This is hilarious:

http://www.imao.us/index.php/2010/03...n-health-care/

President Obama is working really hard to enact a health care plan, and we all know this is just his first step towards complete control of health care by the government. Thus, I thought I’d send my crack research team to find out all they can about government-run health care.

FUN FACTS ABOUT GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTH CARE

* The reason some think the government should take over health care is because they think health care is a right, but instead of an oppressive government infringing on that right, it’s economics and reality.

* Government-run health care is being pushed right now because of the crisis of the uninsured, a crisis America has been suffering for about 233 years.

* For a while now, Canada has had government-run health care, meaning the costs of health care have to be balanced with all other government expenses. Usually a hundred people are denied a doctor’s care anytime the curling teams need to purchase new stones.

* If you find yourself surrounded by government-run health care, don’t worry; it will probably just ignore you, even if you’re in need of emergency care.

* There are worries that government-run health care could lead to lower quality doctors, but doctors should be happy to work for lower pay as long as we can repeal the 13th Amendment.

* Proponents of government-run health care say that death panels will never become a reality… just as long as the bureaucrats running health care don’t realize, “Hey, if sick people just died, we’d save lots of money.”

* Wolverine’s self-healing ability was evolved in response to Canada’s government-run health care.

* Rationing could mean that people thinking of escaping a reality controlled by computers may no longer have the option of both the red and the blue pill.

* President Obama says having the government create the new entitlement of health care will actually save us money. This is because he plans to enact it on opposite day.

* If you think you see government-run health care killing people, don’t panic. Instead, just think of all the savings.

* Liberals want you to know that the government taking over 16% of the economy won’t affect your freedom. They also want to remind you that a happy attitude about it will be factored into rationing.

* The Clintons tried to enact government-run health care in the ’90s, but it ended up that half of the proposed bill were sketches by Bill Clinton of what the nurses’ uniform should look like.

* In a fight between government-run health care and Aquaman, Aquaman would die from being out of the water for too long while waiting for a simple blood test.

* Star Trek shows what a future of universal health care will look like. Basically, if you don’t get good care, someone will go back in time and retcon you out of existence.

* If given a chance, government-run health care will kill you, your family, and everyone you care about. Then again, it’s completely free.

* Despite all the changes, liberals will make sure the most basic right in health care won’t be affected: the ability of a trial lawyer to make millions of dollars in malpractice suits.

* Government-run health care is going to fix health care by making sure your needs are no longer determined by a heartless corporation but instead by a heartless bureaucrat who also has the power to imprison you if you don’t do as he says.

 

You just hate poor people. I can tell.



Good list. The entire country will get a kick out of it after congress passes, and Obama signs this government health care into law. Just thinking about it makes me wish it were November.

 

Check this out.........From a left leaning Magazine even.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/234953?GT1=43002

 

i think this is the first time ive wandered into general discussion here. should have known that a pickup truck forum would be full of fellow conservatives!

 

Well there are a few liberals here but the only radical one is 'Real.' He's completely lost all sense of reality.

 

I just hope he gets "knighted" one of these days, then we can all refer to him as "Sur-Real".

 

Ha-ha! Good one!

Speaking of liberal/conservative, you know you are hanging out with too many far-right-wing extremists when they start to refer to Newsweek as a "left-leaning publication"!

 

Let's see, Real's government has tried this program called Social Security and it's in trouble. It's tried Mediare/Medicaid,,,and it's in trouble,,dare I go on? Yeah, I want the government running my healthcare. NOT!

Health care is NOT a GD right, it's not an entitlement. You chuckleheads who think it is need some Real help. Haaaaaaa

 

My government is the same as your government (unless you are a communist or something) - it's the government that we the (American) people elected.

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are extremely successful programs that have contributed to the growth of our nation and our security in profound ways for decades. The vast majority of people posting here have parents, grandparent and/or great-grandparents who benefitted enormously because of these programs. Our country would not be as great as it is without these programs.

The primary issue these programs are facing is rooted decades ago. They have all been slightly under-funded for decades. Republicans are cheapskates when it comes to taking care of the elderly and infirmed. They would rather see a society in which the entire working class simply rotted away in pain and abject poverty than create programs like all other developed nations have to deal with the inevitable social issues. So, of course they are under-funded, Republicans have fought tooth and nail against giving them the funding they need to stay viable.

You can thank conservative rhetoric for that.

 

Let me get this straight......

we're trying to pass a health care plan written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that hasn't read it but exempts themselves from it, to be signed by a president that also is exempt from it and hasn't read it and who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes, all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that's broke.

What the hell could possibly go wrong?

 

Great post!

 

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2010...h-care-fracas/

Dr. Milton R. Wolf

"Primum nil nocere."First, do no harm. This guiding principle is a bedrock of medical care. Sadly, those politicians who would rewrite our health care laws do not live in the same universe as do the doctors and health care professionals who must practice it.

Imagine if, like physicians, politicians were personally held to the incredibly high level of scrutiny that includes civil and financial liability for any unintended consequence of their decisions. Imagine if they were forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars each year on malpractice insurance and still faced the threat of multimillion-dollar lawsuits with every single decision they made. If so, a government takeover of health care would be the furthest thing from their minds.

Obamacare proponents would have us believe that we will add 30 million patients to the system without adding providers, we will see no decline in the quality of care for the millions of Americans currently happy with the system, and -if you act now!- we will save money in the process. But why stop there? Why not promise it will no longer rain on weekends and every day will be a great hair day?

