tax-money for other projects it is siphoned off and cuts to the healthcare system are made as a matter of course. Shortcuts are taken and rationing occurs. As a direct result, people suffer the consequences and often die. Government healthcare is simply not synonymous with quality healthcare. The government is a political machine. Government determinations are based on the peculiar logic of politics. Politicians can shuffle stacks of funding money around far faster and with more dexterity that a Vegas card dealer blitzing through a deck of cards, where it goes – nobody knows, but the fact remains, it is suddenly gone and the costs need to be reduced. In a government run healthcare system, reduced costs will be directly proportional to a reduction in the quality of the healthcare provided. Furthermore, any government run healthcare system created by the Democratic Party will be a fully unionized healthcare system. SEIU didn’t drop $60 million dollars of their member’s dues money into the Democratic coffers during the 1998 campaign season for nothing, and SEIU is currently financing a good portion of the television ads promoting Obamacare. SEIU is the same labor organization that represented the nurses at Drew King Medical Center in Los Angeles. The quality of the medical care given at Drew King Medical Center in Los Angeles can only be compared to the quality of medical care given to the Jewish inmates of Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka.

3. SENIORS WILL GET BETTER CARE, TOO
When the insurance companies want to scare you, they talk about your mama. The truth is, health insurance reform will create more choices for patients of all ages – including senior citizens – and give them more power over their health care, not less. Plus health care reform will make Medicare better, not by reducing benefits as you might have heard, but by cutting billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abusive overpayments to insurance giants.

THE TRUTH:
There is nothing in the Obamacare bill to warrant the compelling belief that seniors will get better care, however, there is plenty to indicate that their care will be rationed according to their age and health condition. The federal government of the United States has been babbling for more than a hundred years about cutting the billions of dollars in government waste, fraud and abusive spending by the U.S. Congress and the various agencies of the federal government. To date they have been entirely unsuccessful and the waste, fraud and abusive spending by the US. Congress and the various agencies of the federal government have increased at an alarming rate. No legislation is passed through the United States Congress without the addition of billions of dollars in needless pork projects carefully inserted by our elected representatives. The federal government cannot clean their own house so how can they be expected to clean up the waste, fraud and abusive spending in healthcare? If anything, the implementation of Obamacare will give the federal government free rein to enlarge the scope of their already outrageous waste, fraud and abusive spending. It will give them more places to hide pet projects, contractual rewards to large contributors, personal graft and outright theft of tax payer money than ever before. “More choices for patients of all ages – including senior citizens – and give them more power over their health care, not less,” is the promise, but the reality is just more opportunity for government waste, fraud and corruption at the expense of American tax payers and senior citizens.

4. REFORM WILL MAKE HEALTH CARE MORE AMERICAN
Insurance company plants are saying that health care reform will make America more like Russia. But isn’t Russia the place where a few businesses and elites monopolize entire industries? America is about choice and competition. And health care reform will actually do away with some of the worst kinds of rationing, like canceling coverage for pre-existing conditions and lifetime and yearly limits on coverage.

THE TRUTH:
Socialized medicine in the former Soviet Union was underfunded, low quality and loaded with problems right from the start. Like the government, it has all but collapsed and with the introduction of more free market policies, Russian healthcare is getting better but still has a long way to go. However, Russia was not the first to experiment with socialized medicine. The German government instituted public healthcare programs as far back as 1880 under the theory that a little socialism would prevent the rise of more virulent Communism. By the time of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s doctors were quite accustomed to cooperating with the government in providing healthcare to the public. Following World War I the German government implemented policies to provide health care services to all citizens and the focus of medicine moved from private practice to public health and preventable health care. (Sound Familiar?) Between 1924 and 1928, the period of economic consolidation in Germany, public health care improved to the point where tuberculosis, venereal disease, and alcoholism were all subject to government regulation and treatment and counseling centers were established for drug addicts and couples suffering with marital and sexual problems. As a result of these programs, Germany experienced a significant improvement in the public health of their citizens. As a result of these reforms and the changes in perception associated with them, the role of physicians in Germany transformed from being an advocate and advisor for the patient, to becoming a partner of the government. The compassion, individual ethics and charitable nature of Germany’s doctors was gradually replaced by an even stronger collective ethic pushing their attention to the common cause of benefitting German society as a whole.

