Date: January 9, 2010 8:17:08 AM CST

Subject: Open Letter to Nixon on Healthcare

Dear Governor Nixon:

A federal healthcare takeover and mandate thrust upon us by President Obama, Senator Majority Leader Reid and Speaker Nancy Pelosi is on the brink of being passed into law despite the overwhelming public outcry opposing their efforts.  The legislation is convoluted and full of provisions that will raise the cost of living for most everyone in our state.  Up to this point you have chosen to remain silent on whether you support the efforts of your fellow Democrats in Congress.

Despite your silence Governors in other states sounded the alarm that this legislation will bankrupt their states.  Even fellow Democrat Governor Bredesen of our neighbor state Tennessee called this legislation the “mother of all unfunded mandates” and opposed the legislation.  Missouri’s share of the cost of an expanded Medicaid program would be as high as $450 million per year.  The Medicaid program already requires more than $100 million per year in new funding for natural caseload growth.

Some argue this federal takeover is an infringement on state rights and unconstitutional.  Regardless of this issue, unless you cut funding to education, Missouri simply does not have the money to afford President Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi’s social experiment.  Governor, you know the legislation being forced through by your Democrat Party will bankrupt the state of Missouri and yet you say nothing.  The time has come for you to take a side on this issue.

Will you stand with me and speak out against the tax increases, healthcare takeover and mandates being proposed by the federal government?  Or will you abdicate your position to the powers of your fellow Democrats President Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.  Missouri deserves an answer.

Sincerely,

The  Last of The Kennedy Dynasty

As soon as his cancer was detected, I noticed the immediate attempt at the ”canonization” of old Teddy Kennedy by the mainstream media. They are saying what a “great American” he is.  I say, let’s get a couple things clear & not twist the facts to change the real history.

1.    He was caught cheating at Harvard when he attended it.  He was expelled twice, once for cheating on a test, and once for paying a classmate to cheat for him.

2.    While expelled, Kennedy enlisted in the Army, but mistakenly signed up for four years instead of two.  Oops!  The man can’t count to four!  His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, former U.S. Ambassador to England (a step up from bootlegging liquor into the US from Canada  during prohibition), pulled the necessary strings to have his enlistment shortened to two years, and to ensure that he served in Europe, not Korea , where a war was raging.  No preferential treatment for him! (like he charged that President Bush received).

3.    Kennedy was assigned to Paris, never advanced beyond the rank of Private, and returned to Harvard upon being discharged.  Imagine a person of his “education” NEVER advancing past the rank of  Private!

4.    While attending law school at the University of Virginia, he was cited for reckless driving four times, including once when he was clocked driving 90 miles per hour in a residential neighborhood with his headlights off after dark.  Yet his Virginia driver’s license was never revoked.  Coincidentally, he passed the bar exam in 1959.  Amazing!

5.    In 1964, he was seriously injured in a plane crash, and hospitalized for several  months.  Test results done by the hospital at the time he was admitted had shown he was legally intoxicated.  The results of those tests remained a “state secret” until in the 1980’s when the report was unsealed.  Didn’t hear about that from the unbiased media, did we?

6.    On July 19, 1969, Kennedy attended a party on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts .  At about 11:00 PM, he borrowed his chauffeur’s keys to his Oldsmobile limousine, and offered to give a ride home to Mary Jo Kopechne, a campaign worker.  Leaving the island via an unlit bridge with no guard rail, Kennedy steered the car off the bridge, flipped, and into Poucha Pond.

7.    He swam to shore and walked back to the party, passing several houses and a fire station.  Two friends then returned with him to the scene of the accident.  According to their later testimony, they told him what he already knew – that he was required by law to immediately report the accident to the authorities.  Instead Kennedy made his way to his hotel, called his lawyer, and went to sleep.  Kennedy called the police the next morning and by then the wreck had already been discovered.  Before dying, Kopechne had scratched at the upholstered floor above her head in the upside-down car.

