I wasn’t fond of the McCain & Steele support, I am dubious over the rumors of a reality show, I was dismayed over her support of politically correct whitewashing of our language, I am REALLY dumbfounded over why Sarah Palin would go on Canadian television and talk about her families use of the Canadian socialist healthcare system. It is bad enough Mitt Romney basically created and implimented Obamacare, now we have another potential candidate who was using socialist medicine before (or while) being against it.

I dig Palin but this is the latest in a line of things that have really eroded my support for any future political run. Seriously now, the admission was unnecessary in general but asinine when we are trying to put an end to the socialist system here. I don’t care if it happened in the 1960’s or six days ago, what a silly thing to go on about now. Did she help any illegal immigrants across the border while she was getting care? If so, maybe we can hear about it while debating amnesty.

Well the Senate just passed its version of health care intervention. Now the two houses come together to loot the nation with a joint bill. Merry Christmas, the country is bankrupt.

From the Washington Times it looks like part of Harry Reid’s last minute revisions include, wait for it, tax breaks for “non-profit insurers.” Oh, well, that sounds nice doesn’t it. If they don’t want profits, they must not be evil. Let’s see, who is a non-profit insurer… hmmm… well… Blue Cross & Blue Shield. Well, they must have only a few sickly poor people under their plans right? Non-profit, that sounds like poor people… their franchise plans cover 100 Million People???? Well… some of those are for-profit franchises, so… must be OK.

Let’s see, who suggested this whole thing anyway. Michigan Senator Carl Levin proposed the breaks? Well, I am also sure it is a coincidence that Blue Cross Blue Shield was Levin’s #1 Contributor in the 2010 & 2008 election cycles… Total coincidence!

I still cannot understand why all these big old insurance companies seem to support the bill. They must know it is a great deal for the American people and are willing to accept less money as long as it means better service for Americans. Yeah, I am sure that is it.

Breaking: Senator Ben Nelson appears to have secured money for his state in return for his support of Health Care reform. The Senator is now saying he will support the bill and Harry Reid has filed additional pages to the bill that will give money to the States of Democrat holdouts including Lieberman and Nelson.

Will place more info in this post as it comes out. Obamacare and the further destruction of our economy seems within reach.

Found via Right Wing Sparkle from CNN:

Activists are setting their sights on Hadassah Lieberman, launching a celebrity-studded petition drive to convince the nation’s largest breast cancer non-profit to end the Connecticut senator’s wife role as a spokeswoman.

The move to pressure the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation came the same day Lieberman’s husband angered Democrats by announcing that he would not support an expansion of Medicare to cover individuals under the age of 55. Organizers did not point to that decision, instead citing Hadassah Lieberman’s own ties to the health care industry.

I love how you can no longer just have a differing opinion without your friends and family being obliterated. Democrat Party is just full of collective class. Way to go liberals, way to go…

Remember how a few years ago, anorexia and bulimia were destroying the lives of America’s youth? Yeah I do too, there was a time when you couldn’t avoid hearing about how female “body image” was being distorted by attractive people on television and in print advertising. Young women, en mass, were apparently racing to the bathroom to puke away a delicious meal or two.

Yes there were and are women, especially some young women, who are being ravished by terrible psychological problems and hard to deal with issues surrounding their self image. For them I feel and hope they seek and find help. There is a difference between a minority of our population suffering from something that needs real assistance and a public relations campaign forged by academics and snake oil salesman creating a media driven sense of epidemic. The craze over people who were too thin was just a craze, not unlike Y2K or Africanized Killer Bees.

Do you know how I always knew there was no mass issue with bulimia and anorexia striking American youth and destroying our nation from the inside? I have eyes and I shop at malls. While the extreme anti-female-left was pushing this notion, I could see with my own eyes that the majority of people around me, including young girls, were getting fatter and fatter. If there was an epidemic of people experiencing extreme weight loss, it sure wasn’t happening outside of JC Penny’s and definitely not Wal-Mart.

You almost never hear about anorexia or bulimia anymore. I believe that is because common sense has set in. In place of extreme weight loss fears, we are now in the midsts of a massive media campaign declaring obesity the number one problem with America. Liberals, out of nowhere, must have found the right prescription glasses, looked around the classroom and realized young girls and the rest of the population were not wasting away, they were gorging themselves on all they could find.

Obesity has become a major concern of the far left. Just as interest groups were birthed and spread throughout the 80’s and 90’s because of the belief the planet was going to get so hot that the world would explode, lefty groups now appear to be on a crusade to tie obesity to the extinction of the human species, the destruction of Health Care and yes, even global warming. Oy, do we not learn our lessons?