When the U.S. stock market crashed on October 29, 1929 it touched off a worldwide economic crisis and Germany was not spared in the slightest. Germany’s socialized medical system, a large part of the welfare state they had established, was hard hit. Funding for housing programs, nutritional programs, financial support payments and maternal, mental health and child health programs were all subject to massive cuts. The only thing that remained of Germany’s humanistic reform measures were the government mechanisms for inspection and regulation of public health and medical practice. Efficiency became the sole yardstick used for measuring expenses and German healtcare became more a matter of cost-benefit analysis that medical care. The scientific foundation for the cost-benefit analyses Germany’s government funded (and therefore politically minded) medical care system was provided by the new advancements in the field of genetics. Physically strong, healthy and productive members of German society became the focal point of German healthcare providers. The weak, sick, old, and less productive members of German society were deemed less worthy of continued medical support.

During the period of these economic and political developments, a British social anthropologist Herbert Spencer coined the term “Social Darwinism,” to define the concept of “survival of the fittest” with respect to human civilization. The application of Darwin’s theories to the newly discovered field of genetics occurred long before Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA in the 1950s, and the effort was largely undertaken by scientists who misguidedly believed that the outward expression of genetic types could be based upon the external measurements of a human’s body. Their work became categorized under the heading of “eugenics” which became the study of their misguided concepts of genetics and how that study could be applied through the application of government policy to improve the overall population. The study and application of Eugenics was not isolated to Germany alone. In the United States, the study of Eugenics resulted in state and federal healthcare policies of an atrocious nature. Three years after the term “Eugenics” was coined by Sir Francis Galton in 1883, who defined it as “the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations,” the state of Connecticut enacted marriage laws with eugenic criteria. Under these Connecticut state laws, anyone who was diagnosed as having epilepsy or was deemed to be feeble-minded or imbecilic, was prohibited from marriage. During the early 20th century approximately thirty American states enacted similar state laws prohibiting marriage to individuals diagnosed with a variety of medical problems on the basis of eugenic criteria. In 1907, President Woodrow Wilson helped the state of Indiana become the first of more than thirty states to adopt legislation aimed at compulsory sterilization of certain individuals. Ardent American supporters of eugenics and eugenic government policies included Theodore Roosevelt, the Democratic Party, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association and the National Research Council. Margaret Sanger, the founder of the American Birth Control League, which later became the organization we know today as Planned Parenthood was a major supporter of the American eugenics movement and the primary motivation of her push for the legalization and widespread use of contraceptives as a means to reduce the proliferation of those she viewed as being the “lower classes” of American society. Sanger believed that the final aim of eugenics was racial regeneration. Her views were well-received and in full alignment with those of the Ku Klux Klan and she gave lectures on eugenics and birth control as a strategy to promote racial regeneration to the women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey in 1926.

The most significant era of eugenic sterilization was between 1907 and 1963, when over 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under eugenic legislation in the United States and the state of Oregon did not repeal its forced sterilization law until 1983. Adolph Hitler’s primary inspiration for the genocidal slaughter of millions of people in the attempt to create a “master race” was the eugenics movement in the United States where the pseudoscience received extensive financing through corporate philanthropies such as the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. The study of eugenics in America was undertaken by some of America’s most respected scientists and experimentation went on in the labs of prestigious American universities like Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. The credibility of the eugenics movement was severely damaged by the end of World War II and the uncovering of Hitler’s genocidal death camps, but eugenics is far from dead, and modern advancements in the field of genetics has prompted a revival of some of it’s more insidious theories.

Dr. Robert Pearlman, chief of ethics evaluation at the VA’s National Center for Ethics in Health Care, addressed the Supreme Court in 1996 during the case of Vacco v. Quill. Dr. Pearlman’s testimony advocated physician-assisted suicide. He is a long time proponent of health-care rationing and his 52-page end-of-life planning document, entitled, “Your Life, Your Choices,” first published in 1997 was suspended from use by the Presidential administration of George W. Bush. At that time Dr. Pearlman’s, 52 page pamphlet was viewed as a workbook designed to lead the reader to the intended conclusion that physician-assisted suicide was a far better alternative to living the remainder of your life as an invalid. At the direction of the Barack Obama’s administration the bureaucrats at the VA’s National Center for Ethics in Health Care have resuscitated “Your Life, Your Choices,” and despite the denials of the Democratic Party, Barack Obama and the American news media, the principles expressed in Dr. Pearlman’s pamphlet play a significant role in the structure of the current healtcare reform bill.