The Kennedy family began “calling in favors”, ensuring that any inquiry would be contained.  Her corpse was whisked out-of-state to her family, before an autopsy could be conducted.  Further details are uncertain, but after the accident Kennedy says he repeatedly dove under the water trying to rescue Kopechne and he didn’t call police because he
was in a state of shock. It is widely assumed Kennedy was drunk, and he held off calling police in hopes that his family could fix the problem overnight.  Since the accident, Kennedy’s “political enemies” have referred to him as the distinguished Senator from Chappaquiddick.  He pled guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, and was given a SUSPENDED SENTENCE OF TWO MONTHS.  Kopechne’s family received a small payout from the Kennedy’s insurance policy, and never sued.  There was  later an effort to have her body exhumed and autopsied,  but her family  successfully fought against this in court, and  Kennedy’s family  paid their attorney’s bills… a “token of  friendship”?

8.    Kennedy has held his Senate seat for more than forty years, but considering his longevity, his accomplishments seem scant.  He authored or argued for legislation that ensured a variety of civil rights, increased the minimum wage in 1981, made access to health care easier for the indigent, and funded Meals on Wheels for fixed-income seniors and is widely held as the “standard-bearer for liberalism”. In his very first Senate roll, he was the floor manager for the bill that turned U.S. immigration policy upside down and opened the floodgate for immigrants from third world countries.

9.    Since that time, he has been the prime instigator and author of every expansion of an increase in immigration, up to and including the latest attempt to grant amnesty to illegal aliens.  Not to mention the pious grilling he gave the last two Supreme Court nominees, as if he was the standard bearer for the nation in matters of “what’s right”.  What a pompous ass!

10.    He is known around Washington as a public drunk, loud, boisterous and very disrespectful to ladies.  JERK is a better description than “great American”.  ”A blonde in every pond”  is his motto.

Let’s not allow the spin doctors make this jerk a hero — how quickly the American public forgets what his real legacy is.  Let’s keep this going for truth, justice and the American way!

On Thursday, an astounding 280,000 Organizing for America supporters gathered online to huddle with the President at our National Health Care Forum. With Congress about to return to Washington to make historic decisions on health insurance reform, the President chose this critical moment to speak directly to the OFA community. He reminded us of how far we’ve come and what we can accomplish together:

Remember one thing: Nothing is more powerful than millions of voices calling for change. That’s how we won this election. You know this, and that’s why since OFA launched its health reform campaign in June you’ve hosted 11,000 events in more than 2,500 towns in every single state and every single congressional district…I am absolutely confident that we can get this done, but I want everybody to remember, this has never been easy….We are not going to give up now. We are going to get this done.

Now it’s up to us to take the next step. This week, we need to make sure every member of Congress heads back to Washington hearing overwhelming support for change. Lies and fear must not have the last word about the health reform America so desperately needs. So here’s what you can do: Find and attend a “Let’s Get It Done: Health Insurance Reform Now” event near you.

There are thousands of events, in every part of the country. In some places, we’re rallying near local congressional offices to deliver signatures of support from voters. In others we’re meeting in high-traffic areas to offer passers-by an easy way to get the facts and call Congress, thanking those fighting for reform and urging others to stand with their constituents. Wherever you live, you can find a powerful way to show Congress, the media, and our neighbors that the American people have one clear message about health reform: Let’s get it done.

Answer the President’s call — find and attend an event near you:

http://my.barackobama.com/GetItDone

Mises Daily by Yuri N. Maltsev | Posted on 8/21/2009

In 1918, the Soviet Union became the first country to promise universal “cradle-to-grave” healthcare coverage, to be accomplished through the complete socialization of medicine. The “right to health” became a “constitutional right” of Soviet citizens.

The proclaimed advantages of this system were that it would “reduce costs” and eliminate the “waste” that stemmed from “unnecessary duplication and parallelism” — i.e., competition.

These goals were similar to the ones declared by Mr. Obama and Ms. Pelosi — attractive and humane goals of universal coverage and low costs. What’s not to like?

The system had many decades to work, but widespread apathy and low quality of work paralyzed the healthcare system. In the depths of the socialist experiment, healthcare institutions in Russia were at least a hundred years behind the average US level. Moreover, the filth, odors, cats roaming the halls, drunken medical personnel, and absence of soap and cleaning supplies added to an overall impression of hopelessness and frustration that paralyzed the system. According to official Russian estimates, 78 percent of all AIDS victims in Russia contracted the virus through dirty needles or HIV-tainted blood in the state-run hospitals.

Irresponsibility, expressed by the popular Russian saying “They pretend they are paying us and we pretend we are working,” resulted in appalling quality of service, widespread corruption, and extensive loss of life. My friend, a famous neurosurgeon in today’s Russia, received a monthly salary of 150 rubles — one third of the average bus driver’s salary.

