Four Days Left Until Obamacare Obliterates America

For the first time in a very long while, it's back to politics again.  There are just four days left until Obamacare begins its full force of implementation.  If you are reading this, I will assume you have read my rants in the past about this bill, so I won't go into full-detail mode.  However, it does bear some recapping of the worst points using current info.  I'm going to structure this post as a summary, and include a bunch of links at the bottom where you can check things out for yourself if you want (and much, much more than I've included here).  In my opinion, the more informed we all are, the better!  This is going to be long, but hang in there...it's worth it, I promise!

First of all, this is not free health care for everyone.  Get that thought out of your system right now.  In fact, the only people who will be getting free health care out of this are people on welfare or other government assistance who live entirely off the work of other people.  Chances are extremely good that if you are reading this, you will be paying for the health care of people who can't be bothered with icky things like work and responsibility.  To be fair, there will be some who honestly cannot afford health insurance who will now be able to get it.  But...there are far more people who currently have health insurance they're perfectly happy with but will be losing it due to Obamacare.

Here's how this will work in a general sense.  The IRS will enforce the mandate for individuals and businesses to prove they have insurance via your tax returns each year.  If you don't have insurance, you'll pay a fine.  This doesn't give you coverage, just keeps you out of jail.  If you have a doctor and a plan you like, you can keep it...unless they bail.  You see, Obamacare is going to lock in the costs of procedures and medication, and at the same time limit the amount of reimbursement that medical providers can get.  Thus, many small clinics and doctors are going to go out of business (as if the doctor shortage isn't bad enough already).  Insurance companies are in the same boat, and the smaller ones will start dropping out of the market right away.  Even the larger ones will eventually founder, but they're supporting Obamacare right now because they're going to make serious bank until they go bankrupt.  But, as these health care providers and insurance companies fail, the marketplace will get smaller and smaller, eliminating competition and further driving prices up.  And what happens when these companies drop their employer sponsored health care plans?  Their employees will be forced to turn to the only outlet available - the state-run government exchanges.

Problem is, only about 15 states are even planning to implement the exchanges, and none of those are ready.  In fact, not even the federal system that will supposedly tie all of these state-run exchanges together will be ready until at least a month after the actual start date of Obamacare.  Government efficiency at its finest!  This incompetence is precisely what has caused most of the major milestones in Obamacare thus far to be delayed by months or years, and some key provisions actually killed off entirely.  Now that the full implementation is drawing near, they've had to release the real numbers on costs (not just estimates anymore), and most average families will see instant cost increases of thousands of dollars per year just to keep the same plans they had.  In many cases, plans will be eliminated altogether.  It's going to get ugly fast.  Anyway, what do you suppose will happen if your employer drops coverage and your state is either not participating or not ready?  Best guess is that the next few months will be a giant cluster of chaos, skyrocketing costs, and failure after failure.  It will become such a mess that there will be only one entity with the size and resources to step in and take control - the federal government.

And at that point, we will have the kind of single-payer government controlled health care system that has destroyed health care in nation after nation throughout the world.  The government will literally be in control of deciding who gets what health care, medicine, and procedures, and everyone's life will be reduced to a formula of how valuable they are to the state.  If you understand politics, you will also understand that some will be "more valuable" simply by "donating" money to the right people at the right time.

This is the inevitable end result.  It will be a few years down the road, but it will happen.