I have to say, I could care less about obesity. Will millions die as a result? Sure, but that is not my problem. Millions of people will also die from a plethora of other things. I will never, in my life, jump out of an airplane for recreation. If someone does and they die, not my problem and if a hundred people did it, that still doesn’t make it a concern of the federal government. If people choose to eat until their heart explodes, I don’t really care, that is their right. If they want to spend their money becoming obese, have at it. Liberty isn’t always pretty.

The new argument is that health care costs are spiraling out of control because of obesity. There is endless research making this connection and it became the cornerstone of many of the 2008 candidates health care proposals and will surely be part of the health care solutions coming out of the Congress. That is all well and good, I actually believe health care costs are rising because of obesity and other lifestyle choices. I also know, most of the people pushing the plans and vilifying restaurants and food producers, are fat.

Hillary Clinton’s plan in 2008 was loaded with ideas about how to make America healthy. Hillary Clinton is fat. Hillary actually got fatter during the campaign while she was out talking about her proposals. The woman has millions of dollars and a team of people working on her. She can afford the healthiest food and have someone prepare it for her. She has no problem preaching to others about lifestyle, yet her ass is enormous.

It isn’t just a Democrat thing either. Mike Huckabee LOVES to talk about the weight he lost and the virtues of personal responsibility leading to savings for society. I have news, Mike Huckabee is ENORMOUS again. The guy has a TV show and apparently has decided the money he makes from it is best spent binge eating. If Huckabee wants to talk about how to not stay thin, great, otherwise I have no interest.

They aren’t the only ones. Every other week it seems Oprah does a show about weight loss and has been the public face for this growing media campaign. Oprah is gigantic. A billionaire with all of her money riding on self improvement, she cannot wait to let her audience know they have a problem. She is the one with the problem. Any woman taking diet tips from Oprah needs to have her head examined.

Have you looked at most of the members of Congress pushing Health Care reform? Fat! Michael Moore made a movie about the high cost of health care. He must have run across some of this amazing research linking obesity to the high cost of care. Michael Moore, even with supposedly losing weight, is gigantic.

One of the new trends is to attempt a ban on trans fats and taxes for fatty foods. I honestly think the Oprah’s and Hillary Clinton’s of the world can only be skinny if such a stupid and useless ban or heavy tax existed. It appears to me that to keep Oprah skinny, we would have to remove from the planet, every non-vegetable and fruit and turn our streets into treadmills she could not avoid.

At the end of the day, I don’t care if Hillary Clinton or Oprah or Michael Moore are fat and not giving up a few meals to feed starving people in Uganda. They, however, care that everyone else is. Hypocrites.

If you believe in human evolution, you should recognize that over time, species either adapt or they die. This is supposedly the root of all evolutionary history. If you know how the heart and the human body work, you also know that our great ancestors would have had to face enormous obstacles in conditioning their organs to move out of the oceans and eventually walk on two legs. Pushing against the force of gravity, they managed to become stronger and adapt. Their bodies changed and things worked out.

Our bodies are either going to adapt to being gigantic or die. If human internal organs cannot figure out how to handle a Snickers bar properly over the next few hundred years, we might as well become extinct. Like all things liberals worry about, massive government action is not the answer. Time, nature, and a little common sense will prevail. Healthy doses of shame from skinny good looking people is actually part of the solution too, not the problem.

I believe Liberals were smart to wrap their distaste for a heavier population to the rising cost of health care and not spend their time actually solving their own weight problems. As a conservative, I completely agree with the notion that a lack of personal responsibility is leading to problems in our society. However, if you follow a logical and Constitutional line of thought, you would never arise at government bans, taxes and of course socialized medicine.

The logical thing to do would be to charge people who have excessive weight issues more money for things like health care. Somehow this seems to escape the liberal mind. If everyone enjoys foods with trans fats, but a percentage of the population abuses them, why charge everyone more? Additionally, why make the entire population pay the medical bills that come from this abusive population when the smaller population should be paying less? If obesity is a problem you wish to solve, this line of thought actually makes things worse because it removes consequences from the very obese.

Additionally, giving obese people who are denied or cannot afford the high cost of regular medical insurance a government run medical insurance plan, is counterproductive. The socialist notion that the strong must pay more to save the weak is the problem. Like all liberal plans, their solutions to obesity punishes everyone, to save no one, while hurting the people who make good choices.