In order to receive minimal attention by doctors and nursing personnel, patients had to pay bribes. I even witnessed a case of a “nonpaying” patient who died trying to reach a lavatory at the end of the long corridor after brain surgery. Anesthesia was usually “not available” for abortions or minor ear, nose, throat, and skin surgeries. This was used as a means of extortion by unscrupulous medical bureaucrats.

“Slavery certainly ‘reduced costs’ of labor, ‘eliminated the waste’ of bargaining for wages, and avoided ‘unnecessary duplication and parallelism’.”

To improve the statistics concerning the numbers of people dying within the system, patients were routinely shoved out the door before taking their last breath.

Being a People’s Deputy in the Moscow region from 1987 to 1989, I received many complaints about criminal negligence, bribes taken by medical apparatchiks, drunken ambulance crews, and food poisoning in hospitals and child-care facilities. I recall the case of a fourteen-year-old girl from my district who died of acute nephritis in a Moscow hospital. She died because a doctor decided that it was better to save “precious” X-ray film (imported by the Soviets for hard currency) instead of double-checking his diagnosis. These X-rays would have disproven his diagnosis of neuropathic pain.

Instead, the doctor treated the teenager with a heat compress, which killed her almost instantly. There was no legal remedy for the girl’s parents and grandparents. By definition, a single-payer system cannot allow any such remedy. The girl’s grandparents could not cope with this loss and they both died within six months. The doctor received no official reprimand.

Not surprisingly, government bureaucrats and Communist Party officials, as early as 1921 (three years after Lenin’s socialization of medicine), realized that the egalitarian system of healthcare was good only for their personal interest as providers, managers, and rationers — but not as private users of the system.

So, as in all countries with socialized medicine, a two-tier system was created: one for the “gray masses” and the other, with a completely different level of service, for the bureaucrats and their intellectual servants. In the USSR, it was often the case that while workers and peasants were dying in the state hospitals, the medicine and equipment that could save their lives was sitting unused in the nomenklatura system.

At the end of the socialist experiment, the official infant-mortality rate in Russia was more than 2.5 times as high as in the United States and more than five times that of Japan. The rate of 24.5 deaths per 1,000 live births was questioned recently by several deputies to the Russian Parliament, who claim that it is seven times higher than in the United States. This would make the Russian death rate 55 compared to the US rate of 8.1 per 1,000 live births.

Having said that, I should make it clear that the United States has one of the highest rates of the industrialized world only because it counts all dead infants, including premature babies, which is where most of the fatalities occur.

Most countries do not count premature-infant deaths. Some don’t count any deaths that occur in the first 72 hours. Some countries don’t even count any deaths from the first two weeks of life. In Cuba, which boasts a very low infant-mortality rate, infants are only registered when they are several months old, thereby leaving out of the official statistics all infant deaths that take place within the first several months of life.

In the rural regions of Karakalpakia, Sakha, Chechnya, Kalmykia, and Ingushetia, the infant mortality rate is close to 100 per 1,000 births, putting these regions in the same category as Angola, Chad, and Bangladesh. Tens of thousands of infants fall victim to influenza every year, and the proportion of children dying from pneumonia and tuberculosis is on the increase. Rickets, caused by a lack of vitamin D, and unknown in the rest of the modern world, is killing many young people.

Uterine damage is widespread, thanks to the 7.3 abortions the average Russian woman undergoes during childbearing years. Keeping in mind that many women avoid abortions altogether, the 7.3 average means that many women have a dozen or more abortions in their lifetime.

Even today, according to the State Statistics Committee, the average life expectancy for Russian men is less than 59 years — 58 years and 11 months — while that for Russian women is 72 years. The combined figure is 65 years and three months.[1] By comparison, the average life span for men in the United States is 73 years and for women 79 years. In the United States, life expectancy at birth for the total population has reached an all-time American high of 77.5 years, up from 49.2 years just a century ago. The Russian life expectancy at birth is 12 years lower.[2]

After seventy years of socialism, 57 percent of all Russian hospitals did not have running hot water, and 36 percent of hospitals located in rural areas of Russia did not have water or sewage at all. Isn’t it amazing that socialist government, while developing space exploration and sophisticated weapons, would completely ignore the basic human needs of its citizens?