America has the finest health care delivery system in the world. Let's not forget that and put it at risk in the name of reform. Desperate souls across the globe flock to our shores and cross our borders every day to seek our care. Why? Our system provides cures while the government-run systems from which they flee do not. Compare Europe's common cancer mortality rates to America's: breast cancer - 52 percent higher in Germany and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom; prostate cancer - a staggering 604 percent higher in the United Kingdom and 457 percent higher in Norway; colon cancer - 40 percent higher in the United Kingdom.

Look closer at the United Kingdom. Britain's higher cancer mortality rate results in 25,000 more cancer deaths per year compared to a similar population size in the United States. But because the U.S. population is roughly five times larger than the United Kingdom's, that would translate into 125,000 unnecessary American cancer deaths every year. This is more than all the mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, cousins and children in Topeka, Kan. And keep in mind, these numbers are for cancer alone. America also has better survival rates for other major killers, such as heart attacks and strokes. Whatever we do, let us not surrender the great gains we have made. First, do no harm. Lives are at stake.

Obamacare: Fixing price at any cost

The justification for Obamacare has been to control costs, but the problem is there is little in Obamacare that will do that. Instead, there are provisions that will ration care and artificially set price. This is a confusion of costs and price.

As one example, consider the implications of Obamacare's financial penalty aimed at your doctor if he seeks the expert care he has determined you need. If your doctor is in the top 10 percent of primary care physicians who refer patients to specialists most frequently - no matter how valid the reasons - he will face a 5 percent penalty on all their Medicare reimbursements for the entire year. This scheme is specifically designed to deny you the chance to see a specialist. Each year, the insidious nature of that arbitrary 10 percent rule will make things even worse as 100 percent of doctors try to stay off that list. Many doctors will try to avoid the sickest patients, and others will simply refuse to accept Medicare. Already, 42 percent of doctors have chosen that route, and it will get worse. Your mother's shiny government-issued Medicare health card is meaningless without doctors who will accept it.

Obamacare will further diminish access to health care by lowering reimbursements for medical care without regard to the costs of that care. Price controls have failed spectacularly wherever they've been tried. They have turned neighborhoods into slums and have caused supply chains to dry up when producers can no longer profit from providing their goods. Remember the Carter-era gas lines? Medical care is not immune from this economic reality. We cannot hope that our best and brightest will pursue a career in medicine, setting aside years of their lives - for me, 13 years of school and training - to enter a field that might not even pay for the student loans it took to get there.

Giving power back to people

I believe there is a better way. The problems in the American health care system are not caused by a shortage of government intrusion. They will not be solved by more government intrusion. In fact, our current problems were precisely, though unintentionally, created by government.

World War II-era wage-control measures - a form of price controls - ushered in a perverted system in which we turn to our employers for insurance and the government penalizes us if we choose to purchase insurance for ourselves. You are not given the opportunity to be a wise consumer of health care and compare prices as well as quality in any meaningful way. Worse still, your insurance company is not answerable to you because you are not its customer. It is answerable to your employer, whose interests differ from your own.

Insurance companies have been vilified for following the perverse rules that government has created for them. But it gets worse. The government, always knowing best, deploys insurance commissioners across the land to dictate what the insurance companies must provide, whether you want it or not, and each time, your premiums increase. Obamacare will make all of this worse, not better.

One of America's founding principles is our trust in the people and their economic freedom to rule their own lives. We should decouple health insurance from employers and empower patients to be consumers once again. Allow them to determine the insurance plan that best meets their families' needs and which company will provide it. This will unleash a wave of competition that will drive costs down in a way that price controls never have. Eliminate the artificial state boundary rules that protect insurance companies from true competition and watch as voters demand that their state insurance commissioners get the heck out of the way. Innovative companies will drive down costs similar to how Geico and Progressive have worked for automobile insurance. And it won't cost taxpayers a trillion dollars in the process.

This free-market approach has worked for everything from high-definition TVs to breakfast cereals, but will it work for medicine? It already is. Take Lasik eye surgery, for example. Because patients are allowed to be informed consumers and can shop anywhere, doctors work hard for their business. Services, availability and expertise have all increased, and costs have decreased. Should consumers demand it, insurance companies - now answerable to you rather than your employer - would cover it.

Between Barack and a hard place

I have personally trained and practiced in both the government-run and free-market segments of American medicine. The difference is vast. Patients see this for themselves, and this may be why, according to a recent CNN poll, they oppose Obamacare nearly 3 to 1. I am with them. It is difficult for me to speak publicly against the president on his central issue, but too much is at stake.

I wish my cousin Barack the greatest of success in office. But I feel duty-bound to rise in opposition to Obamacare. I must take a stand for my patients, my profession and, ultimately, my country. The problems caused by government will not be solved by growing government. Now that this new era of big-government takeovers has spread to our health care system, it's not just our freedoms or our wallets that are at stake. It's our lives.

Dr. Milton R. Wolf is a radiologist in Kansas. He is Barack Obama's second cousin once removed. President Obama's great-great grandfather, Thomas Creekmore McCurry, is Dr. Wolf's great-grandfather. Dr. Wolf's mother, Anna Margaret McCurry, was five years older than Mr. Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. The two were childhood friends until the Dunhams moved from Kansas to Seattle in 1955.

 

I wonder about this too. I thought that Newsweek was fairly Centrist.

 

I don't regularly read Newsweek, so I can't say if they lean one way or the other, but doing a search using the terms "Newsweek liberal?" leads me to believe that not everyone gives them the "centrist" seal of approval.

 

Well, it's all relative. If you're extreme enough, everybody is your enemy.

Of course some people prefer it that way.