In the end obesity will work itself out or it won’t. All of the money and time wasted to hunt this media driven epidemic will only make things worse. Is obesity a problem? Yes, for the obese. Has it become a problem for everyone else? Yes, because we all have to pay for their poor choices. So will a solution whereby everyone is punished and taxed and forced to provide for the obese, solve the problem? No, it will only make things worse.

There is one solution to obesity, eat less and work out more and society cannot do that for the obese.

Every now and again, a liberal will make an argument that is striking in stupidity even for a liberal. More often than not, it is made from Senator Barbara Boxer or some other representative from California. During debate over the Nelson health care amendment, that would limit government funding of abortion, Boxer made a very odd statement.

“We don’t tell men that if they want to make sure their, can buy insurance coverage through their pharmaceutical plan for Viagra that they can’t do it. No, we don’t do that, and I wouldn’t support that. It would be wrong. Well, it’s wrong to single out women and to say to women of this country, they can’t use their own private funds to purchase insurance that covers the whole range of reproductive health care,” Boxer said on the Senate floor. (From the Examiner)

This is one of those, “where do I begin” reactions, so I am going to limit it to just one of many lines of thought. What level of insanity must you reach to believe that if the government doesn’t fund a procedure, a citizen is being denied that procedure. From what I can tell, Boxer is asserting that choosing to have an abortion and choosing to have someone else pick up the tab for that abortion, are both the same right.

In essence, the Nelson amendment was an attempt to stop taxpayers from paying for abortion. Boxer’s argument that the amendment was saying women could not “use their own private funds to purchase insurance” is a flat out lie. Of course a woman can use her OWN FUNDS to purchase private insurance. Actually we conservatives would absolutely love it if she used her funds to purchase private insurance. If all of the uninsured used their OWN FUNDS to purchase insurance, we wouldn’t have a need for a public option and we wouldn’t be arguing over most of this health care reform.

Boxer doesn’t want a woman to use her OWN FUNDS though, she is talking about taxpayers footing the bill. So with that in mind, Boxer is suggesting that if the nation doesn’t use OUR FUNDS to pay for abortion, we are somehow denying women an abortion.

Think of it this way, if a stranger knocked on my door and asked me to fund her abortion, and I said no, would I be denying her an abortion? Of course not. Yet if we add a middle man to the mix, the federal government, why is it different? If the woman sent a representative of the federal government to my door and asked me to pay for the abortion, and I said no, I am not denying her the procedure.

Women have the ability to go out and buy a private health insurance plan that covers abortion. They can simply take the money and get an abortion too. They can even utilize one of the many liberal funded programs that will find a way for her to get the abortion regardless of cost. They do not have the right to make me pay for it. Frankly the country as a whole doesn’t have the right to make me pay for anyones health insurance.

Additionally, Boxer’s comparison somehow makes me believe that she also thinks Viagra is a right. If a man walked up to my door and asked me to pay for his erection, I would probably punch him in the face and call the police. So you have my answer on whether denying him the money, is denying him the right.

Abortion and erections are just two of the things I don’t think I should be paying for with my taxes. Arguing that by not paying for them, I am denying someones rights, is arguing against the Constitution and against my own individual liberty. It is my own choice to decide when I am my brothers keeper and what that means, not the federal governments unless it deals with War, national contagion, etc.

The single dumbest complaint concerning health care in the United States is cost. Let me put it to you plain and simple. If a surgeon reaches inside of your family members body, removes a kidney, reaches inside of your body, inserts that kidney, and both of you live, that is going to cost something. To expect that it would cost nothing, is asinine. To expect that it would be covered by a $10 copay or even a $1000 deductible, is asinine.

Let me give you a little context about the “outrageous” rise in health care cost. It wasn’t long ago, let’s say a hundred and fifty years or so, that revolutionary health care amounted to, “Take this whisky, try not to cry as I amputate your leg.” Then things became better. Less than a hundred years ago or so health care amounted to, “Take this morphine, try not to cry as I amputate your leg.”

Today we have laser scalpels, fiber optic cameras, MRI machines, gene therapy, slews of vaccines, designer antibiotics, sonograms, and other technologies that make the state of medicine just a few decades ago seem like barbarism. From research we now know more about the human body and its operations than was ever thought possible. That research costs enormous sums of money and an investment of time from our nation’s most industrious minds.