“The filth, odors, cats roaming the halls, drunken medical personnel, and absence of soap and cleaning supplies added to an overall impression of hopelessness and frustration that paralyzed the system.”

The appalling quality of service is not simply characteristic of “barbarous” Russia and other Eastern European nations: it is a direct result of the government monopoly on healthcare and it can happen in any country. In “civilized” England, for example, the waiting list for surgeries is nearly 800,000 out of a population of 55 million. State-of-the-art equipment is nonexistent in most British hospitals. In England, only 10 percent of the healthcare spending is derived from private sources.

Britain pioneered in developing kidney-dialysis technology, and yet the country has one of the lowest dialysis rates in the world. The Brookings Institution (hardly a supporter of free markets) found that every year 7,000 Britons in need of hip replacements, between 4,000 and 20,000 in need of coronary bypass surgery, and some 10,000 to 15,000 in need of cancer chemotherapy are denied medical attention in Britain.

Age discrimination is particularly apparent in all government-run or heavily regulated systems of healthcare. In Russia, patients over 60 are considered worthless parasites and those over 70 are often denied even elementary forms of healthcare.

In the United Kingdom, in the treatment of chronic kidney failure, those who are 55 years old are refused treatment at 35 percent of dialysis centers. Forty-five percent of 65-year-old patients at the centers are denied treatment, while patients 75 or older rarely receive any medical attention at these centers.

In Canada, the population is divided into three age groups in terms of their access to healthcare: those below 45, those 45–65, and those over 65. Needless to say, the first group, who could be called the “active taxpayers,” enjoys priority treatment.

Advocates of socialized medicine in the United States use Soviet propaganda tactics to achieve their goals. Michael Moore is one of the most prominent and effective socialist propagandists in America. In his movie, Sicko, he unfairly and unfavorably compares health care for older patients in the United States with complex and incurable diseases to healthcare in France and Canada for young women having routine babies. Had he done the reverse — i.e., compared healthcare for young women in the United States having babies to older patients with complex and incurable diseases in socialized healthcare systems — the movie would have been the same, except that the US healthcare system would look ideal, and the UK, Canada, and France would look barbaric.

Now we in the United States are being prepared for discrimination in treatment of the elderly when it comes to healthcare. Ezekiel Emanuel is director of the Clinical Bioethics Department at the US National Institutes of Health and an architect of Obama’s healthcare-reform plan. He is also the brother of Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s White House chief of staff. Foster Friess reports that Ezekiel Emanuel has written that health services should not be guaranteed to

“individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”[3]

An equally troubling article, coauthored by Emanuel, appeared in the medical journal The Lancet in January 2009. The authors write that

“unlike allocation [of healthcare] by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years. Treating 65-year-olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.“[4]

Socialized medicine will create massive government bureaucracies — similar to our unified school districts — impose costly job-destroying mandates on employers to provide the coverage, and impose price controls that will inevitably lead to shortages and poor quality of service. It will also lead to nonprice rationing (i.e., rationing based on political considerations, corruption, and nepotism) of healthcare by government bureaucrats.

Real “savings” in a socialized healthcare system could be achieved only by squeezing providers and denying care — there is no other way to save. The same arguments were used to defend the cotton farming in the South prior to the Civil War. Slavery certainly “reduced costs” of labor, “eliminated the waste” of bargaining for wages, and avoided “unnecessary duplication and parallelism.”

In supporting the call for socialized medicine, American healthcare professionals are like sheep demanding the wolf: they do not understand that the high cost of medical care in the United States is partially based on the fact that American healthcare professionals have the highest level of remuneration in the world. Another source of the high cost of our healthcare is existing government regulations on the industry, regulations that prevent competition from lowering the cost. Existing rules such as “certificates of need,” licensing, and other restrictions on the availability of healthcare services prevent competition and, therefore, result in higher prices and fewer services.

Socialized medical systems have not served to raise general health or living standards anywhere. In fact, both analytical reasoning and empirical evidence point to the opposite conclusion. But the dismal failure of socialized medicine to raise people’s health and longevity has not affected its appeal for politicians, administrators, and their intellectual servants in search of absolute power and total control.