Any nationalized healthcare program or government subsidized healthcare program is subject to government and political abuse, and that potential is greatly exacerbated in direct proportion to the degree of politics involved in the programs creation and regulation. Economic instability, the natural ups and downs of tax revenues and widespread lack of accountability for government spending inevitably impacts the overall operation, management and quality of the medical care provided. Any attempt to deny this obvious fact is an attempt to deny reality.

5. WE CAN’T AFFORD NOT TO REFORM HEALTH CARE
We’re spending more than $2 trillion dollars per year on health care in America. The average family premium is projected to rise to over $22,000 in the next decade. Every year, nearly a million families face bankruptcy because of medical debt. Health care reform will drive down costs and save you money and be fully paid for over 10 years — not adding a single penny to the deficit. Meanwhile, the cost of doing nothing is enormous and only growing.

THE TRUTH:
CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE Report to Charles B. Rangel, Chairman, Committee on Ways and Means, U.S. House of Representatives – July 17, 2009

“Effects of the Key Provisions of H.R. 3200
Collectively, those provisions would yield a significant increase in the number of Americans with health insurance. By 2019, CBO and the staff of JCT estimate, the number of nonelderly people without health insurance would be reduced by about 37 million, leaving about 17 million nonelderly residents uninsured (nearly half of whom would be unauthorized immigrants). In total, CBO estimates that enacting those provisions would raise deficits by $1,042 billion over the 2010-2019 period.”

Obamacare will create huge federal bureaucracies and provide tremendous growth for some already in existence. The cost will be tremendous and all of it will be the burden of American tax payers. The government can not create funding from nothing. Its only source of revenue is the tax payers. You and I will pay for everything the government does. On top of your crushing credit card debt and your inflated home mortgage you will have to deal with an increase in taxes and fees associated with Obama’s healthcare reform. Regardless of what the media is telling us or the Democratic politicians are claiming, the 40 million illegal aliens currently in the U.S. will inevitably be covered under Obama’s plan and we will pay for it. We will also pay for the next 140 million who will come behind them.

The financial resources of the federal government are not infinite regardless of their ability to print more money. The national debt has never been larger and more out of control. Government spending has never been greater than it is today. Financial irresponsibility has never been this blatant. Government healthcare will destroy our current medical system and result in widespread healthcare rationing and low quality medical care. It will entirely destroy the technological advancement of medical research in the United States and the good doctors and specialists we now have will be replaced by a legion of ill-trained, union represented, healthcare technicians certified by the U.S. government as “Doctors.” Obamacare will be a complete and unmitigated disaster.

In 1979 the United States Congress passed the Department of Education Organization Act and it was signed into law by former President Jimmy Carter on October 17, 1979. The purpose of the Department of Education was to create programs to generate funds for education, standardize school curricula across the nation and enforce the civil rights laws as those laws pertained to students. The quality of American education went straight into the toilet. The Department of Education was a creation of Democratic legislators who felt the need for educational reform was pressing. The educational system that cultivated the likes of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Jonas Salk, Robert Fulton, Eli Whitney, Charles Goodyear, Willia Carrier, Samuel Colt, Cyrus McCormick, John Browning, Emmett W. Chappelle, Edmond Berger, Robert Bryant and millions of other great American minds was obviously broken and needed to be fixed. The quality of American education has been on a downward spiral continuously since the federal government first became involved. American public schools are more interested in turning out politically correct, culturally sensitive future Democrats than they are in teaching math, reading, English, grammar, geography, history, writing or science. Public school students have to be tested for their ability to read at a sixth grade level prior to their graduation from high school at the completion of the 12th grade. Every year millions of high school students graduate from high school with absolutely no employable skills of any nature. The United States of America is currently forced to look to Asia and India for adequately trained and educated engineers, computer technicians and scientists because our educational system is incapable of producing them. The Department of Education has become a political money pit and the more tax money poured into it the worse it does.

Barack Obama and the Democratic Party now want to fix American healthcare the same way they fixed our educational system. History is a harsh educator, unfortunately the American people have short memories and seldom remember the mistakes of the past, but in this case, they should certainly make the effort because this is one mistake that the American people can not afford to repeat.

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