When people complain about the rising cost of a doctors visit or a trip to the specialist, they completely disregard the enormous sums of money and the investment of time needed to develop their doctors skill. They ignore the technology that is being used to diagnose and treat them and the cost it took not just to develop but then manufacture and now maintain. Arguments for Government run health care systems almost always ignore this cost too. That is why the most exciting innovation and sought after medical surgeons come from the United States and are not found in Canada. That is why American developed technology is fed into innovation starved nations that have socialized medicine.

The main benefit of our technological and intellectual advance, is that people are living longer than ever before. Ailments that were once life threatening are now easily cured. Other ailments that were never thought to be curable are. It costs an enormous amount of money and drains an equally enormous amount of resources from our society to maintain our growing life expectancy. To believe that we can continue to keep our life expectance rise, but watch medical bills decrease is to ignore fundamental principals of economics.

Put another way, you cannot subscribe to a service that gets better every month because it adds more features that cost more money to acquire while expecting that each month you will pay less. That service would not be around very long with that business model. Somehow people expect this to be the business model for health care. Add more people who don’t pay while expecting the level of service to rise and the cost to consumers who do pay to fall. There is no way a thinking person could ever expect that to work. That, however, is exactly the argument being pushed by Democrats.

Of course the cost of health care has gone up with our growing life expectance. The drain on our resources and money to keep people alive is enormous. The reason many fear the potential creation of “death panels” or Government agencies doing the work currently done by private insurance, is that our technology has become so vast, individuals who have no ability to live on their own can be kept alive for many years by machine.

Each of us creates a benefit to the world by being alive in some way. This can be as small as giving a smile and encouragement to a child who will take that and grow. It can be as mundane as the labor we provide for industry. It can be as important as innovation we create that revolutionizes the world. We are facing a growing trend of having people live so long with a dependence on technology, that they consume far more resources than their frail bodies provide. To be honest, some of these people consume more resources than they ever provided to society in their entire life to society. That is a judgement call though, one I don’t want the government making.

Currently we pay doctors and insurance companies to help make decisions with families to decide how these matters are handled. For an alternative, consider what happened when government became involved in the Terri Schiavo case. Now imagine that circus happening on a daily basis when our nation has a say in making health care decisions for individuals. Now imagine the enormous cost the public and individuals to battle these decisions in court.

In addition to all of this, American citizens have adopted terrible lifestyle habits. We are fatter than ever in our history, more sedentary and yet more stressed. Those who work in our nation encounter extreme amounts of mental stress and are working far more than the forty hours that often appears on their timecards. Those who manage homes and children have to deal with immense pressures from outside influences. They face financial struggles and mental stresses that can destroy households. We have an enormous divorce rate leaving families broken and children starting life in poverty. While we enjoy the healthiest era of our existence, we make personal choices and lead lives that are equally as unhealthy. We also face problems with alcoholism, drug abuse, promiscuous sex and the spread of disease from the increased ability for sick individuals to travel great distances at rapid speed.

The cost is great to bridge the gap between the ability to cure our ails and the personal choices that destroy ones health through action or mental stress. The contributions to the growing cost of health care are vast but they are easily understandable. The level of care in our country has made a quantum leap from just a few decades ago. Sane individuals cannot expect this level to continue increasing but not expect it to cost enormous sums of money. Nor can they expect to cover more people, over a longer period of time, for less money.

Undoubtedly there is waste, fraud and abuse. All of this needs to be rooted out, not just from the medical community but from the government programs like Medicaid that already exist. This should be agreeable by everyone. Democrats, however, have repeatedly foiled attempts to actually remove waste from the system. Coveting their voter blocks over the wealth and well being of our citizens, they have resisted tort reform and crackdowns on Medicare and Medicaid waste and abuse. Resisting new oversight of government programs already in place, they simply want to expand them. This ignores the reality that expanding systems of abuse will only lead to more abuse. In this case ignoring abuse will also result in the continued massive rise in the cost of health care, the very problem their expansion is supposed to solve.

Put simply, the level of expectation of individuals for a growth in care but a decline in cost is baffling.

The argument: “Republicans are so evil and terrible they don’t want this poor soul here or that poor soul there who is crushed by the evil corporations to have public health care.”

The retort: “This poor soul here and that poor soul there don’t want public health care either.”

The rejoinder: “That is because you are all stupid and corrupted by talk radio and are racist.”

The obvious: You catch more flies with honey. That is to say you make better arguments if you know what is actually in the bill that was passed and don’t just rebuke every cogent question or argument with the assertion of what you SUPPOSE reform will be then vilify those asking the questions or making the arguments.

Why test socialized medicine? Obama says it is good, it must be!

From NotSoSure.org found via ipolitics posterous and techRepublican.