Most countries enslaved by the Soviet empire moved out of a fully socialized system through privatization and insuring competition in the healthcare system. Others, including many European social democracies, intend to privatize the healthcare system in the long run and decentralize medical control. The private ownership of hospitals and other units is seen as a critical determining factor of the new, more efficient, and humane system.

Yuri N. Maltsev, senior fellow of the Mises Institute, worked as an economist on Mikhail Gorbachev’s economic reform team before defecting to the United States. He is the editor of Requiem for Marx. He teaches economics at Carthage College.

A long, long time ago

I can still remember

Oh, the protests used to make me smile

Cause I knew we could ram it thru

Before they even had a clue

Then maybe they’ll shut-up for a while

But the protests grew and made me shiver

Pelosi and Reid could not deliver

Now our push for health care has to wait

Til September [Spoken: or October or next year]

I can’t remember if I cried

When I heard the why’s and organized

But something told me deep inside

That day National Health Care died.

So I’d lied, lied at every townhall in sight

Drove my Chevy cross the country tryin’ to put up a fight

The good ol’ boys were standing right there outside

Sayin’ this will be the day that it dies

This will be the day Obama Care dies

We were gonna run it all on our own

But Congressmen and Senators were gettin’ stoned back home

That’s not how it was supposed to be

We used to be treated like a king and queen

And the sweater she borrowed from LL Bean

And my horse could part the stormy, stormy seas

But now everytime I hit the stage

Bitter crowds appear in fits of rage

Somewhere down in hell

There my members dwell

I was blown away by Bob and Bart

And the redneck neighbors with their pickup truck

But I knew I was out of luck

The day that health care died

Even though I lied, lied at every townhall in sight

Drove my chevy ‘cross the country tryin’ to put up a fight

The good ol’ boys were standing right there outside

Sayin’ this will be the day that it dies

This will be the day Obama Care dies

Even though I lied, lied at every townhall in sight

Drove my chevy ‘cross the country tryin’ to put up a fight

The good ol’ boys were standing right there outside

Sayin’ this will be the day that it dies

This will be the day Obama Care dies

[Spoken: Uh...Would you be interested in a health care co-op?]

Get involved, call Congress, go to congressional forums, participate in tea parties.

Health Care is just one of many things our government is pushing so they will have more and more control of our lives and our money. Obama and company are destroying our economy, putting more and more people out of work, hoping to make people more dependent on Government.  We are losing our freedom every day.  Stay alert because they are throwing everything at us, keeping us distracted, calling us the MOB because we don’t agree with their takeover.

I want my children and your children to have the same opportunities in life that I and my parents had.

In regard to health care, please don’t be fooled by the ol “competition” argument. Private business cannot compete with government.  Econ 101. Plus the Obama administration has clearly indicated this is just the first step to get to ‘Universal Health Care’.  Then it is all about cost benefit analysis.  The old, the sick, those needing treatment deemed too expensive; they will be denied treatment.  The old will be given pain pills to “die with dignity”.  Obama said as much.

Yes, health care needs to be looked at, just not taken over by the federal government.

I shutter to think what would happen to my parents, my in-laws under Universal health care.  They would not treat my Mom and Dad, maybe not my husband based on his past health issues, they would be left to die. Very scary stuff when the government decides who gets and who doesn’t.  Plus Congress and Prez are excluding themselves from the bill.  Good enough for us not for them.

If you have gotten this far —–

This is the complete Fleckman document, (pages beyond 498) http://www.docstoc.com/docs/8851473/The-Health-Care-BillWhats-In-It

Dont miss videos of how the Dems are handling their recess events in MO.

Organized by the POTUS (president of the united states)? http://bit.ly/aU9St Blocking REAL people  http://bit.ly/2s0OFF

And POTUS tells Americas Shut UP!!  http://bit.ly/ZQeaU

Excellent handouts: http://www.saveourcountrynow.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=127&t=1469

http://www.deserveliberty.com/2009/07/27/new-flier-released/

The Health Care Bill is the biggest attempt ever to take our freedom.  We must stand strong, make sure our representatives know who they work for, and in 2010 we must clean house.

Just a quick review of what this President and Democratic Congress along with the RINOs (republicans in name only) have done:
$787billion stimulus that paid off their supporters
Passed a $400billion budget bill
House voted to pass Cap & Trade expected to raise utilities by 400%
Health Care Bill
Has already increased the deficit by $1 trillion