In my opinion, there are several levels of problems with Obamacare.  First and foremost, it's an economic debacle of historic proportions.  It was sold as a cost-saving measure, but company after company has sought waivers so they don't have to participate precisely because it's so costly it will swamp them.  These are huge companies with thousands of employees, too, like McDonald's, Caterpillar, and numerous unions (and you know it's terrible when even die-hard liberal unions have turned against it!).  It has already raised taxes (Obama admitted it just this week), and will continue to raise more.  In fact, the average family will pay another $5,000-20,000 more each year in health care costs, and that will be for the basic plans.  The quality of care will decline because of things like taxation on medical device innovation, the departure of many highly talented medical professionals from practice, and a flood of people trying to get their "free" health care.  One definition of economics is the distribution of finite resources across infinite demand, and that's exactly what will happen.  You see, prices have already gone up on health care because of the impending costs of not only the wide array of new taxes, but also the massive burden of simply managing the whole system.  People are already losing their jobs because of this, and many companies are refusing to hire because of Obamacare.  A couple easy examples are the mandate for every company to provide coverage for each employee...if they are 50 employees or larger.  Guess what number of employees many small businesses are now cutting back to?  Hm...49?  Why, it must be a coincidence!  Similarly, businesses are required to provide coverage for all employees who work 30 or more hours per week.  Guess what number thousands upon thousands of working Americans are having their hours cut back to each week?  Hm...29?  Bingo!  Another coincidence, to be sure.  You see the point.  This is already happening, and has been happening for the past three years, a large part of why the economy steadfastly refuses to actually recover despite the repeated assertions in the media.  And these effects are resulting in job loss and hours loss simply as a pre-emptive survival effort before Obamacare is actually implemented.  It will only get worse three days from now.

Second, it's a terribly offensive violation of individual freedom.  Following the scenario I mentioned above, you will literally have a nameless, faceless bureaucrat decide if you can get the procedures you need, or if your child can get the medicine that will save their life, or if your elderly parents just need to take a pill and go die quietly in the corner.  No, this is not hyperbole.  It happens in socialized medicine every day - ask your favorite Englishman how that works out.  Sure, if you're young and healthy, you're valuable enough to the Almighty State to keep you alive and ticking, but if you fall short on their formula chart, there is nothing you can do about it but suffer and die.  Also, if abortion is important to you, it will open the floodgates of taxpayer money to fund abortion-on-demand whether you like it or not.

Third, it's a control thing.  Ultimately, the heart of government-controlled health care is control of everything.  And yes, I mean everything.  If the government runs health care -- and therefore pays for every procedure and medication you may or may not need -- then they get to dictate the rules surrounding health care, do they not?  If the government deems something to be "unhealthy" or risky to people, then they have a responsibility to prevent it from becoming a problem to society, correct?  So, it is only logical that the government can dictate things like how big a soda can be, what temperature you keep your thermostat on, how much salt you eat in a day, whether or not you can take an elevator up to your office, and so on.  If you think this is far-fetched, just as the nearest New Yorker you can find.  They're already living it with Nanny Bloomberg.  This will happen on a massive, nation-wide scale, and the government will control everything by calling it a health risk.

So you see, this is a true disaster waiting to happen in every sense of the word.  It's an economic debacle that cannot possibly succeed in the real world, it's the single largest intrusion into personal freedom in the history of this nation, and it's going to give the federal government control over every aspect of your life.

Perhaps the most telling damnation about Obamacare is the fact that Congress, the President, the Supreme Court, and their staffs have exempted themselves from having to deal with it.  That's right, the very people who have forced this abomination upon the American people know how awful it's going to be, and have decided that they don't want any part of it themselves (aside from controlling it, that is).  For those few who have claimed they're going to join the exchanges just to prove how wonderful they are, we've seen leaked memos warning them not to do so because of all the problems that are going to take place.  There's a reason Congress is polling at historically low levels, Obama is at his lowest polling approval of his Presidency, and more than 2/3 of Americans believe America is headed in the wrong direction.  While we're talking polls, if you look at just about any reputable polling firm, Americans have wanted no part of Obamacare - the poll ratings are anywhere from 50%-60% in favor of repealing it altogether, and have remained so for over three years since it was signed into law.

So...what can you do about it?  Fortunately, there is one last chance to stop it, but it needs some explanation so bear with me.

The House recently passed a bill to fund the government (called a continuing resolution) for a few more months.  Included in that bill was full funding for 100% of the federal government...except Obamacare.  If Obamacare isn't funded, it grinds to a halt.  Repeal or other dismantling measures would have to happen separately later, but the key is that Obamacare doesn't begin four days from now.  Obama and the Democrats are accusing Republicans of trying to "shut down the government" (and equating them with terrorists, arsonists, and kidnappers) but that is simply not the case - the bill in question funds every other part of the government except for the part that a HUGE majority of Americans don't want.  Don't buy the propaganda.  Anyway, the bill is now waiting for a vote in the Senate.

In the Senate, there are actually two votes on each bill.  First comes the cloture vote, which is just a vote on whether or not the debate on the bill concludes.  Until a cloture vote passes on a bill, the debate remains ongoing.  Once cloture passes, then a vote can be held on the bill itself, and that's the vote that determines whether or not the Senate kills the bill or approves it and sends it on to the President.  The cloture vote requires 60 to pass, but the Democrat leadership in the Senate has pledged to use a (backdoor, unethical, and unconstitutional) parliamentary trick to pass the bill itself by simply removing the defunding for Obamacare and sending the rest on, and that would require just 51 votes.  There are 54 Democrat Senators, so it's a guaranteed victory for them...once cloture is passed.

That's where you and I come in, and that's where our last chance is.

The cloture vote is scheduled for Friday afternoon or Saturday.  Some Republican Senators are likely to vote in favor of cloture and then against the bill itself in order to take both sides of the issue - they can claim they opposed it (knowing that their constituents don't want it) but they can allow it to be enacted anyway (because all of them, Rep and Dem alike, want that control over you, and none of them have to participate in it, anyway).  It's a show vote, one designed purely for the visuals, not for the substance of what's going on.

This cannot be allowed.  Any Senator who says they don't know this is what will happen is a flaming liar because this is how the Senate works all the time.  It's what they do.  So, it is absolutely imperative that at least 41 Senators vote against cloture, thus preventing the debate from ending, and effectively killing the continuing resolution and defunding Obamacare (for now).  The only way this will happen is if the Senate switch board is melted down on Friday with calls from angry constituents demanding they vote against cloture.

While I believe that most of our "representatives" in Washington really hate hearing from us and try to ignore us as much as possible, mass numbers of angry callers does still have some effect on them, and we need every possible caller all day long on Friday.  On occasion, for the really hotly contested issues over the past few years, there have been so many calls flooding the Capitol Switchboard that it has actually shut down.  That's what we need now.  You can look up your state's Senators' contact information here.  The Missouri and Kansas Senators are as follows:

Blunt, Roy - (R - MO)	Class III
260 RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-5721
Contact: www.blunt.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/contact-form?p=cont...
McCaskill, Claire - (D - MO)	Class I
506 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-6154
Contact: www.mccaskill.senate.gov/?p=contact

Moran, Jerry - (R - KS)	Class III
361A RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-6521
Contact: moran.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/e-mail-jerry
Roberts, Pat - (R - KS)	Class II
109 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-4774
Contact: www.roberts.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=EmailPat

The switchboard itself can route you to any Senator or Representative's office, and that number is: 202-224-3121

Call your Senators and tell them that you oppose Obamacare and urge them to vote NO on cloture.  When you have a spare moment in the day, hit those contact links and send them an email.  Call again later.  Email again.  Over and over and over...

One last thought before I wrap up.  Some say that we should allow Obamacare to become law so that everyone can see what a wreck it is, and that this will prompt a mass rejection of it.  That's asinine for a couple reasons.  First of all, the American people have already rejected Obamacare.  They've been rejecting it by 2-to-1 ratios for three solid years.  The question of rejection has been answered beyond doubt, but Washington isn't listening.  They need to be forced to listen now.  Second, that logic is ridiculously stupid.  It's like saying that you should allow the Titanic to hit the iceberg so that once it's sinking you can say, "Ha! I told you we shouldn't have hit that iceberg!"  No, once we hit, it's over.  We need to miss the iceberg altogether.

This is it.  This is the endgame.  If we don't end this now, it is extremely unlikely that we will ever be able to rid ourselves and our children of Obamacare.

Do it.

 

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